The Brooklyn Rail

“Baldanders,” a monster from German folklore, first appeared in a poem by Hans Sachs in 1534, and was popularized over a century later in a 1669 novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Baldanders is a shapeshifter, a symbol of the constant change in the world and the importance of taking on the perspectives of others. For his exhibition Baldanders at Blade Study, which resembles a Criss Angel residency more than an art show, Andrew Woolbright shifts his own shape by inhabiting three figures—William Blake, Francis Picabia, and Bam Margera—from art history and pop culture.

Opening night was a horror show. The artist, in the guise of William Blake, lurked unpredictably around the small gallery. He effortlessly dodged the gray Lifecast of Phong Bui (2025) on the floor and the Baldanders Memory System (2025), a wooden cabinet with the title of the project written on the face and Ultracal cast reliefs of past inhabited personas sitting within it like the corpse of Vladimir Lenin. Woolbright was also able to weave around gallery well-wishers, much to their dismay. All the while, a thick, yellowing layer of latex slid off his face. The production value was perfectly honest, closer to Evil Dead II than World War Z.

Woolbright/Blake, annoyed at his slumber being disrupted by the opening party, was antagonistic. He mopped the floor, mumbling to himself, avoiding eye contact with patrons who tried their hardest to get out of his way as he zigzagged water at their feet. The mop left behind dark gray streaks on the concrete floor, a liquid drawing that evaporated within a half hour. When Woolbright/Blake spoke, his mouth did not move. His hands hovered on the shoulders of patrons he’d trapped into conversation, like an eager weeb with a booth babe at an anime convention. Is this social sculpture? Or is Woolbright/Blake simply a creep?

On the left wall, hung high enough to prevent any curious gallery visitors from poking them, were silicone likenesses of William Blake, Immanuel Kant, Francis Picabia, Shulamith Firestone and Jean Baudrillard, watching, waiting. They wore silly hats, a pink wig, and sunglasses. William Blake is the only repeat appearance of an identity in this iteration of Baldanders, the first having taken place at Anton Kern Gallery in April, with Woolbright/Blake in conversation with Phong Bui as Immanuel Kant. At Blade Study, Woolbright donned the Picabia and Blake masks during portrait painting sessions that were available for eight hundred dollars apiece and quickly sold out. If this is too rich for your blood, you could’ve attended a conversation with Woolbright as Blake and fellow artists Angela Dufresne as Firestone or Andrew Ross as Baudrillard. Seats for these conversations were twenty dollars, and they sold out even quicker.

This commercial success, however, stands in stark contrast to the tragic figures Woolbright chooses to embody. William Blake, the Christian mystic whose proclamations verged on blasphemy was ultimately driven insane by his own genius. Picabia, modernism’s shapeshifter and enemy of orthodoxy incarnate, also makes sense. Finally, poor Bam Margera. The ur-content-creator-cum-crash-out of the early twenty-first century, whose sobbing Instagram stories are penance for beating up his father on the toilet some twenty years ago. What unites these disparate freaks is what they have in common with Woolbright’s methodology. All possess a monk-like dedication to their project, desperate and reaching for some form of truth that exists just past their fingertips. To ignore this truth and its proximity is itself blasphemy edging towards suicide.

The idea of self-sacrifice to the point of near death for art is seductive. The results speak for themselves. If done right, your place in history can be secured. Your corpse is made to dance by fakers in galleries across New York City, interested in the end results of your dedication more than the years spent getting there. Every day, artists liberate techniques and ideas of the long dead in the hope that the shifting of context will be enough for an appropriated idea to be made fresh again, mostly to middling results and poorly written reviews.

Woolbright’s innovation is to, knowingly or not, literalize this process of necromancy implicit in participating in the western canon and exposing the tragic gap between artist and influence. Baldanders argues that familiarization isn’t a gentle study, but a grotesque act of wearing anothers skin until it fails. Like the Germanic monster, it is about perpetual change, and shifting of perspective. Baldanders succeeds in that it acknowledges the impossibility of doing so cleanly. Implicit in the attempt is failure and misinterpretation. Because we know the attempt is doomed, we can have Blake dance however we like, for as long as we want, just so long as we remember it’s all pretend.