Female figure) - Jordan Wolfson

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From The Broad Collection: Jordan Wolfson, (Female figure) , 2014, mixed media, The Broad Art Foundation. “ I was mostly just interested in the physicality of what I’d seen in the animatronic field, and I was also interested in making a sculpture that had the potential to be chronological or structural in the same way a video is. My hope is that the work dips in and out of spectacle.” —Jordan Wolfson Jordan Wolfson’s (Female figure), 2014, is an immersive environment that features a robotic sculpture. For twelve minutes, the robot gives monologues and dances to pop songs. Startling and unnerving, the work raises the specter of misogyny and exposes fissures in pop culture. It challenges the ways women are represented, and the ways images of women are consumed. The sculpture resembles a hypersexualized female, but it also complicates such a reading and evades easy consumption. In a brightly lit room that is more sterile than sensual, the robot wears a witch mask and is covered in black smudges. The figure faces a mirrored wall to which it is attached by a rod piercing its torso. Traditionally, art is a one-directional experience: you alone observe the artwork. Here, however, the robot uses facial recognition software to “look at” the viewer, returning your stare. This may feel like the sculpture is objectifying you, treating you like an object. (Female figure) inverts the male gaze, a phrase coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975. The male gaze describes a cultural condition in which all viewers—regardless of gender—assume heterosexual male desires. In this state, the female is passive while the male is active, and women are looked at for the pleasure of men. In this artwork, however, the depiction of a woman—a classic theme in art—is anything but passive. (Female figure) confronts the viewer, while the viewer endures its stare. Further, the robot projects the artist’s male voice. It whispers, “My mother is dead. My father is dead. I’m gay. I’d like to be a poet. This is my house.” (Female figure) aggressively challenges assumptions about gender, sexuality, and even our status as human subjects.