Exceptional Works: Jordan Wolfson

Jordan Wolfson (b. 1980) is known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance. Pulling intuitively from advertising, the internet, and the tech industry, he produces ambitious and enigmatic narratives that frequently revolve around a series of invented, animated characters.

Featured on the occasion of Art Basel 2025, Riverboat song (2017–2018) combines computer-animated vignettes and found video clips with pop soundtracks and a monologue voiced by the artist. By turns surreal, deadpan, and mischievous and presented across a sixteen-monitor video wall, the artist creates an idiosyncratic juxtaposition of banality and barbarity that speaks directly to the algorithmic logic of contemporary digital culture.

Riverboat song revolves around one of the artist’s recurring figures, a Huckleberry Finn/Alfred E. Neuman hybrid that appeared in animatronic form in the artist’s 2016 work Colored sculpture. Opening with a seductive dance number (to Iggy Azalea's 2014 song “Work”) and later delivering a cajoling and coercive address to an absent lover, this figure is but one of a disparate array of animated avatars that Wolfson employs throughout the video, including a group of smoking rats, a pair of horses, and a bathing crocodile. In addition, two other songs are featured in the work: Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” and Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” The closing section of the work shows Wolfson surfing through YouTube, with clips ranging from instructional videos to a vicious brawl that served as the impetus for the artist’s 2017 virtual reality work Real violence.