Unidentified girl standing on studio table Marcus Aurelius Root, American, 1808 - 1888 ca. 1850 daguerreotype with applied color 4.2 x 3.2 cm. (oval), 1/9 plate National Origin: United States
an exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, June 27–October 19, 2014;
the Centre Pompidou, Paris, November 26, 2014–April 27, 2015; and the
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, June 5–September 27, 2015
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Scott Rothkopf
Whitney Museum of American Art, 303 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press)
Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons: Rendering of Pluto and Proserpina, 2010–2013
Imagine the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of
American Art as the perfect storm. And at the center of the perfect
storm there is a perfect vacuum. The storm is everything going on around
Jeff Koons: the multimillion-dollar auction prices, the blue chip
dealers, the hyperbolic claims of the critics, the adulation and the
controversy and the public that quite naturally wants to know what all
the fuss is about. The vacuum is the work itself, displayed on five of
the six floors of the Whitney, a succession of pop culture trophies so
emotionally dead that museumgoers appear a little dazed as they
dutifully take out their iPhones and produce their selfies.
Presented
against stark white walls under bright white light, Koons’s floating
basketballs, Plexiglas-boxed household appliances, and elaborately
produced jumbo-sized versions of sundry knickknacks, souvenirs, toys,
and backyard pool paraphernalia have a chilly chic arrogance. The
sculptures and paintings of this fifty-nine-year-old artist are so
meticulously, mechanically polished and groomed that they rebuff any
attempt to look at them, much less feel anything about them. This is the
last show that the Whitney will mount in its Marcel Breuer building on
Madison Avenue before moving to new quarters in the Meatpacking
District, and Adam Weinberg, the museum’s director, has come up with a
parting shot so swaggeringly obnoxious that it can’t be ignored.
Anybody
who has taken Modern Art 101 will be able to give you some general idea
of how we arrived at the point where a ten-foot-high polychromed
aluminum reproduction of a multicolored pile of Play-Doh holds center
stage at the Whitney—and is hailed by Roberta Smith, one of the chief
art critics at The New York Times, as “a new, almost certain
masterpiece.” What we are seeing at the Whitney is the mainstreaming of
Dadaism and in particular of the readymade, the ordinary and frequently
mass-produced objects that Marcel Duchamp reimagined as art objects,
including, early on, a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, and a urinal.
Duchamp produced his first readymades roughly a hundred years ago. At
the time they were seen by hardly anybody; they were the ultimate
insider’s cool dude joke art. This was a joke that Duchamp presented
deadpan, with the deliberateness of a man who very carefully weighed
every move he made. He had already pursued a serious career as a
painter; he had created a sensation at the Armory Show in 1913 with his Nude Descending a Staircase;
and he would not have abandoned painting without cause. Duchamp felt
there was too much of a mystique around art. Years later, he told Calvin
Tomkins, “I don’t believe in [art] with all the trimmings, the mystic
trimming and the reverence trimming and so forth.” The readymade was an
act of supreme skepticism; at least that is what it was for Duchamp.
Koons,
simply put, is Duchamp with lots of ostentatious trimmings. This is not
a pretty sight. Duchamp’s readymades have an almost monastic austerity.
Koons has bulked them up, transforming the ultimate insider’s art into
the art that will not shut up. For Koons’s supporters, and they are
legion, this is an anti-tradition that has become an honorable
tradition, with all that implies about the risks and rewards of
legitimacy. The art historians, with their addiction to neat
chronologies, will tell you that Duchamp begat Rauschenberg and Johns,
who begat Warhol, who begat Koons. It has been Koons’s weird instinctive
salesman’s genius to capitalize on the art world’s increasingly
confused adulation of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, who are
nowadays seen as seductive mixtures of trickster, mystic, magus,
prophet, virtuoso (and at least in Warhol’s case, huckster).
There
is a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t element to the reputations of all
these artists, who are viewed as simultaneously criticizing and
celebrating the commercial culture that is their inveterate subject. If
you listen in on conversations in the galleries at the Koons
show—whether a museum lecturer speaking to a group or a more
knowledgeable visitor giving some friends the lowdown—you invariably
find that the Whitney’s overwhelmingly middle-class audience is being
told that Koons presents a sly critique of middle-class values. Of
course everybody can also see that he is having his way with commercial
culture—and with us. Koons knows how to capitalize on the guilty
pleasure that the museumgoing public takes in all his mixed messages. He
knows how to leave people feeling simultaneously ironical, erudite,
silly, sophisticated, and bemused.
Koons presents his work under
an assortment of brand names, and many of these brands have their own
galleries at the Whitney. Everything Koons produces has a
factory-produced impersonality. His studio is a kind of factory,
although a far cry from the darkly druggy escapades of Warhol’s Factory.
There are some 128 people employed in Koons’s studio, which from
photographs looks as antiseptic as an operating room; sixty-four
employees work in the painting department, forty-four in the sculpture
department. Among the brands he has marketed since the early 1980s are
“Equilibrium” (the floating basketballs); “Statuary/Kiepenkerl”
(stainless steel replicas of a statuette of Bob Hope, an inflatable
rabbit, a bust of Louis XIV); “Banality” (reproductions in porcelain and
polychromed wood of various knickknacks); and “Made in Heaven”
(photorealist paintings and glass sculptures of Koons in flagrante
delicto with his then wife, Ilona Staller, known in Italy as the porn
star Cicciolina).
The newer brands include “Celebration”
(jumbo-sized renderings in mirror-polished stainless steel of a heart,
an egg, and a variety of animals) and “Easyfun” (colored mirrors shaped
like animals’ heads). Balloon Dog, from the “Celebration” series,
may be the most famous of all Koons’s concoctions. This is a
ten-foot-high rendering, in mirror-polished stainless steel with a
translucent color coating, of a canine made from the kind of
sausage-shaped balloons that amuse little children. Koons’s Balloon Dog
was produced in an edition of five. The yellow one is on display at the
Whitney. The orange one sold last year at auction for more than $58
million, the record for a living artist.
Koons has his detractors. Some years ago, Rosalind Krauss—who as one of the founders of the magazine October pioneered a strenuous mix of left-oriented political, sociological, and semiotic thought—told The New York Times
that Koons had turned Dada on its head because he was “in cahoots with
the media.” She said she found his “self-advertisement…repulsive.” These
are strong, smart words.
But in the art history departments where Krauss and the somber style of October magazine
still reign more or less supreme, Koons is now regarded, like it or
not, as a part of the history of our times. So there is a determination
to account for his success and (let’s be honest about this) to give some
scholarly tone to the megabucks art world fun. Koons’s
low-meets-high-meets-low mix-ups have proven to be catnip for quite a
few intellectuals. Joachim Pissarro, the art historian who was for a
time a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote an essay not long ago
claiming that Koons’s work “goes back, somehow, to our innermost
desires”—that “our” really gets on my nerves—and managed in his first
sentences to cite not only Freud but Plato.
Norman Rosenthal, for
years head of exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London, is about to
publish a book of interviews with Koons, in which the artist at moments
imagines himself a sort of philosophe of the twelve-step program. “Morals are very important,” Koons opines:
You
cannot separate the moral from the visual. I really believe that to
have transcendence into the highest realms you have to have acceptance
of others. You have to leave the self. You get so bored with the self.
And in Koonsland, if transcendence doesn’t work, there is always shopping. The clothing chain H&M, a sponsor of the Whitney show, has just come out with a handbag bearing Balloon Dog’s image, priced at $49.50; it was unveiled along with the new flagship H&M on Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, the store’s façade emblazoned with giant images of Balloon Dog.
Just north at Rockefeller Center, Koons is letting the summer tourists
get a gander at the latest of his topiary concoctions, a work called Split/Rocker,
with the combined half-heads of a horse and a dinosaur covered with
real flowering plants. A nearby bar is offering a Koons cocktail, the
“Split/Rock Margarita.”
To evaluate this onslaught
can feel hopeless, if not downright absurd, as if one were some Judge
Judy of the art world, examining a situation so incredible that the very
act of judgment calls one’s credibility (and credulity) into question.
Perhaps this helps to explain why so many sophisticated observers,
confronting the Koons cult, would rather join than fight. Certainly one
of the fascinations of the Whitney show has been the near unanimity of
the critics of record, who appear to be of the opinion that it’s high
time for everybody, like it or not, to make their peace with Koons.
In The New Yorker,
Peter Schjeldahl, certainly a man of discriminating tastes, basically
announced that there was no way of arguing with his success. Koons is
“the signal artist of today’s world,” Schjeldahl wrote. “If you don’t
like that, take it up with the world.” In New York magazine Jerry
Saltz announced that “haters will hate, but ‘A Retrospective’ will
allow anyone with an open mind to grasp why Koons is such a complicated,
bizarre, thrilling, alien, annoying artist.” And Roberta Smith, after
expressing reservations about a ten-foot-high stainless steel rendition
of Bernini’s Rape of Persephone outfitted with live petunias,
felt the need to censor her own feeling that it might be “déclassé,”
commenting, “but there I go again.” The critics, of all people, are
putting the world on notice that the work is criticism-proof.
“In
my observation,” Schjeldahl writes, “Koons’s most ardent detractors skip
aesthetic judgment of his art to assert a wish that it not exist.” When
Schjeldahl regards Koons’s overblown baubles, what he sees is an
authentic aesthetic response to the mind-bending pressures of a global
consumer society. Our Gilded Age, so Schjeldahl may imagine,
precipitates—empowers, even legitimates—this high-tech kitsch vision.
But does it follow that those of us who do not respond to the work are
in denial—that we are, whether consciously or unconsciously,
delegitimizing a legitimate aesthetic? Is Schjeldahl suggesting that the
very existence of the work forces some sort of aesthetic embrace? Must
it be appreciated simply because it exists (and sells for so much
money)? And where does this leave the average museumgoer, whoever that
mythical being might be, who has been told even before walking through
the doors of the Whitney that whatever scruples he or she has are
suspect?
The Koons phenomenon has a belligerence that may well be
unprecedented in the art world. For many that belligerence reached a
climax in 1991, when Koons exhibited paintings and sculptures in which
he and the glossily pneumatic white-blond Cicciolina are having sex and
nothing is left to the imagination. The effrontery of these photorealist
paintings, with cocks and cunts presented front and center, isn’t so
much in the X-rated material as in their gaudy narcissism—in the
cheerfully salacious swagger with which Koons shoves his lady love and
himself in our faces.
Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons: Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988
But the tough-guy swagger is invariably a central element in
the Koons operation, even when the subject matter is only kid’s stuff.
Everybody involved with the work seems fascinated by the in-your-face
mood. Even when Koons is lighthearted, as with Play-Doh, his admirers are raising the stakes. Jerry Saltz, although uncertain about what he actually thought about Play-Doh,
says that he “flashed on Koons as a modern mound builder, making
sculpture that is instantly archeological, mystical, able to mark a
future burial of contemporary culture.” And Peter Schjeldahl, if it’s
possible, pushed even farther, arguing that Play-Doh “might stand as an imperishable symbol of art’s present unworldly estate: child’s play in a game with no-limit stakes.”
Koons
is a high-end purveyor of the literal and the obvious. That makes him
the perfect artist for an era when everybody from the couch potatoes who
are only now wearying of reality TV to the
politicians in Washington who have made realism their watchword will
assure you that the promise of something different or better is no more.
The twenty-first century is proud to be done with the ideal. And if
there is one thing that you can say for Koons’s work it is that he deals
in what is taken to be the real—even if the real is an act, a fake, a
copy, an impersonation, what might be called the really unreally real.
There is nothing on Planet Koons we haven’t seen before, admittedly
generally in smaller, less costly, less shiny versions. His work is the
apotheosis of Walmart. For the sophisticated museumgoing audience, which
is inclined to boycott Walmart because of the miserable way it treats
its workers, Koons’s supersized suburban trinkets can be a smarmy guilty
pleasure.
Nothing is left to the imagination in Koons’s work.
That, so I believe, is the source of the almost limitless fascination he
exerts. His elaborate matter-of-factness makes him a populist of sorts.
He likes to explain that a recent series of sculptures, in which
replicas of classical statues are juxtaposed with blue gazing balls, was
inspired by the gazing balls on lawns in rural Pennsylvania, where he
grew up and now has a vacation home. “I want my work to be accessible to
people,” he told a reporter at the opening of the H&M store on Fifth Avenue.
Koons
is a recycler and regurgitator of the obvious, which he proceeds to
aggrandize in the most obvious way imaginable, by producing oversized
versions of cheap stuff in extremely expensive materials. It is only
when he rejects the real in favor of the surreal that the audience’s
interest begins to cool. In his recent paintings he has created what
amount to photorealist collages, with inflatable toys, cartoon
characters, classical statuary, and details of a woman’s hot-red lips or
sexy head of hair layered and juxtaposed to create trippy Pop fantasy
visions. These 3-D surrealist dreamscapes, with their echoes of
Dalí—Koons cites Dalí as a major early influence on his work—are almost
invariably said to be his weakest stuff. The public wants its Koons real
rather than surreal. People want their Koons straight up,
unadulterated. Koons is here to prove that in our been-there-done-that
society metaphor and mystery and magic are dead and gone. It all comes
down to familiarity.
The Koons retrospective is a
multimillion-dollar vacuum, but it is also a multimillion-dollar
mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about
avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die. I am aware that
some people embrace Koons because they believe his armor-plated work is a
necessary evil, the tougher and cleverer product that art must become
if it is to survive. Of course they see that Koons has put the readymade
on steroids. But that, so the argument goes, is what is needed to give
Duchamp’s nerdy anti-art a fighting chance in our media-mad world.
However persuasive it may seem to some, this argument, which is pure art
world realpolitik, has the effect of shutting down the discussion we
really need to have, which is about the ideas and (dare I say it?) the
ideals of the Dadaists, and the significance of anti-art a hundred years
ago and its potential significance today. Frankly, I wonder if those
who hail Koons as the high-gloss reincarnation of anti-art really know
what anti-art is all about.
Scott Rothkopf, the
curator of the Whitney show, who has been praised for his streamlined
installation, makes a rather telling historical misstep at the very
beginning of his catalog, even as he is arguing that we must understand
Koons’s work “through the lens of the readymade.” Rothkopf asserts that
Duchamp “first exhibited his urinal in 1917.” The trouble with this
statement is that Duchamp never actually managed to exhibit the urinal
that he purchased at the J. L. Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue and
dubbed Fountain. After heated debate among the organizers of the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, Fountain
was not displayed, although this was an organization with which Duchamp
was closely involved and that had intended to exhibit anything that was
submitted along with the $6 entrance fee.
There is some possibility that Fountain
was hidden behind a curtain at the exhibition for three days, but what
is certain is that Duchamp took it to Alfred Stieglitz, who made a
photograph that appeared in a little magazine called The Blind Man.
The work itself disappeared not long after; it is only replicas of the
urinal that were eventually exhibited in public, many decades later. My
feeling is that Rothkopf, immersed as he is in Koons’s virulent brand of
exhibitionism, can hardly grasp the extent to which for Duchamp the
readymade was a private avowal, an act of inwardness, an effort to see
what art was and was not and could and couldn’t be for him.
Dadaism,
which erupted a hundred years ago in the midst of World War I, may be
one of the most misunderstood developments in twentieth-century art.
There is a purity, almost an innocence, about the carnivalesque impurity
of the original Dadaists and their objects and their ideas. So far as I
am concerned, Jeff Koons has as little to do with Duchamp as he has to
do with Bernini or Praxiteles or any of the other historical figures
whose names are invoked in relation to the follies he calls art. Koons’s
show-offishness is almost the exact opposite of Duchamp’s reticence.
Art, Duchamp worried, is “a habit-forming drug,” and with the readymade
he somehow hoped to break the habit, which is perhaps what every artist
hopes to do by inventing art anew.
Jean Arp, one of the very first
Dadaists—he was also and almost simultaneously one of the great
classicists of twentieth-century sculpture—wrote that “Dada wished to
destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order.” The
delicacy with which Arp describes an old reason being destroyed in order
to discover a new, “unreasoned order” (ordre déraisonnable) has
nothing whatever to do with the chilly, pompous certainties that fill
the Whitney. Koons’s overblown souvenirs are exactly what Duchamp warned
against, a habit-forming drug for the superrich.
Dada—whatever
its deficiencies, and the fact is that it produced relatively little
enduring art—was part of a tradition of doubt about the possibilities of
art that is woven deep into the history of art. You can trace this
tradition back to the accounts in Pliny and other historians of the
struggles of ancient painters to disentangle the relationship between
the natural world and the pictorial world. The tradition runs through
Michelangelo’s Neoplatonic worries about the conflict between the
material and spiritual powers of art. And it reaches a first tragic
climax in Chardin’s statements about the uselessness of artistic
training as a preparation for the real challenges of art and his
haunting confession that painting was an island whose shores he doubted
he even knew.
There is not a shred of doubt in Jeff Koons. And
where there is no doubt there is no art. Those who care to understand
Duchamp’s impact on recent art must look elsewhere—perhaps to the
enigmas and paradoxes of Robert Gober and Vija Celmins, two artists who
keep some of Duchamp’s quixotic elegance and eloquence alive. But Gober
and Celmins are artists’ artists. That is what Marcel Duchamp and the
rest of the Dadaists were, at least for most of their careers. Koons is a
publicist’s artist.
Might does not always make
right, although that would seem to be the proposition on which Koons’s
current lofty position is based. In art history departments there is
nowadays an inclination to submit all art to a sociopolitical analysis,
which is convenient when critics and scholars want to rationalize the
considerable attention they pay to Koons’s marketing strategies. Too
many column inches have been wasted on his stint in the early 1980s as a
commodities broker on Wall Street and on his powers of persuasion when
it comes to pushing art dealers to bankroll the extraordinary production
costs involved with his work. Why should we care about any of this?
When was it that the art of the deal became the only kind of art that
art people want to talk about?
For Koons’s supporters, his
business savvy, with its elements of risk-taking and maybe even
recklessness, is a new Gilded Age avant-gardism. His combination of
in-your-face banality and in-your-face extravagance takes the place of
what must by now seem the excessively earnest campaigns of the
avant-gardists of earlier generations. From the first supporters of the
Cubists to the critics and collectors who embraced Abstract
Expressionism early on, the bewilderment one sometimes experienced on
encountering new art was embraced as a complicated intellectual
challenge, demanding new alignments of sense and sensibility. We are all
acquainted with the derision with which Matisse’s Woman with a Hat was greeted at the Salon d’Automne in 1905 and the protests provoked by Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913.
For
the Gilded Age avant-garde, such legendary events have become the model
for new marketing opportunities, and there is an assumption that if the
public has a very strong negative reaction to something—if a work of
art disturbs or annoys or flummoxes some of the public—it most likely is
important. Incredibly enough, there are highly intelligent observers
who believe that Koons challenges them in more or less the same way that
Matisse, Picasso, Nijinsky, and Pollock might once have done. In the
very first paragraph of his catalog introduction, Scott Rothkopf quotes
the late Robert Rosenblum, a distinguished student of nineteenth-century
neoclassicism who doubled as a critic of contemporary art, declaring in
1993 that “Koons is certainly the artist who has most upset and
rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the last decade.” Later in the
Whitney catalog, the art historian Alexander Nagel recalls his first
encounter with Koons’s work—the “Banality” series at the Sonnabend
Gallery in 1988—and explains that it “made me a little sick, even as I
felt an almost irresistible invitation to submit to it.”
I would
have hoped that by now everybody agreed that not all unease is equal.
Why should we imagine that because once upon a time certain gallerygoers
were troubled by something that they later came to admire, then it
follows that anything that troubles a gallerygoer is necessarily worthy
of admiration? Just because it makes you sick doesn’t mean that it’s any
good. I am not saying that either Rosenblum or Nagel, both scholars
widely admired for their erudition, would take this view. But there is
no doubt in my mind that Koons is alert to a tendency on the part of the
art audience to submit—to submit to something (to anything) that exerts a certain discomfiting power. This is the S&M of the contemporary art world, with the audience angling for an opportunity to grovel at the feet of the superstar.
In the run-up to the Whitney show, Jeff Koons posed for Annie Leibovitz’s camera for Vanity Fair,
working out in his private gym and wearing nothing at all, his physique
quite impressive for a man well into middle age. What on earth was the
point? On the face of it, Koons’s Vanity Fair star turn looks
tiresome, the swagger of a macho buffoon. And yet it does the trick.
Koons is the bully in the playground. He is also the class clown. He
will do whatever it takes to win, and in our winner-take-all culture
that passes for profundity.
Of course even those who take a
serious interest in Koons know that he’s also full of baloney. Roberta
Smith, reviewing the Whitney retrospective in the Times, comments
on his “slightly nonsensical Koonspeak that casts him as the truest
believer in a cult of his own invention.” That is well put. The
essential fact about the Koons cult, however, is not that Koons invented
it, but that it has gained such extraordinary traction, in the art
world and well beyond. Day after day, the crowds are lining up outside
the Whitney, waiting to get in to see the Jeff Koons show. What are they
to make of the tens of millions of dollars that have been squandered on
this work? What are they to make of the critics and historians who are
defending Koons with a belligerence that allows for no debate? And what
are they to make of the Whitney Museum of American Art?
That Koons
will be Koons is his own business. That he has had his way with the art
world is everybody’s business. No wonder the people in the galleries at
the Whitney look a little dazed. The Koons cult has triumphed. For his
next project Koons should consider manufacturing a ten-foot-high
polychromed aluminum Kool-Aid container. It could come right after Play-Doh in the “Celebration” series.
