In Terms Of

Tag: Affirmation

  • The Air That I Breathe

    This essay is the fourth of four that reviews “The Koons Effect,” a recent symposium at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read the first, second, and third texts.

    Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late
    The Koons Effect Part 2
    Friday, September 12, 2014
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York

    Jeff Koons, one of four Art Magazine Ads, 1988–89, offset lithograph on Simpson Ragcote paper, 38 x 29¼ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Concluding the two-day symposium on the work of Jeff Koons was a keynote address by the art historian Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. By choosing a single decade—Crow’s talk was titled “Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late”—the scholar conveniently avoided discussing the artist’s work since the early 1990s, typically considered the divisive break between those who respect and loathe the artist, in particular when Koons exhibited his Made in Heaven series (1989–91). Indeed, in a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, one critic wrote, “Watching Koons between 1985 and 1992 was like being on a roller coaster, beholding the readymade crossed with greed, money, creepy beauty, and the ugliness of our culture.”1 Even the exhibition’s curator, Scott Rothkopf, skirted the later work in his catalogue essay “No Limits,” which analyzes Koons’s work up to Made in Heaven before defending the artist against the art market for the last half.2

    Crow’s delivery was slow, calm, assured, and never overbearing; his modest confidence was almost fatherly. He began his talk by discussing three artworks typically understood as “distant from Koons” but with “corresponding and congruent” ideas. Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–65), a sculpture comprising water inside a Plexiglas cube that responds to an exhibition’s environment, becoming “a living organism that reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings.” Condensation Cube, Crow noted, can exist in the three chemical phases of matter—solid, liquid, and gas—depending on its physical conditions. Crow returned to the notion of phases, and to elements such as air and water, and also to conceptual, representational, and literal phases of imagery, several times during his talk.

    The second predecessor work was Andy Warhol and Billy Klüver’s Silver Clouds (1966), consisting of helium- and oxygen-filled balloons made from Mylar film, “a still very novel DuPont product,” Crow said, that was used by NASA for the first communication satellite, Echo 1, launched in 1960. The third work was unfinished: Gordon Matta-Clark’s made drawings for an airborne structure of his own; he even corresponded with the American businessman Gilmore Schjeldahl, the inventor of Mylar film and the creator of Echo 1, circa 1977, during his research. Matta-Clark’s project was concurrent with Koons’s earliest works, The Inflatables (1978–79). “These two projects,” Crow said, “while coincidental in time, manifest vastly different scales of endeavor and intended effects on their audiences.” Unlike Matta-Clark, Koons avoided engineering problems by purchasing his materials—mirrored squares and plastic toys—off the shelf.

    Thomas Crow speaks right on time (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Moving to Koons’s series The New (ca. 1980–83), for which Koons entombed out-of-the-box vacuum cleaners in upright Plexiglas coffins, Crow asked, “Why choose vacuums in the first place?” While many would offer “commodity fetishism” as an answer, he argued that these machines signify “tiresome, disagreeable, and never-ending work.” With a design basically unchanged since World War II, Crow said, vacuum cleaners are simply not seductive. When the machine’s power is switched on and off, its bag inflates and deflates, just like a pair of lungs. “The mental enterprise of reconciling the fantasy of immortality—being forever new—with the fragility of actual life is not something that Jeff Koons invented,” he explained. “To the massive contrary, it comes close to a core definition of the whole symbolic dimension of human culture.” For Crow, Koons’s work is about mobility and stasis and the contradiction between the mortality of humanity and the idea of perfection that people over the centuries have attributed to gods and demigods. “Needing a tool,” Crow remarked, “doesn’t make you a commodity fetishist.”

    Crow argued that Koons’s populist touch surfaced in the three distinct bodies of work in the Equilibrium series (1985), which included the cast bronzes of the inflatable lifeboat and snorkel, the floating basketballs in glass tanks, and the appropriated Nike posters. The bronze works are hollow—the air is trapped inside. The poster of Darrell Griffith (a.k.a. Dr. Dunkenstein) featured dry ice (a carbon dioxide that skips the liquid phase) rising from bisected basketballs, and the poster of Moses Malone boasted a dry seabed. Crow noted the racial tension inherent/embedded in professional basketball, in which white fans deify the unfathomably natural talent of black players. These revelations arrived relatively late in the artist’s career, the scholar said, but he seized them. The posters in particular, Crow stated, “must have confirmed the artist even more deeply in his sense of the rightness of his sculptural intuitions.”

    Thomas Hoepker, 1989. Jeff Koons with collection of his sculptures in New York, 1989, archival pigment print, 18 x 24 in. (photograph © Thomas Hoepker)

    Crow briefly discussed works from the Luxury and Degradation series (1986), which showcased “anonymous drinking artifacts” used in “suburban Bacchic rites,” and from Banality (1988), for which vernacular and religious images were enlarged to ridiculous proportions using the means of Old World craft. Entering the 1990s, the critical tide, which had been on Koons’s side until then, turned against him. It was acceptable, art historically speaking, for Koons to employ bronze casting and fabricate Minimalesque cases Koons used for The New and Equilibrium. But, it seems, the pornography of Made in Heaven was rejected. In 1994, Koons turned to air and matter again in the Celebration series (1994–2014), whose works featured thin, liquid membranes such as balloons. Unlike a heat-sealed plastic rabbit, a balloon is expansive, and its surface becomes thinner when blown with more air

    From the audience, the artist Josiah McElheny asked Crow how today’s Koons squares against 1980s Koons. During a Flash Art panel in 1986, Crow replied, Koons was a twentysomething artist who wanted to be taken seriously at the time.3 Is that just as much an act, McElheny wanted to know, as the self-help affirmation guy that Koons has become? During the symposium, McElheny noted, panelists perceived the fun in Koons’s act as a portal into dark, uncomfortable places—and, like many other thinkers, one should not take Koons’s words at face value. “He’s speaking through his art in a way that’s quite transparent,” argued Crow, “and that goes against the grain of the things he generally says.” Topics such as the quest, danger, and allegory, as well as supernatural personification, were historically the domain of fine art, Crow said, but have since been suppressed in modern times. Now we find these ideas in astrology columns and young-adult fiction. Echoing the artist Carol Bove’s position from last night’s panel, Crow wondered aloud, “Where myth has gone to live now that we don’t feel we believe in this anymore?”

    Buster Keaton on Palm Sunday (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Another audience member asked, “Where is Mike Kelley in this?” After a moment of flabbergast at the momentous nature of the question, Crow responded, “Kelley is honest. He’s always honest.” Kelley and his admirers, the scholar continued, share an intellectual ambition and an educational influence, as well as a desire for mythic, emotional expressions but not in a high-minded way. According to Crow, Kelley “had to debase to get to affirmation.” The artist Stephen Prina recalled that Kelley worried about the psychoanalytical aspect of stuffed animals: because people understood these objects to reference the artist’s own past, Kelley became scientific and conceptual about their display, putting them on tables like specimens. Prina concluded the digression: “I’ve only become worried about infantilism as an adult.”

    In Terms Of count: 7.

    1 Jerry Saltz, “Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds,” New York, June 25, 2014.

    2 Scott Rothkopf, “No Limits,” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 15–35.

    3 The panel discussion was moderated by Peter Nagy and comprised Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Philip Taaffe, Peter Halley, and Ashley Bickerton. See David Robbins, ed., “From Criticism to Complicity,” Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986): 46–49.

    Read

    Elizabeth Buhe, “Blowing Up the Koons Effect,” IFA Contemporary, September 25, 2014.

    Watch

  • The Authorial Intent

    Public Art Fund Talk at the New School: Jeff Koons
    Wednesday, September 10, 2014
    New School, John L. Tishman Auditorium, University Center, New York

    Jeff Koons discusses his Inflatables from the late 1970s (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Is it possible to be indifferent to Jeff Koons? For many years my attitude toward the artist’s work has been impassive and disinterested. It exists whether I like it or not and has some visual interest, but I’ve never cared enough to form an opinion beyond that. Among the most successful living artists, Koons is comparable to Jay Z or U2: a talented mainstream artist whose early output is considered groundbreaking but whose later works are noteworthy more for their high production values and their exorbitant, multimillion-dollar price tags than their aesthetic worth. Over the years Koons has managed to stay relevant, with critics and journalists dutifully covering his exhibitions and appearances, just as they would report on Bono’s activism and Hova’s exploits.

    A retrospective covering Koons’s entire career, organized by Scott Rothkopf, sits in the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 19, the final exhibition at the museum’s Upper East Side location before a move to the Meatpacking District. The exhibition was among the reasons for tonight’s sold-out talk at the New School. Dressed in a navy suit, a pale-blue open-collared shirt, and black dress shoes, Koons delivered an hour-long, well rehearsed lecture in which he presented himself as an animated but never overbearing orator, using a variety of hand gestures, movements, and poses that enhanced his spoken words. At one point he even crouched down to greet an imaginary dog. Woof!

    After thanking the Public Art Fund, which sponsored the talk as well as the sculpture Split-Rocker (2000), a large outdoor floral arrangement on view at Rockefeller Center during summer 2014, Koons talked about his upbringing and his understanding of and approach to public sculpture, the subject of this lecture. He first became aware of the genre through a childhood encounter with the statue of William Penn that stands atop Philadelphia’s City Hall building. Created by Alexander Calder’s grandfather, the work embodies, Koons said, a history of society’s values on a mystical scale. Art deals with issues of interior and exterior, he continued, that elicit emotional responses. Further, experience and emotion form the vocabulary of art, and to interact with public art in physical space is a “communal activity.”

    William Penn stands on top of City Hall (photograph by G. Widman for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation)

    Koons emphasized what he called the “unitative,” explained as something bigger than us but at the same time collectively shared. The York fairground in the artist’s Pennsylvanian hometown, founded ca. 1765, was the first fair in the United States, he said, and there he experienced games, visual stimulation, joy, pleasure, and terror—both as an individual and as a group with other fair goers. Fireworks, parade floats, and houses decorated with Christmas lights also inspire him, providing “excitement, awe, and wonder.” “Our governments,” Koons even said, “are a form of public sculpture.” If by this he means the socially engaged practice of argument and debate, with the elation of progress and success and the frustration of stagnation, then art is like not only politics but also science, business, religion, and myriad other things.

    Koons’s vacations were also formative experiences. As a kid he and his family visited Dolphin Land or Dolphin World in Florida (perhaps he meant the Miami Seaquarium), where he internalized the relationships between humans and animals. These relationships are evident—in some way or another—in his Antiquity 3 painting, which depicts a woman riding an inflatable dolphin. Recalling the aquatic-theme-park performances of jumping dolphins and such, Koons applied abstract ideas about the surface of the water versus going underneath to sculpture. Indeed, surface and depth are the core—if not the most important—qualities of Koons’s art.

    Jeff Koons, Antiquity 3, 2009–11, oil on canvas, 102 x 138 in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    At this point Koons switched to autopilot, pulling ideas from the usual spiel he gives when discussing his own work, trotting out stock phrases about generosity, transcendence, perfection, communication, and sharing, like he most recently did on Charlie Rose and The Colbert Report. “As soon as things become public, there’s a sense of generosity,” Koons said. People share the transcendence created by art collectively, the artist explained, and there is no private experience. Deflating the importance of his artistic production, the artist said, “There’s not any art in that object,” which instead acts as a “transponder” for the art experience. Transponders, he noted, both send and receive. Later Koons said, “We don’t care about objects—we care about people.” I have no obligation to the object, he continued, but rather to the people and their trust. I wonder if he gives the same populist rap to the elite collectors who spend millions on his work.

    Koons traced the beginnings of his involvement in outdoor, public sculpture. His first foray was the stainless-steel Kiepenkerl (1987), made for that year’s Skulptur Projekte Münster in West Germany. The hot metal accidentally bent during the casting process, damaging the work in several places. Since there wasn’t enough time to redo the piece, the artist faced a grave decision: either pull out of the exhibition or attempt a hurried fix. “I went with the radical plastic surgery,” Koons said cheerfully, giving the punch line to this story for the umpteenth time.

    Jeff Koons’s Rabbit in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007 (photograph by Librado Romero for the New York Times)

    Koons described several more public artworks from the past twenty years, expressing amazement that Macy’s included a gigantic version of his mirrored inflatable Rabbit for its Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007. He also revealed that he had been looking at Baroque and Rococo art when conceiving the monumental Puppy (1992), a large floral arrangement in the shape of a dog that appeared outside Rockefeller Center in summer 2000 (among other sites); he wanted to put those historical styles into a piece of his own. Issues that Koons grappled with for Puppy included biology, ephemerality, symmetry/asymmetry, and internal/external. Ultimately—and this was the highlight of the talk—Koons described Puppy as “a piece about control,” the kind of control a person exercises or relinquishes in his or her life. “It’s whether you want to serve or be served,” he said. This commentary evoked not only the “greed is good” mantra from the 1980s, but also the exercises and abuses of power in any political or economic dictatorship —all frightening stuff, even threatening. Here the menacing qualities of Koons’s seemingly happy, carefree art bare its fangs.

    Returning to formal and logistical issues, Koons professed that photographs of Split-Rocker typically show the piece in a pristine state, when it was first erected in early summer. Koons, however, intended the work to get “shaggy and chaotic” over time, which it had certainly done when I visited the work in mid-September. An unrealized outdoor work called Train, Koons explained, will feature a functioning, performing steam locomotive dangling from a crane. “It’s a metaphor for an individual” that huffs and puffs in a determined manner, he said, and the train experiences an “orgasmic moment” when it hits one hundred miles per hour. “To me, that’s William Penn,” he said, reiterating his themes of history, power, and the connection of an individual’s experience to something bigger.

    Koons also returned to his biography, recalling the showroom of his father, who was an interior designer. The elder Koons had sold paintings by his young son in the store window, integrating them into arrangements of furniture and other household objects. “He gave me great confidence,” the artist said of his dad. Koons also gave a shout out to W. Bowdoin Davis Jr., his art-history professor at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, who revealed the many operations in play in art, such as psychology, religion, sociology, and symbolism.

    Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules), 2013, plaster and glass, 128½ x 67 × 48⅝ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Koons revealed his Balloon Venus sculpture (2008–12) as a hermaphroditic fertility object and announced that the Gazing Ball series (2013) is among his favorite bodies of work. Coincidentally it was at that moment when I noticed the artist’s intense blue eyes as he showed images of several Gazing Balls. With an image of his oversized sculpture Play-Doh (1994–2014) hovering onscreen, Koons told us “I’m trying to make works you can’t have any judgment about.” If you make judgments,” he decreed, “you’re limiting yourself.” He advised his critics to “Open yourself up and keep everything in play.”

    The event organizers had collected written questions for Koons earlier in the lecture, and Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, read a selected few to the artist. Did Koons ever fear there was a time when he felt that his career was over, and what did he do? In his early years the artist admitted to going broke a couple times, leaving New York to live with his parents. But he came back to the city because, in his own words, “people want to be involved in dialogue. People depend on you.” I cannot imagine anyone taking that statement at face value.

    When has technology not kept up with your artistic vision, asked another question. Koons claimed he prefers not to use new technology, which implied an apprehension of his work being tied to a particular method or process or—worse—appearing dated. Yet as the Friday symposium “The Koons Effect Part 2” determined and as Michelle Kuo noted in her catalogue essay, the artist uses complex software and highly intricate three-dimensional modeling to fabricate his recent work. Some even say that his level of technological perfection is higher than is needed by the aerospace industry and the military. Again, Koon’s modest words can be readily dismissed.

    Jeff Koons on Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Someone wanted to know how Koons can manage his studio workers and still be creative? Acknowledging his longtime studio manager Gary McCraw, who sat in the audience, the artist said he is always walking through the studio, watching and educating his loyal workers. How loyal are they? The average tenure of an assistant, he pointed out, is nine years. In the end, tight organization and long-term stability give the artist his creative freedom. Another Q&A dealt with the white skin color of the porcelain figures in Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). At the time, Koons replied, radical changes were happening to the performer’s body, and the Italian craftsman who fabricated the piece wanted to know “How am I supposed to make his nose?” when it was constantly changing in real life. Koons noted that porcelain was the “king’s material,” so he wanted Jackson to appear godlike, as in a pieta. Further, he said, the thick black outlines surrounding the singer and monkey’s eyes alluded to Egyptian art.

    How would aliens from the future interpret your work? “They’d see a lot of the world, from our day-to-day lives,” Koons responded, pointing to the archetypal, universal qualities from our present historical moment embedded into his art. To what do you owe your fame and commercial success? “My family,” he replied, as if giving an Academy Award acceptance speech. When he was child, Koons remembered becoming ecstatic when his parents told him he could draw better than his older sister, whose life, he perceived at the time, had until then been superlative to his in every way. I wondered what that sister is doing now. What don’t critics get about your work? Koons repeated the transponder argument and boasted that negative people aren’t “prepared” for his art and are “insecure.” While seemingly arrogant, this response isn’t so atypical for an artist, though many would probably not state it so baldly. Koons does receive a healthy amount of negative criticism, but it’s rare for an artist to be so untroubled by it. Koons’s attitude may serve as a model for other artists. Or not.

    Installation view of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, June 27–October 19, 2014 (artworks © Jeff Koons; photograph by Ronald Amstutz)

    I wish someone had asked about appropriation and copyright. Koons has been the subject of four lawsuits: he lost the first three on weak parody defenses but won the fourth with the transformation argument. The losing cases—Rogers v. Koons (1992), United Feature Syndicate v. Koons (1993), and Campbell v. Koons (1993)—each involved works from the Banality series: String of Puppies, Wild Boy and Puppy, and Ushering in Banality (all works 1988). The last, Blanch v. Koons (2006), focused on a photographer’s complaint that Koons used an image she took in a painting from his Easyfun-Ethereal series.

    Toward the end of the lecture Koons returned again and again to his aphorisms on affirmation, acceptance, participation, and mutual support. It was hard for him to go off script—I doubt that he can—and the audience questions picked for him were relatively tame. In many ways Koons speaks like a politician, like Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail. And like a politician Koons doesn’t offer truth or salvation but favorable, enthusiastic rhetoric about those things. He proposes a welcoming, populist frame of interpretation for his art, not to foreclose other people’s ideas but rather to make sure his intentions are being discussed. You can take his words at face value, scrutinize them, or dismiss his sermon, but you can’t deny that Koons is smartly shaping the reception of his work. After this talk I still felt indifferent toward his art but appreciated hearing about it from the source.

    In Terms Of count: 0.