Marina Nebro: Arts and Culture

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

You’re so narcissistic! What’s your name, Jeff Koons?

For its closing exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art has dedicated almost its entire space to feature the work of Jeff Koons, an artist who has been called “one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the postwar era” (Whitney Museum). Though I have never studied him previously, I did have some prior knowledge about Koons from visiting a gallery in Chelsea back during my History of Western Art II course in freshman year. I remember not being impressed by much with the exception of his large, modern take on the pre-historic Venus of Willendorf. This piece had caught my attention because I had learned about the original stone sculpture in AP Art History, and I didn’t realize it still had such an impact in the art world.

Jeff Koons had been a distant memory for me until one day, my father received a gift from one of his clients – a Dom Pérignon Jeff Koons Limited Edition Brut Champagne. I was immediately taken by the familiar figure on the box – Balloon Venus! I got very excited, hoping that the bottle inside would mimic the bulbous shape of the fertile woman – I was disappointed when the unspectacular champagne bottle was lifted from its bed. Jeff Koons had entered back into my life, and he wouldn’t leave as quickly as before.

While studying abroad in Spain, my mother had sent me various articles on the current Whitney exhibit. Before I had left to Madrid, we had been talking about the issue of art – What is art? What is an artist? What is the purpose of art? The Jeff Koons Retrospective is a perfect setting to discuss these complex questions. So let’s start! I will take you, the reader, through the various rooms and floors of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, and describe my feelings about the pieces of “artwork”, what I think they contribute to the art world, and where I think the art world may be going.

Celebration!

The first exhibition hall that I visited, along with my mother and sister, featured images and sculptures that dealt with joyousness and felicity. Three polished, stainless steel balloon sculptures decorated the room, as did a big mound of metal play-doh, a ginormous plastic cat in a sock (Cat on a Clothesline), and two paint-by-numbers paintings. Of course, the shiny surfaces of Balloon Dog, Moon, and Hanging Heart caught my immediate attention, as I, along with everyone else in the world, sought to take “selfies” within the reflective, puckering surfaces of the trompe l’oeil figures. But what was my overall impression? Was what I was looking at “art”? When I differentiate between art and everything outside of the field, I like to talk about historical acknowledgment. Does the “artist” know who and what came before him or her? Is the “artist” continuing along a historical timeline of aesthetics and technique? Jeff Koons’ Boy With Pony throws me for a huge loop, here. In the description on the wall, the curator brings the viewer’s attention to how Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse inspired Koons’ grand-scale, semi-photorealistic painting. There you have it! Historical allusion! Koons is an artist, right? Don’t get excited so quickly, reader. The wall plaque goes on to explain how the painting was produced – several Koons slaves (that’s what I’ll call them, to add some drama) filled in the gridded canvas. What did Koons do? He took a picture and gave it to a factory of workers to bring to painted fruition. As an “artist” myself, I have taken photographs to use as references for paintings and drawings, but I don’t just stop there and hand it over for someone else to complete! What rubbish is that!

Before I move onto the next room, I would also like to mention Koons’ fixation on sex. Several times throughout the first room, and continued throughout every succeeding room, the curator mentioned the sexual nature of his work. Take Balloon Dog, for instance: Koons imparted Balloon Dog (Yellow) with an air of innocent playfulness as well as elements that suggest sexual orifices and protuberances (Whitney Museum). As much as I like this sculpture for its uncanny resemblance of a real-life mylar balloon, I must say, this description is complete baloney! Yes, I guess one can liken a balloon animal to a phallic symbol, but this is only due to necessity – a balloon animal must be long and cylindrical in order to twist it into animal shapes! The knot at the end of the balloon? Again, necessary to trap the air inside in order to maintain shape. There is just no connection between a balloon dog and sexuality, unless one starts speaking about balloon fetishists!

Popeye!

The room immediately adjacent to the first featured inflatable water toys… or what looked like them, anyway. Another aspect of art I like to discuss is technique – what is an artist bringing to the table that is new and transforming to the art world in terms of skill? The Dutch painters during the Renaissance introduced oil painting, an incredible transformative technique to the art world. Oil painting allowed artists to capture reality in much more detail. In Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition (El Prado), individual tear droplets and fur hairs are visible on the canvas, and seem to almost protrude into our world. Koons’ work is a sculptural equivalent, I might say. Though at first glance, one might roll one’s eyes and sarcastically say, “What an artist! He just piled pool floaties on top of one another!”, it is important to note what material he used: aluminum! Absolutely amazing, no? I can also appreciate the conflicting idea between floating and sinking, air and metal, that Koons employs here. But, just as I get excited, I realize something: he sent his sketches and blue-prints to a factory to be manufactured, just like he hired his little minions to paint Boy with Pony! Unlike Rogier van der Weyden’s personal brush strokes, or Michelangelo’s handiwork on David, Koons didn’t touch these sculptures! So… can I consider him the founder of a groundbreaking, new technique? Or should I consider him a fraud?

 Luxury and Degradation / Equilibrium

Ideas and creativity. Ultimately, that’s what an artist is, right? One cannot be an artist if one is not creative. The description of all artsy individuals is always: “Oh, she is so creative and has such unique ideas!” And I must admit, some examples of Koons’ work does show new thinking and creativity.

I remember taking History of Photography and learning about appropriation photographers. Individuals such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Harrell Fletcher (I include this last “artist” because I had not learned about appropriation before seeing his work at the MoMA, and I was absolutely disgusted by the fact that a museum would dedicate such prime real-estate to something so artistically lacking) made names for themselves by re-photographing and reusing old images. How is this art? It infuriates me! And just as I was enraged by these so-called artists, I was equally disheartened to see Koons doing the same thing.

In Luxury and Degradation, oil-printed canvases decorated the walls, featuring advertisements for different types of alcoholic beverages. First of all, by sending these images to be mechanically printed, it shows that Koons had no hand in producing the actual picture. Secondly, none of these advertisements were originally designed by Koons! One might argue that the art behind this exhibit is the idea of bringing all of the ads together to send some sort of message. You got me there, he came up with the idea, big whoop. If anything, I’d just describe that as being a curator or some sort of exhibition designer, but not an artist who is included on the historical timeline with some of the world’s creative geniuses.

In Equilibrium, alongside his cases of suspended basketballs and bronze sculptures, both of which I can appreciate on some artistic or at least creative level, are appropriated, vintage Nike posters. In this case, he didn’t even reprint the images onto canvases. He literally just went to Nike’s headquarters, took some posters, and put them in frames. That’s it. That’s it! Nothing else. I don’t think I need to explain how un-artistic and not unique this is.

Made in Heaven

My descriptions of the exhibit so far have served the purpose of illustrating what I consider art to be: aware of an art historical past, having a strong and possibly progressive technique, and being creative. Each example I have given shows that while Koons does show some of these qualities as an artist, he contradicts them as well. I think that the art world is shifting, and the definition of art is changing from what it initially meant, or at least “art” is moving away from the definition I have. Just like everything else in this world, I believe that art is starting to place its focus and importance on the wrong things. Take the world of education, for instance. Though the purpose and importance of education is teaching children and creating a better future for our youth, the world of education has shifted towards becoming a business focused on college prep courses, College Board, and new, expensive, cockamamy teaching methods and tests. Yes, I know the art world has never been as idealistic as it is sometimes portrayed. Business and money has always been a part of it – the rich can afford art, the poor cannot. Those with connections succeed, and those that are not accepted flounder and die in poverty. But I think today, more than ever, money is ruling the roost. Wealthy people, who have little to no idea about what art is, – because now “rich” doesn’t mean from a cultured past like it used to – are sponsoring “artists” or individuals that seem to be outside the box, just for the sake of jumping on a band wagon and saying they have discovered the next big thing. This new money focus that art has really influences and affects the art that we look at. Money often creates pompous, pretentious, self-centered monsters, and I think that is what Koons has become.

In his Made in Heaven series, we see larger than life images of Jeff Koons, naked as a baby, having sexual intercourse with his porn star wife. The images are tacky beyond belief, and at least to me, not aesthetically pleasing at all. The large, oil-printed canvases (featuring photographs not even taken by Koons) are not examples of sexual liberation and sex positive ideals, but in-your-face, unattractive, look-at-me images that should be relegated to 4 x 6 photographs stashed in ones bedside drawer. If you can’t see the narcissism from these large murals, you can definitely sense it from Self-Portrait, a marble bust of Jeff Koons. An upturned face, closed eyes, and bust emerge from a bed of crystalline diamonds. The surface of the sculpture shines like Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of Edward Cullen in the Twilight Saga. The horrendous, kitschy, not-even-well-done likeness epitomizes and reflects perfectly what I think Jeff Koons believes he is – an artistic god. I’m sorry, Koonsy… you’re not.

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My mother, sister, and I visited the exhibit on August 20, 2014. When we arrived, we were told that the third floor was closed due to “emergency maintenance.” My mom asked every security guard in sight, but not one would tell us what the situation was. Luckily, before we left for the day, the third floor re-opened and we were able to see more of the exhibition, but there was still a sectioned off area.

The next day, after looking online, we figured out what had actually happen. A man, at first unidentified but later believed to be Istvan Kantor, a founder of the anti-art movement Neoism, had painted an “X” on one of the third floor’s walls with his own blood, signing “Monty Cantsin was here.” Monty Cantsin is a pen-name that the Neoists encourage everyone to use, to increase the fame of this non-existant man. My mom later reflected that perhaps Kantor’s anti-art was more artistic than anything at the Koons exhibit because “at least he used his own blood and did it himself!”

What an historic day to visit the museum!

Marina B. Nebro