It is hard to dismiss an artist who sells single pieces for upwards of $20 million and sets record museum ticket sales from Chicago to London. On the other hand, it is easy to dismiss a piece of art that claims a vacuum cleaner in a plexiglass box is worth the price of admission. Jeff Koons and his sculptures fuze these conflicting reactions into a delicious inner tension that breeds public fixation. As a mature artist at age 55, Koons has secured his place in pop art’s canon and still he holds international attention as raptly as he ever has.
Koons’s most iconic works, quite literally named “Balloon Dog” with a color specified in parenthesis, have been exhibited most notably on the Cantor Roof Gardens of the Metropolitan Museum, in “(Yellow),” and in the Chateau de Versailles, in “(Magenta).” The sculpture’s convex metallic surfaces reflect their surroundings in a high-gloss drama between viewer, subject, and setting.
On the Met’s Roof Gardens, the city’s skyline mirrored across the dog’s middle makes Koons’s works monumental, epic; it releases them from the meaningless confines of the traditional four white walls and gives their chromatic surfaces something stunning to reflect. Standing with two of Koons’s other painted aluminum works, “Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)” and “Coloring Book,” “Balloon Dog (Yellow)” gains a certain authority in being on par with, and not overshadowed by, the city’s skyscrapers.
In the great halls of Versailles, joined by 16 other sculptures from various periods in Koons’s career, “Balloon Dog (Magenta)” takes on a regal quality, as if standing primly at Queen Marie Antoinette’s feet. The richly painted vaulted ceilings above the sculpture’s pedestal and the sunlight streaming in through the imposing French doors offer Koons’s form something entirely different to comment upon. In both settings, peering into the meticulously crafted creases in the balloon’s twists and in the knot that is the dog’s smart little nose affords the viewer an unescapable reflection of themselves, caught in the act of peering.
For a man who has his own room in London’s Tate Modern and has had a giant flowered dog in Rockefeller Center, in addition to his shows Versailles and the Met, context is everything. From an early age, Koons watched his father, an interior decorator, change the arrangements of entire rooms unannounced. Koons revealed in a interview with Charlie Rose that he “learned that objects, color, texture can really affect your emotions.” He has been manipulating objects from his daily life ever since. Koons take on ready-made art can be deceivingly simple once the full repercussions of context and intent are understood; or, it can be a flop which never ceases to be explained away when, in critic Robert Hughs words, “art is short, bibliography long.”
In 1988, the wild success of his Banality series, 21 pieces of porcelain, polychromed wood and mirrors, launched a reputable artist into pop-star splendor. There are a few pieces here that transcend context, like the porcelain 3 ½ foot blonde hugging a sock puppet-like Pink Panther, and are mesmerizing even without background knowledge. Most of the collection, though, goes the way of a vase of flowers made entirely of chunks of welded mirror: a clever and novel play off its physical and temporal atmosphere. Koons says his art is “conception” and “non-judgmental,” and says with a laugh that he accepts the term “pop” to describe his work, but would rather “real.”
After he exhibited Banality, Koons faltered a bit and sought a new direction. He became fascinated with porn star turned Italian Parliament member Ilona Staller and then set out to make art from their bodies. Then, unexpectedly, as The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones put it, Koons “fell in love with his own ready-made.” Koons exhibited the resulting sculpture and photography series “Made in Heaven,” which portrayed the two in the throes of many variations of passionate sex; they married in 1991 and had a son, Ludwig, in 1994.
The shock value of Koons’s pseudo-pornography has claimed much of the credit for “Made in Heaven,” which was billed as the heir to such controversial paintings as Courbet’s “Burial at Ornans” and Manet’s “Olympia.” But in Koons’s “Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona” there is a tenderness in Jeff’s marble fingers that is unlike the starkness of Courbet’s flattened processional figures, and Ilona does not stare the viewer down like the cold Olympia.
Koons instead credits his inspiration to the early Renaissance fresco master Masaccio, one of the first to portray Adam and Eve in true torment as they flee Paradise. He wanted to exhibit “a body of work that is kind of about after the fall,” he mused in a conversation with Jones, “but all of this guilt and shame is removed.” Koons seems not to be interested in shocking his audience into discomfort but rather in confronting his audience with themselves. He says in a CNN tour of his studio that “Its about how your life can look at its own parameters and how they can be expanded from that moment.” It remains to be seen if Koons’ reflective pieces have expansive power once they are no longer confrontational, like Courbet and Manet’s works that continue to haunt and impress over 100 years later.
When the self-assurance that came with the ecstasy in Koons’s marriage disappeared in the bitter divorce and custodial battles, Koons himself disappeared from the popular art scene for the duration of the 1990’s. Though he came back in full force in 2000 with his new conception of the metal-cast balloon objects, Koons’s reliance on setting and public image to validate his art betrays his dependence on the momentary. Koons’s objects may survive his generation, but the controversy and cultural obsessions that drive this moment’s fixation with his art will most likely fade. If the tension simmers down and the settings which give his art meaning dissolve, Jeff Koons will be laid bare as just a man who reproduced banalities.
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