Top 25 – Jeff Koons
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Why KOONS???
We received several complaints about our decision to include Jeff Koons in our ‘Top 25 Artists In New York’ list. These objections all started with or included somewhere in the complaint the phrase ‘not a TRUE artist’ and/or the phrase ‘not a REAL artist’.
Like Warhol he creates art by hiring others to do the actual work. He’s the man who hires crews of people to construct his pieces such as the 100 riggers, planters, engineers and studio assistants who erected a 43-foot-high stainless steel armature, which they covered with foam and blanketed with some 70,000 flowering plants known as ‘The Puppy’ in 2000.
In an article by db artmag in 2005 Cheryl Kaplan said, “Walking into Jeff Koons’ studio is more like walking into a car factory or NASA. There are men in white suits hovering around objects, tag teams of painters on ladders, and paint swatches enough for neighborhoods of remodeled homes. Then there’s the clean room, where inflatable sculptures are polished and tended to behind clear plastic curtains and sealed doors. It’s Elizabeth Arden meets Vasari. Just a normal day for Jeff Koons and his 50 plus assistants.”
Koons is PERFECT!
His honest expression of himself and our country challenges all of us to examine our definition of ART and how it is created. Is the old school process sacred? What part do the masses play in defining ART?
Is ART the process or the finished product?
Who better to reflect the emphasis of our society on business than a businessman who becomes a famous artist without having to change his corporate persona?
Warhol started building the reflection of the concept of ‘art’ in the minds of the masses in America and HE hired assistants to do most of his work. NOW Koons delivers the coup de grâce to Warhol’s statement by revealing our country’s obvious priorities as a culture.
Personally I like his pieces/visual products and I’m sure he enjoys his process of creating albeit different than the traditional methods. I now relinquish the Blog flloor to ArtDaily.com the ‘first art newspaper on the net’ to inform us about Koons next show.
CHICAGO -The contemporary artist and provocateur Jeff Koons is one of the most well known and intriguing artists of the 20th century. The seductive surfaces, luxurious scale and quality, and flawless execution of his works – many of which have become icons, such as Rabbit, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and Puppy – transform everyday objects and fantasies into high art. After presenting the first survey of Koons’ work in 1988, the MCA is revisiting the work of this seminal figure in contemporary art, exploring his powerful influence on contemporary art and his significance for a new generation.
The exhibition Jeff Koons, on view May 31 to September 21, 2008, is his first major US museum survey in fifteen years and will only be presented in Chicago.
Jeff Koons worked closely with the MCA to create a carefully selected survey focusing on his most iconic works from the 1980s to the present. The exhibition reveals relationships between the artist’s works both through and across series, surveying Koons’ career from the celebrated sculptures of the 1980s to new paintings completed in 2007. One of his most recognized recent pieces, Hanging Heart (Blue/Silver), will hang from the MCA’s atrium ceiling as a centerpiece to the exhibition.
Koons mirrors society’s obsession with popular culture and negates simple divisions between appearance and reality, surface and depth, and art and commodity. With roots in Pop, Conceptual, and Minimalist art, Koons models his sculptures on consumer products and manipulates store-bought items to dramatize mass-produced cultural objects while exposing the subtleties of marketing. But unlike his 1960s predecessors, Koons’ agenda is to address people’s psychological investment in consumer objects and how these objects are designed to seduce. “My work,” says Koons, “will use every possible opportunity. It will employ all possible tricks and do everything – really everything – to communicate and win the viewer over.”
The exhibition features iconic works from each of Koons’ series: Pre-New and New “I have always used cleanliness and a form of order to maintain for the viewer a belief in the essence of the eternal, so that the viewer does not feel so threatened economically. When under economic pressure you start to see disintegration around you. Things do not remain orderly. So I have always placed order in my work not out of respect for Minimalism but to give the viewer a sense of economic security.”
The first two series, Pre-New and New, draw upon the American public’s desire for new consumer products. Referencing methods of display in retail stores and museums, Koons mounted mass-produced consumer goods such as Hoover vacuum cleaners, and placed them within airtight Plexigas vitrines as if preserved artifacts. Koons elevation of everyday objects to symbols of desire explores cultural value judgments and the public’s quest for status, permanence, and “the new.”
Equilibrium – “The show was about equilibrium, and the ads defined personal and social equilibrium. There is also the deception of people acting as if they have accomplished their goals and they haven’t: ‘Come on! Go for it! I have achieved equilibrium!’ Equilibrium is unattainable; it can be sustained only for a moment. And here are these people in the role of saying, ‘Come on! I’ve done it! I’m a star! I’m Moses!’ It’s about artists using art for social mobility. Moses [Malone] is a symbol of the middle-class artist of our time who does the same act of deception, a front man: ‘I’ve done it! I’m a star! … And the bronzes were the tools for Equilibrium that would kill you if you used them. So the underlying theme, really, was that death is the ultimate state of being. What was paralleling this message was that white middle-class kids have been using art the same way that other ethnic groups have been using basketball — for social mobility.”
Created in 1985 for his first solo exhibition, Equilibrium, the show included basketballs floating in display tanks, along with cast bronze lifesaving gear, a diver’s vest, an inflatable lifeboat, and a snorkel. Framed advertising posters of American basketball heroes wearing Nike clothing and surrounded by basketballs continue the artist’s examination of consumption and the desire for lasting perfection. Similar to the New series, the tanks and the bronze works cannot fulfill their intended function; however, Koons changes the objects’ materiality to make connections between objects, their economic and cultural value, and public perception.
Luxury and Degradation – “Coming from these wombs and the masculine color of Equilibrium, all these internal areas, Luxury and Degradation is much more sociological. I just rode the subways here in New York. And I would go from one economic area, from Harlem, to the other, Grand Central Station. I got the whole spectrum of advertising. You deal with the lowest economic base to the highest level. I realized how the level of visual abstraction is changing. The more money comes into play, the more abstract. It was like they were using abstraction to debase you, because they always want to debase you.”
In this series, exhibited in 1986, Koons presents a view of consumerist decadence by appropriating images and objects related to the marketing and consumption of alcohol. Luxury and Degradation features precisely reproduced paintings of liquor advertisements and stainless steel alcohol-related items ranging from children’s toys to Baccarat Crystal sets. The series reflects a variety of consumer income levels and tastes that are united in a desire for status and power through conspicuous consumption.
Statuary – “This was to show that if you put art in the hands of a monarch, which Louis XIV was a symbol of, it would become reflective of their ego, and eventually become decorative. And if you put art in the hands of the masses, which Bob Hope was a symbol of, that eventually art would become decorative. And if you put art in the hands of Jeff Koons, it will eventually reflect my ego and also eventually become decorative.”
Similar to Luxury and Degradation created the same year, Koons conceived of Statuary as a panoramic view of society. The sculptures, all made of stainless steel, draw from a range of art historical themes and sources from the bust of Louis XIV, to the figure of Bob Hope, to an inflatable bunny. For Koons, stainless steel simulates the economical security of luxurious objects. Because he aims to address the entire social spectrum with his art, he uses the democratic material of stainless steel rather than bronze or gold which historically have been materials associated with the elite social classes.
Banality – “I don’t see a Hummel figurine as tasteless, I see it as beautiful. I see it and respond to the sentimentality of the work. I love the finish, how simple the color green can be painted. I like things being seen for what they are. It’s like lying in the grass and taking a deep breath. That’s all my work is trying to do, to be as enjoyable as that breath.”
The works in Koons’ Banality series in 1988, made in porcelain, ceramic, or poly-chromed wood, draw on images and icons in popular culture and often combined people and animals with ambiguous sexual undertones such as in Pink Panther. While the series continues Koons’ use of common objects in the New series and his use of kitsch in the Statuary series, Banality offers a distinct shift in scale. Enlarged, these monumental works challenge the relationship Koons questioned earlier between art and commodity, as well as between sublime art and banal taste, and valuable sculpture and cheap kitsch.
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James Kalm takes us to Koons.
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New York Art News Blog 2008
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March 22, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Was the art that Koons sined, but had the straving artist create from his ideas or did he let the artist create their own works from their own ideas?
If they were Koons’ seed to the finished product, he is an artist, if they were not, well, you can guess what would be said regardless of society’s current fad. He was not the first artist to use everyday items or redimades to create art!
There is no objection to an artist having his or her work created by a team when the work is the artist inception or the artist has produced drawing and/or a maquette to show what the finished work is to be.
It is when an artist takes works created by someone else with little or no imput from the signing artist that there is a problem.
March 22, 2008 at 8:08 pm
I remember in the eighties reading a story about him in either Art In America or ArtNews magazine, an interview where he talked about his beginnings. If I remember correctly, at first the artists just did their thing and he picked. I believe it was Koons who talked about being embarrased about it at first and would only pick and sign at night after the artists went home. I’ll try to find it in the magazine’s archives to make sure my memory is accurate. I do remember another story that said the work looked like wooden art figure dolls, so if I’m wrong someone please correct me.
He makes no secret of his process now though. He talked about the process and it’s evolution into committees and huge groups of people.
Here’s an EXCELLENT German article with beautiful photos:
http://www.db-artmag.de/2005/6/e/1/366.php
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MORE on Koons from ArtNews
http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1829
Koons moved to New York when he was 22 and got a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art. His earliest supporter was dealer Mary Boone, who met him in 1979 when she bought his green Mercedes as a birthday gift for Schnabel. Boone sold two of his works—to Saatchi and collectors Donald and Mera Rubell—but after a year Koons left her for dealer Annina Nosei, with whom his relationship was also short-lived.
Koons’s work, with its roots in Pop, Conceptual, and Minimalist art, was out of step with the brash Neo-Expressionist style of artists like Schnabel and David Salle, which was in favor at the time. Frustrated by a lack of sales, Koons moved to Florida in the summer of 1982 to live with his parents and save enough money to move back to New York in the fall.
For the next few years, he personally financed his art by working as a Wall Street commodities broker. Koons has said he spent a lot of his time at Smith Barney consumed with a new series of sculptures, calling physicists to help him figure out how to suspend basketballs in water.
“Equilibrium,” his groundbreaking 1985 show at International with Monument, included basketballs floating in aquariums, lifesaving devices cast in bronze, and reproductions of Nike advertisements featuring black basketball stars. The basketball tanks, in editions of two, originally sold for $3,000, and the lifeboats, in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof, sold for $8,000, but those prices doubled within a matter of months. In recent years a lifeboat and an aqualung have sold for about $2 million each at auction. Less in demand are the basketball tanks, whose top price at auction is $244,500, because, sources say, they are difficult to maintain and the balls deteriorate.
“With Jeff Koons, I was absolutely obsessed,” says art adviser Estelle Schwartz, who placed about a dozen works from “Equilibrium” with clients. “I was a more voracious collector than even my clients. I remember saying to a collector, ‘If I’m buying a snorkel vest, you should be buying an aqualung.’”
“Equilibrium” set off a whirlwind of exhibitions by Koons. Between 1985 and 1991, he showed five distinct but often overlapping series of works at galleries across the country and overseas. He also began to work with multiple dealers, including Daniel Weinberg of Los Angeles, who, like other dealers who have worked with Koons, helped the artist fund his ideas in exchange for a share of the profits.
Over the past two decades, Koons, who has been quoted as saying that the “great artists of the future are going to be the great negotiators,” has built what he describes as a power base. “I have a platform now,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “I have all the support possible, as far as a stage for Jeff Koons to do his work.”
March 22, 2008 at 10:39 pm
The philosopher/writer Ayn Rand believed it not inappropriate to say “This is a great work of art, but I hate it.” That pretty much sums up my feelings about Koons. His work succeeds beautifully as a mirror of our culture, but endpoints are never as interesting as beginnings. Koons’ work is not transcendent, he is the Baroque culmination of art made by and for a decadent consumer society.
March 30, 2008 at 1:01 am
How extraordinary to live in Hervey Bay, Queensland, Australia yet have my photograph magically appear on a New York Art News Website. I wonder if you will link to my blog under my photo? Any publicity is good publicity! You never know one day you may doing a critique on my work!
http://www.designhouse.com.au/design-house-news/general-news/andy-warhole
March 30, 2008 at 2:50 am
Thanks now we know who to credit!
March 31, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Agree totally with RA Friedman and by the way I checked out his site – great work yet again from Philly. I am so proud of my home town. There’s also Zoe Strauss shaking things up and gotta love Vincent Romaniello.