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REVIEWS

Jeff Koons

By Michelle Grabner

Published: October 1, 2008

"Jeff Koons" at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago)
May 31–September 21, 2008 

In his catalogue essay for the Jeff Koons retrospective, the show’s curator, Francesco Bonami, writes: “The greatness and poetry of Koons’ work dwell in his power to lead the viewer to believe in what the artist himself believes.” Bonami continues, “The cynical are doomed. We concede to the victory of a relentless optimist, of a true believer in the mystical power of art to change the world and transform our lives.”

For 20 years Jeff Koons and his champions have insipidly, albeit steadfastly, served him up as a genuine “believer.” His critics levy the adjectives “artificial,” “cheap,” “sensational,” “phony,” and “cynical,” expressing distrust of Koons’s celebrity and his apparent earnestness. Might it be worth considering, on the occasion of this major museum retrospective, that both these positions miss the mark? While debates that frame Koons as either the gladsome evangelist of consumer aesthetics or a satirical post-Warholian “simulator” may be convenient, they both fail to acknowledge Koons’s enduring faith in what can only be called classical standards of beauty, not to mention the imperialist undercurrent that emerges from his desire to maintain such standards in a prevailing climate of cultural pluralism.

The show—Koons’s first major US museum survey in 15 years— successfully underscores this untimely faith. Installed in the museum’s two main galleries is a collection of iconic pieces that represent the artist’s 10 distinct bodies of work produced between 1979 and 2007, from his earliest series, titled “Pre-New” (1979–80) and “The New” (1980–87), a sequence of encased and hanging home appliances, to his most recent “Hulk—Elvis” paintings. The show’s commingling of works from different series—stuck together without regard for chronology—zeros in on how consistently (and blatantly) Koons has peddled sentimentality attached to a narrow brand of American consumer culture over the past three decades.

Koons’s objects are raised high on pedestals and glorify themselves amid his lustrous, ambitious “Celebration” works, a series that simultaneously ushers the viewer toward the bathos of burgeoning consumerism and revels in the classical economy of objects of adolescent desire. But the paintings, mirrors, and appropriated advertisements do not make the most compelling backdrop to his authoritative artifacts, which reign in the two vast halls, never seeming to lose their glory. Unfortunately, the north gallery is interrupted by an awkward build-out that shields young eyes from Ilona’s Asshole (1991), Silver Shoes (1990), and Manet (1991), the overreaching soft-porn images that Koons produced of himself and his then wife, the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, engaged in explicit sexual acts.

In the south gallery, three “equilibrium tanks,” basketballs suspended in aquariums, crowd Koons’s wry, bronzed Aqualung (1985). Its neighbors are Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), the large-scale porcelain of the entertainer and his pet chimp, which sits next to Cracked Egg (Magenta) (1994–2006). The glassy monumental ovum sits adjacent to a silver bust called Italian Woman (1986), which is located just next to the famed stainless steel Rabbit (1986). The compression of these works and others from Koons’s repertoire presents viewers with an unseemly web of Western values, and when taken together, the works reverberate with pseudo-xenophobic smugness. For Koons, truth resides in the banal, explicit, and reproducible flotsam of late capitalism: in the image of a jumbo salted pretzel (Couple, 2000), a Gordon’s gin ad (I Could Go for Something Gordon’s, 1986), and the Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polisher (New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10-Gallon Displaced Tripledecker, 1981–87).

Shiny dime-store sundries writ large seems to be Koons’s default mode. Cheap inflatable toys cast in metal and repainted to achieve playful illusionary impact, enshrined appliances, gilded baroque mirrors, colossal tchotchkes: these are unmistakably the forms and characters that make up the cultural mythology of America’s consuming class. Like a contemporary Praxiteles—the Attic sculptor who famously integrated anatomical realism and classical ideals— Koons idealizes the forms and the virtues that constitute the belief systems and collecting habits of an entitled sector of society. By heightening the gloss, increasing the scale, or upgrading the medium of an array of consumables, Koons, convincingly, and most pleasurably, reinforces the principle that personal happiness is to be found in the beauty of material possession.

Koons traffics in refining first-world goods and middle-class standards. His sources reflect a narrow ideology of American materialism. And when his works are all seen together—as they are in this venue—they seem entirely out of step with postmodern notions of pluralism and decentralized truth, so much so that this exhibition careens in excess and indulgence. Does Koons’s enduring appeal not betray a residual desire for the monumental, for tangible sites of truth during an epistemological diaspora that corresponds roughly to Koons’s career? In fact, I would argue that the only thing that saves Koons (and his supporters) from a purely hegemonic perspective is his (their) celebrity status, the ultimate middle-class aspiration, which in the exhibition essay Bonami trumpets thus: “If art were a religion Jeff Koons would be its pastor.” This is true, but materialism is also religion, and Koons could certainly qualify as its high priest. "Jeff Koons" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.

 

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