Jordan Wolfson
Dreaming of the dream of the dream

USA, 2004/05, 16mm, 1 min
Courtesy: Johann König, Berlin / Kadist Art Foundation

Jordan Wolfson was born in New York and currently lives and works in Berlin and New York. He has presented his work in solo exhibitions at galleries including: Johann König, Berlin (2007); Art 38 Basel (2007); Yvon Lambert, Paris (2005); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2004). His work has been included in international group exhibitions including: New York – States of Mind, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2007); Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London (2007); Moscow Biennale (2007); and Whitney Biennial (2006). www.johannkoenig.de

Dreaming of the dream of the dream consists of over 100 excerpts of sea, rain, river and running-water scenes from animated films and cartoons, transferred to 16mm film. The original film print will play until it deteriorates and will never be remade: the work is intended to be played throughout the exhibition period, causing the image on the film itself to slowly degrade into nothingness.

Much of Wolfson’s work is concerned with memory, loss and failure. In another work, Infinite Melancholy (2003), the name Christopher Reeve runs as a film credit line. As the name slips out of view, one cannot avoid thinking about the fate of the actor whose fictional persona was Superman. Both works present a fiction that is fated to become a myth, through a self-destructive process. This alchemical process of destruction and transformation is most familiar in Wolfson’s acclaimed work for the 2006 Whitney Biennial, a 16mm silent film, which takes the last speech from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and translates it into sign language. The film itself is silent, but the complete speech of 706 words becomes the work’s title. Wolfson explains his humanist approach to working with cinema culture: ‘I’m not interested in cinema as a phenomenon, I’m more interested in the experience of life and the experience of memory and how we see the world – that’s a phenomenon. Cinema is only a reflection of a greater picture.’