THE PAINTINGS OF JEFF KOONS: 1994 – 2008
A Thesis Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board
______
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS
By Ian J. Zoller January 2010
Thesis Approvals:
Dr. Gerald D. Silk, Thesis Advisor, Art History Department
Dr. Susanna W. Gold, Art History Department ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my professor and advisor, Dr. Gerald Silk, for his insights, comments, and advice, which helped me craft my thesis into its present form. Also, thank you to my second reader, Dr. Susanna Gold, for her willingness to be a part of this process and for providing thoughtful insight into my paper.
Thank you to the Temple Art History Department secretary, Michelle Gudknecht, for her assistance in a variety of areas either directly or indirectly connected to the completion of my thesis and Master’s degree.
Thank you to my parents, James and Donna Zoller, for their concern and never- ending encouragement in the pursuit of this Master’s degree. Mom, thank you for the regular inquiries about my thesis and for reminding me that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Pop, thank you for giving me the article on Jeff Koons to begin with, which proved to be the impetus for my thesis topic. Thank you also for reading my proposal and first draft and providing feedback which helped me to think constructively about my writing as well as encouraging me to persevere through many frustrations.
Thank you to my new wife, Kristen, for gently encouraging me along the way before and after our marriage while pursuing her own Master’s degree. Kristen, when I was ready to throw in the towel you motivated me to see this endeavor through to the end. The completion of this thesis and degree represents hope for the future and a chance to continue bettering myself. iii
FORWARD
In the beginning stages of formulating my thesis topic my father handed me an
article from The New Yorker, as he often does, entitled “The Turnaround Artist.”1 It was about Jeff Koons and his remarkable resurgence as a force in contemporary art. At that point I was flexible about my topic and only knew I wanted to deal with contemporary art from the 1980’s or beyond. I was also interested in looking at art in the 21st century and what types of art or artists would lead the way. After reading the first paragraph in which
Koons says, “In this century, there was Picasso and Duchamp. Now I’m taking us out of the twentieth century,” I knew I was on to something. 2 Not only was this an artist who acknowledged the accomplishments of the last century but also the lack of leadership in our present decade and had the courage, confidence and ambition to assume that mantle.
Here, in one man, I had found a contemporary artist who not only made a significant arrival on the art scene in the , but also was continuing to make challenging and vital work in the new century.
My previous exposure to Jeff Koons came primarily through art history texts where he is generally represented by vacuum cleaners encased in Plexiglas from his 1980
– 81 series The New. Admittedly, I hated this sterile-looking conceptual art that appeared to be simply piggybacking on the shoulders of Duchamp’s innovations. As I read The
New Yorker article, however, I became aware that there was much more to Koons than I previously realized and I was determined to discover what it was. How could an artist that commanded blue-chip prices as a newcomer in the continue to be a top artist in the
1 Calvin Tomkins, “The Turnaround Artist”, The New Yorker, vol. 83, no. 9 (April 23, 2007), 58 – 67.
2 Tomkins, 59. iv
2000’s unless there was more to him than rehashed Duchampian clichés? Additionally, I was intrigued by a man who garners as much vitriol as praise even from the beginning of his career. At the very least, this was an interesting man.
Initially I intended to use Koons as a vehicle to look more deeply at the particulars of the 1980’s, his first decade as a professional artist. I was intrigued by the decade for a number of reasons: the clash of ideologies and generations: latter day
Modernism with youthful Postmodernism as well as aging Pop artists like Warhol mingling with a new generation of consumer-obsessed artists. Also, I wanted to investigate the particulars of Postmodernism: what does it mean? How does it manifest itself? Is it still relevant today? Additionally, I was intrigued by the myriad artists who came to prominence in this decade: David Salle, Eric Fischl, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith
Haring, Haim Steinbach, Peter Halley, Julian Schnabel, etc. Of course I soon discovered that here was a hundred theses alone. With this in mind, and my growing appreciation of
Koons, I decided to keep the focus on the artist who piqued my interest to begin with.
Among the literature on Koons there is a noticeable disparity between the texts that deal with his sculptures and 1980’s output and those that deal specifically with his paintings and his post-1980’s work. With that in mind I narrowed my focus to look at his paintings, a topic I believe has been underserved in the literature. What I hope to contribute to the body of writing that exists on Koons is a cohesive and coherent look at his paintings and how they enhance and inform his oeuvre as a whole. Therefore, I hope to add a new dimension to the understanding and appreciation of this increasingly prominent aspect of his work that is often overlooked. In closing, I hope the reader will v gain an increased understanding and appreciation for the paintings of Jeff Koons and a more complete picture of the artist who is leading us into the new century. vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….ii
FORWARD...... iii
LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………...vii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………1
CHAPTER 2: EARLY CAREER
The 1980’s………………………………………………………………………...6
Context: The Early 1990’s……………………………………………………….12
CHAPTER 3: THE PAINTINGS
Studio Practice, Sources, Influences……………………………………………..15
Painting and Art History…………………………………………………………19
CHAPTER 4: THE SERIES (1994 – PRESENT)
Celebration (1994 – 1998)……………………………………………………….22
Easyfun (1999 – 2000)…………………………………………………………...27
Easyfun-Ethereal (2000 – 2002)…………………………………………………28
Popeye (2002 – 2003)……………………………………………………………34
Hulk Elvis (2007-PRESENT)……………………………………………………40
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………..45
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………..49
FIGURES………………………………………………………………………………...53 vii
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1 Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny) (1979) …………………53
Fig. 2 Toaster (1979)……………………………………………………………………53
Fig. 3 New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Hoover Quik-Broom, New Shelton Wet/Dry 5 Gallon, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Tripledecker (1981-1987)………...54
Fig. 4 Dr. Dunkenstein (1985)…………………………………………………………..55
Fig. 5 One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. J 241 Series) (1985)…………..55
Fig. 6 Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Engine (1986)……………………………………………………………………………56
Fig. 7 Bob Hope (1986)…………………………………………………………………56
Fig 8. Rabbit (1986)………………………………………………..…………………………..57
Fig. 9 Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988)…………………………………………………………………………..58
Fig. 10 Ushering in Banality (1988)………………………………………………………………………….58
Fig. 11 Ilona on Top (Rosa Background) (1990)……………………………………………………………………..59
Fig. 12 Puppy (1992)……………………………………………………………………59
Fig. 13 Auto (2001)……………………………………………………………………...60
Fig. 14 Jeff in the Position of Adam (1990)……………………………………………………………………………..60
Fig. 15 Cake (1995–1997)…………………………………………………...……...…61
Fig. 16 Plate Set (1995–1998)…………………………………………………………61
Fig. 17 Ribbon (1995–1997)………………………………………………………...….62
Fig. 18 Shelter (1996–1998)…………………………………………………………....62
Fig. 19 Donkey (1996–1999)…………………………………………………...………63 viii
Fig. 20 Balloon Dog (1995-1998)…………………………………………………...…63
Fig. 21 Balloon Dog (Yellow) (1994-2000)…………………………………………..…64
Fig. 22 Donkey (Orange) (1999)………………………………………………………..64
Fig. 23 Cut-Out (1999)…...……………………………………………………………65
Fig. 24 Pot Rack (2000)………...………………………………………………………66
Fig. 25 Cheeky (2000)………………………………………………………………...... 66
Fig. 26 Pam (2001)……………………………………………………………………..67
Fig. 27 Moustache Lobsters (2003)…………………………………………………….68
Fig. 28 Lobster Log (2003)……………………………………………………………..68
Fig. 29 Popeye (2003)…………………………………………………………………..69
Fig. 30 Elvis (2003)……………………………………………………………………...69
Fig. 31 Hulk Elvis II (2007)……………………………………………………………70
Fig. 32 Monkey Train (Orange) (2007)…………………………………………………71
Fig. 33 Waterfall Couple (Dots) Blue Swish (2008)…………………………………...71
Fig. 34 Landscape (Tree) II (2007)………………………...……………………………72 1
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
American artist Jeff Koons (b.1955) has been making artwork based on
advertising imagery and mass-produced objects since the late 1970’s. Most observers of
contemporary art know his conceptual and Pop inspired pieces from the 1980’s: encased
vacuum-cleaners, the stainless steel inflatable Rabbit, the sensationalized pornography of
Made in Heaven, all of which have been well documented. His sculpture garners the
majority of critical attention but paintings have been an important, if not exclusive,
element of every series of Koons’ work for the last fifteen years. Still, his paintings have
not received substantive attention. His reputation as primarily a sculptor and provocateur
is in need of a reassessment: He has devoted an increasing amount of effort to the
production of paintings in the 1990’s and 2000’s and it is now essential to the
understanding of this artist to consider the paintings as a whole and how they contribute
to his oeuvre.
This paper will look at the paintings that Koons produced from his earliest as a
professional artist through five series of works extending over fifteen years: Celebration,
Easyfun, Easyfun-Ethereal, Popeye, and Hulk Elvis. By focusing on the paintings I seek to highlight and examine the developments that have occurred in these works from the straightforward Photorealist style of Celebration to the densely layered pastiche of
Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal; the Surrealist inspired work of the Popeye series to the
recent Hulk Elvis series that refines the pastiche approach yet also includes a surprising
group of quasi-abstract images related to contemporary German painting (e.g. Gerhard
Richter and Sigmar Polke). Next, I will examine the relationship of the paintings to the 2
sculptures as well as Koons’ continued application of Duchamp’s readymade even in two
dimensions. Every series of paintings remains strongly linked to Koons’ sculptures
through the repetition of readymade objects, particularly inflatable objects, as well as
through thematic similarities. In addition, I will examine some reasons why the paintings
are often overlooked in favor of Koons’ earlier sculpture output: Koons’ reputation and
provocative persona were established before he began making paintings and the belief by
some critics his three-dimensional work is superior.
Gaining fame in the mid-1980’s, Koons remains a fixture in contemporary art: his
work commands top prices at auction and was featured in recent shows at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Palace of Versailles, France, both in 2008. He is
best known as a sculptor, but as an art student at the Maryland Institute College of Art
and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Koons was primarily a painter. After he
graduated and moved to New York in 1977 he abandoned painting in favor of sculpture
for nearly a decade and a half. From 1978 until the mid-1990’s he produced no paintings
before rediscovering the medium in his Celebration series beginning in 1994. Since then, he has produced paintings in every series of work and one series consists solely of paintings (Easyfun-Ethereal).
Much has been written about the artist in his three-decade-long career but there is a noticeable disparity between the literature dedicated to the first half of his career (1979
– 1992) and that dedicated to the second half (1994 – present) when Koons began producing paintings as well as sculpture. The reasons for this disparity are threefold:
First, Koons rose to fame and renown in the mid-1980’s when artworld reputations were being made in intensely short periods of time. The rush by collectors and critics alike to 3 declare “the next big thing” created a parallel amount of critical attention to artists such as Koons. Second, his most shocking (or irritating) works were produced in the late-
1980’s and early 1990’s, most notably Made in Heaven. Third, Koons’ extended hiatus after Made in Heaven kept his name out of the press and the gallery for several years.
There is some scholarship that addresses the paintings, however, including several useful catalogs that examine the post-1980’s career of the artist. First, the catalog of
Koons’ 2002 retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Jeff Koons: Pictures 1980 – 2002, is notable for extending beyond the early 1990’s to look at selections of works from three series: Celebration, Easyfun, and Easyfun-Ethereal. Pictures, however, only scratches the surface of these three bodies of work and most of the text consists of Koons’ own statements cribbed from The Jeff Koons Handbook, published in 1992. Second, a more significant volume from Koons’ 2001 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Germany, entitled Jeff Koons, focuses on his paintings and sculptures from 1994 – 2001:
Celebration, Easyfun, and Easyfun-Ethereal. This book contains an insightful essay by
Alison Gingeras about the artist’s “comeback” in the 1990’s after his hiatus that serves as a valuable introduction to the second half of his career and to the Easyfun and Easyfun-
Ethereal paintings in particular. Third, Easyfun-Ethereal, a catalog from an exhibition of this series at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2000 - 2001 is an excellent though slim catalog featuring an interview with the artist by David Sylvester and an essay by Robert
Rosenblum. Lastly, Francisco Bonami published Jeff Koons for the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2008. Bonami’s catalog is noteworthy because it spans Koons’ entire career, 1979 to 2007, and offers a glimpse of Koons’ two most recent series: Popeye and Hulk Elvis, though it treats them only briefly. At the time 4
of this writing, three more books on Koons’ post-1980’s work have been published, all in
the Spring of 2009: a large monograph entitled Jeff Koons published by Taschen and
featuring a contribution from Eckhard Schneider; the catalogue of Koons’ installation of
seventeen works at Versailles, Jeff Koons: Versailles; and the catalogue, Jeff Koons:
Celebration, accompanying an exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie.
The first chapter of this thesis will examine Koons’ early career from 1979 to
1992 to provide a context for the current paintings. In order to understand his paintings, it is important to consider this period since his 1980’s and early 1990’s output still continues to define his place in art history. In addition, many themes and visual motifs are carried over from the earlier sculptures into the paintings. The second chapter will look at his painting process, style, compositional approach, sources, and influences in order to locate Koons’ paintings within the larger context of contemporary painting. This context includes Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist as well as Salvador Dali and Surrealism, Photorealism, and contemporary painters such as
David Salle, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke. The last chapter will address each series of work featuring paintings (Celebration – Hulk Elvis) chronologically in order to provide a better understanding of each individual series. Additionally, the relationship between Koons’ sculptures and paintings in a given series will be examined in order to situate the paintings as a vital aspect of his output.
Jeff Koons’ paintings have not been examined as a group since Easyfun-Ethereal and the last two series, Popeye and Hulk Elvis, have scarcely been examined at all. A number of critics, even Koons’ supporters, see his paintings as a secondary body of work unequal to his sculpture; however, it is my contention that these works are just as 5 important and vital to the understanding of this artist. They continue many themes and visual motifs from his earlier output: his obsession with American culture, the quest for perfection, the acceptance of one’s taste and cultural values, and the use of inflatables and centrality of readymades. Not only do they enhance and continue many of the themes addressed in his sculpture, but they also extend his thematic range by addressing desire and frustration, Surrealism (also intimately tied to desire and frustration), and uniquely
American archetypes. By focusing on his paintings I hope to create a more coherent view of this important artist and add to the scholarship on this underappreciated aspect of his oeuvre. This will not only bring greater attention to his paintings but also reveal elements of continuity and difference not seen on an individual basis. I hope to show that the paintings of Jeff Koons are as important to the understanding of his work as the sculptures and that his legacy will ultimately be as both a painter and a sculptor. 6
CHAPTER 2: EARLY CAREER
The 1980’S
Koons moved to the city of New York after graduating from the Maryland
Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1976. He was a painter at this point but he
reached a critical juncture in his work that led him to abandon paintings and begin
creating objects:
I was always a painter. I always studied painting. I made one or two sculptural objects, but I never thought of myself doing sculpture. But eventually when I moved here, my paintings became so massive that they were too big to stay on the wall. I started buying porcelain vases or I would buy three-dimensional gift wrapping, reflective ribbons, or something. Different objects – flowers – different fabrics that became so three-dimensional that, eventually, I just stopped making paintings and just produced objects.3
At that point in 1978 Koons would not create a conventional oil painting until he began the Celebration series in 1994.
His time at the Maryland Institute was punctuated by a year at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago on a student mobility program. In Chicago he became the studio assistant of painter and teacher Ed Paschke (1939-2004) to whom he credits his burgeoning interest in Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and readymade sculpture. Despite
Paschke’s distinctively personal iconography it was his sources: magazines, television,
3 Lynne Warren, “A Conversation: Jeff Koons with Lynne Warren, February 5, 2008,” in Jeff Koons, exh. cat., ed. Francisco Bonami (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Haven: in association with Yale University Press, 2008), 22. 7 bars, clubs, tattoo parlors, and the streets of Chicago that impressed Koons the most.4
During his collegiate years Koons also developed interests in art history including
Salvador Dali’s brand of Surrealism: the “dream photograph.” As a student his paintings were “mainly Surrealism, things I dreamed up the night before.”5 It was after he moved to New York that his interest in Andy Warhol and Pop art would take hold and manifest itself in much of his work throughout the 1980’s and beyond.
From Koons’ first acknowledged works in the late 1970’s up to the present he has worked in series. Each series contains various numbers of pieces from the concise
Statuary series consisting of ten sculptures to Celebration, which encompasses over sixty works, including multiples. Each series contains common themes and incorporates sources, materials, and formats particular to a given series. Koons has developed a variety of themes revolving around the American middle class: pleasure, perfection, desire, cultural history, taste, and racial issues. In 1979 he created his first two series, Inflatables and Prenew, the first of his post-painting period. Both series established Koons’ desire to work with commercially manufactured objects and were followed by more mature works of the 1980’s: The New (1980-83), Equilibrium (1985), Luxury and Degradation (1986),
Statuary (1986), and Banality (1988). In all of these series Koons developed a focus on the readymade sculpture and commercial advertising imagery. He also experimented widely with a variety of materials including stainless steel, carved wood, glass, porcelain and mirrors. Additionally, he revealed an obsession with inflatable objects that begins with his first series and continues to the present day.
4 Arthur C. Danto, “Banality and Celebration: The Art of Jeff Koons,” in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), 18.
5 Tomkins, 63. 8
Koons’ obsession with Pop oriented material is easy to understand considering the era in which he became ensconced in the New York art world: Andy Warhol was prominent and active in New York at the time and many artists were exploring the possibilities of working with commercial imagery and products. Today, many critics see
Koons as the inheritor of Warhol’s legacy. Likewise, a new wave of New York artists were making themselves known and working within the parameters established by the original Pop artists: Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Ashley Bickerton, Haim Steinbach and others thrived in this atmosphere. Koons became the face of the Neo-Geo movement
(Neo-Geometric Conceptualism) after the early 1980’s hype surrounding Neo-
Expressionism quieted. Though Koons disliked the label, Neo-Geo linked him with other artists who used Pop and commercial imagery in a seemingly cool and impersonal manner. Many of these artists responded to the influence of the mass media and consumer culture through parody, satire, and irony, but Koons chose to embrace it.
Rather than a sense of alienation brought on by contemporary trends and mass media imagery, Koons welcomed it and its effects on his art, seeing a positive effect on his ability to reach and communicate to a larger, broader audience. Yet with commercial success and notoriety also came many detractors. Robert Pincus-Witten describes the situation thus: “a handful of artists received international recognition so quickly as to make it seem that it is an art with no past and consequently, no future, an art emblematic of the now.”6
In 1977 Koons got a job at the Museum of Modern Art where he quickly discovered his abilities as a salesman. He also began work on The Inflatables (1979) and
6Robert Pincus-Witten, “Keith Haring: the Cross Against the Rod,” in Eye to Eye: Twenty Years of Art Criticism (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984), 151. 9
The Prenew (1979), the first two series of his post-painting period [Figs. 1 & 2]. Both
series established Koons’ engagement with commercially manufactured objects and set
several important precedents: the inflatable plastic toy motif and the use of the
readymade sculpture. His next series, The New (1980–83), continued his use of readymades and consumer goods and are considered by the artist to be his first mature works. The New consists of brand new vacuum cleaners and floor polishers enclosed within Plexiglas cases and lighted by banks of fluorescent bulbs underneath [Fig. 3].
These sculptures vary in their evocations, from mummified bodies, holy relics, and biological specimens to museum or department store display cases and often appear anthropomorphic.7 More importantly, the enclosures represent an ideal state of being, an eternal newness that broaches the topics of desire and perfection.
Similarly, his next series Equilibrium (1985) also employs these themes yet is a more complex group of works incorporating three distinct elements: First, a variety of water- related lifesaving or survival objects cast in bronze: snorkel, inflatable boat, lifejacket, etc. Second, Nike posters of athletes with slick catch phrases such as: “Dr. Dunkenstein,”
“Secretary of Defense,” and “Jam Session” [Fig. 4]. Finally, the centerpieces: large aquarium tanks on simple steel legs containing enough sodium chloride and water to keep brand-new Spaulding basketballs suspended inside them [Fig. 5]. The three elements of this series work together to probe middle-class consumerism, class and race identity, and, continuing from The New series, perfection and desire.
7 “I chose the vacuum cleaner because of its anthropomorphic qualities. It is a breathing machine. It also displays both male and female sexuality. It has orifices and phallic attachments. I have always tried to create work which does not alienate any part of my audience.” Jeff Koons quoted in Angelika Muthesius, ed. Jeff Koons. (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1992), 49. 10
In Luxury and Degradation (1986), first exhibited in 1986 at International with
Monument Gallery, Koons’ work took another step forward in its aesthetic qualities: the
choice of readymade objects becomes more interesting (more curious and kitschy than
commodity oriented) and the introduction of stainless steel. Luxury and Degradation’s
stainless steel pieces are exclusively concerned with alcohol-related items: bourbon
containers in the form of toy trains or model trucks, ice bucket, travel bar set, etc. [Fig.
6]. Included are poster-size liquor advertisements gathered from subway ads, billboards
and magazines. Koons wanted to expose the illusion of luxury conveyed by the
advertisements and the use of stainless steel for what it actually advertised or contains:
the degradation associated with alcohol and the desire for social status through
conspicuous consumption. The centerpiece of the series, Jim Beam – J. B. Turner Train
(1986), is a nearly ten foot long replica train consisting of seven railcars, each filled with a fifth of bourbon and sealed with a tax stamp.
That same year Koons also created Statuary (1986), a series consisting of small-scale stainless steel readymade sculptures ranging from a bobble-head figure of Bob Hope to a bust of Louis XIV [Fig. 7]. Koons presents the series as a “panoramic view of society” but more accurately it describes Koons’ idea of modern middleclass American taste represented by kitschy subjects (Bob Hope) and a comparatively highbrow European taste refined by centuries of culture (Louis XIV). The question that Koons poses by this juxtaposition of kitsch and refinement is whether the two are equal: visually, culturally, and socially.
The most important work of this series and perhaps of Koons’ entire career is Rabbit
[Fig. 8]. Rabbit would set an important precedent for the artist: a soft, inflatable toy 11 rendered in unyielding metal. Rabbit has remained one of Koons’ most iconic and best loved works because it embodies many of the themes he addresses in all phases of his career and still manages to provide aesthetic delight to viewers. Themes include the use of consumer commodities, childhood desires, and sexuality.
In addition to the Statuary work Koons created a life-size sculpture, Kiepenkerl
(1987), a life-size stainless steel sculpture cast from a 19th century bronze. It remains an important work for the artist because he ran into numerous technical problems with the casting of the original, which forced him to alter its appearance. Koons saw the alteration as “an opportunity to go and create [his] own objects.”8 He states: “Through this radical work on it, through having craftsmen work and bend and not maintain the integrity of the original model, I was liberated to go on to Banality and to use the public as a readymade instead of any object.”9
His next series, Banality (1988), marks a significant development because the kitschy subjects and aesthetic quality of his work increase substantially though many of his earlier themes remain central. Instead of sober conceptual works or unmodified consumer products, Banality is an explosion of color, bizarre juxtapositions, a sense of enjoyment and surrealism, and introduces new materials, particularly porcelain. His previous work decidedly lacks the baroque and rococo spirit that made its first significant appearance in
Banality. The objects may seem vaguely familiar to viewers but these are not readymades in the traditional sense. For this series he devised many of his own subjects “with a sense
8 Danto, 293.
9 Jeff Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook (London: Tames and Hudson: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1992), 86.
12 of the readymade inherent in them.”10 Critic Arthur C. Danto, writing in 2005, sees this new formulation, and the Banality series as a whole, as Koons’ “breakthrough” that
“constitutes his outstanding achievement to date.”11 The readymade is not abandoned but the sources are focused on “gift shop kitsch” and often juxtaposed in unexpected combinations.12
Banality contains a disproportionate amount of important and iconic works including
Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Pink Panther, Bear and Policeman, String of Puppies,
Woman in Tub, and the title piece, Ushering in Banality (all 1988) [Figs. 9 & 10]. In addition, Koons’ marketing campaign for the show was unprecedented, consisting of four unique advertisements in different art magazines that constitute a remarkable group of self-portraits in and of themselves.
Context: The Early 1990’s
In the first few years of the 1990’s Jeff Koons produced both his most reviled series of work, Made in Heaven (1989 – 1991), and one of his most admired Puppy
(1992). Made in Heaven caused quite a stir when Koons unveiled its first incarnation at the Venice Biennale Aperto (open exhibition) in 1990 and even more critical backlash in
1991 when he brought an expanded and more explicit version to the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. The Made in Heaven series features the artist and his then wife Ilona
10 Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook, 293.
11 Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook, 293 & 298.
12 Francisco Bonami, “Koons ‘R’ Us,” in Jeff Koons, exh. cat., ed. Bonami (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Haven: in association with Yale University Press, 2008), 59. 13
Staller, better known as la Cicciolina, an adult film star and deputy in the Italian
parliament, in various pornographic scenes on large-scale photographs on canvas and
sculpture [Fig. 11]. Despite Koons purported lofty intentions of going “to the depths of
my own sexuality, my own morality, to be able to remove fear, guilt and shame from
myself [and] for the viewer” most critics hated it.13
Mark Stevens in an article titled “Adventures in the Skin Trade” for The New
Republic disparaged Koons because he failed to accomplish anything significant with all
of the titillating imagery he employed. He concluded by stating that the pictures make a
“mockery of pleasure, sexual and otherwise” because they fail to give “worldly pleasures
some spiritual or emotional stature.”14 Likewise, Michael Kimmelman’s “Onward into
the Realm of Porno and Promo” in the New York Times savaged the show as “one last
pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the
worst of the (1980’s) decade.”15 Even those sympathetic to his previous work found
Made in Heaven to be an anomaly in his oeuvre. Fifteen years after the fact Arthur Danto
writes that these sexually explicit works are a “distraction.”16
On the heels of this critical failure came the monumental public sculpture, Puppy.
Standing forty feet tall, Puppy is a giant topiary sculpture originally installed at the
Schloss Arolsen in Germany during Documenta IX [Fig. 12]. Though he was not invited
to participate in the international art fair the sculpture became a big hit attracting large
audiences. Its popularity is attested to by its recurring subsequent exhibition, including
13 Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook, 130.
14 Mark Stevens, “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” New Republic (Jan., 20, 1992): 32.
15 Michael Kimmelman, “Onward Into the Realm of Porno and Promo,” New York Times (Nov. 29, 1991).
16 Danto, 300. 14
Sydney (1995), Bilbao (1997), the Rockefeller Center (2001), and Greenwich,
Connecticut (2002 – present). Unlike Made in Heaven, Puppy remains a much-endeared
piece of public art, “communicating love, warmth, and happiness to everyone.”17 Critic
Nathan Kernan wrote that Puppy “is perhaps unique among contemporary avant-garde
artworks in providing pleasure to viewers of all degrees of art knowledge” reinforcing the
success of this particular work.18
In the same year as Puppy, Koons and Staller divorced. The divorce left the custody
of the couple’s young son, Ludwig, in jeopardy. Koons was awarded custody of the child
by an American court but Ilona absconded with him to Rome. The subsequent anguish of
the separation from his son and the ensuing custody battle combined with professional
problems regarding the manufacture of his work drove Koons to the brink of bankruptcy.
Additionally, the I.R.S. filed a three million dollar lien against Koons in 1999 because he
had been using payroll tax money to cover his studio costs. Financially drained, Koons
was forced to lay off most of his staff except for two long time employees. This personal
and professional turmoil led to a fallow period in his career and a hiatus from exhibiting
and the public.
17 Muthesius, 162.
18 Nathan Kernan, “Coloured by Reflection,” in Norman Rosenthal and Michael Archer, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 232. 15
CHAPTER 3: THE PAINTINGS
Studio Practice, Sources, and Influences
Robert Rosenblum describes entering Koons’ studio building on the corner of
Broadway and Houston Streets in New York “like entering a business office.”19 The
structure houses seven different studios, which include painting and sculpture rooms as
well as preparation and computer production areas. Koons rarely participates in a
physical manner but instead supervises and directs his staff of over eighty employees as
they go about their assigned tasks. As Koons explains to Klaus Ottmann, “I’m basically
the idea person. I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the necessary
abilities, so I go to the top people.”20 This method of production is not new for Koons; he has been relying on skilled craftsmen for decades to produce technical marvels of sculpture to his exacting specifications. His insistence on technical perfection is part of his strategy to gain the trust of the viewer and has come at no small cost to Koons personally. In 1995, during the production of Celebration Koons brought a lawsuit
against the Pennsylvania foundry hired to create his stainless steel pieces because he was
not pleased with the results. The suit forced the foundry to declare bankruptcy and Koons
lost over two million dollars. Having suffered financial hardship and the laying-off of
19 Robert Rosenblum, “Dream Machine,” in Easyfun-Ethereal, exh. cat., org. Lisa Dennison and Rosenblum (Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications 2000), 46.
20 Klaus Ottmann, “Interview: Jeff Koons,” Journal of Contemporary Art, 1.1 (1988): 18-23. Interview conducted October 1986.
most of his employees in the 1990’s Koons has since rebuilt his staff with the help of
successful gallery shows at Sonnabend and the sale of Celebration works.
Koons’ paintings begin as seemingly random images clipped from advertisements, glossy magazines, brochures, coupons, and personal photos. The numerous images are sorted into piles and then placed into plastic sleeves and accumulated into various folders and binders. Each prospective painting acquires its own binder or folder where the appropriate source material is gathered and scanned into the computer. Once on the computer, the images are arranged, edited, and manipulated to
Koons’ specifications, including precise color assignments. The finished image is then projected onto the canvas where each shape is penciled in by hand. Assistants are given computer printouts of the whole or part of the painting and meticulously paint each canvas by hand, dividing it into small sections and often working in groups. Each computer printout is carefully labeled with arrows and numbers indicating precisely where each color should go.
The manual labor that once was done on the canvas or palette—mixing color, compositional arrangement and corrections—is now done digitally and improvisation is anathema to the process. The result of this approach is a hard-edge paint-by-numbers look that is greatly indebted to the crisp forms of Photorealism. The artist describes the finished product as “a kind of superrealism through a kind of paint-by-numbers method.”21 The hard edge against hard edge technique allows no blending of paint between light and dark values or different hues but instead yields a sequential breakdown of shapes and solid colors. The paintings are bright, sharp, and utterly flat. Rosenblum
21 David Sylvester, “Jeff Koons Interviewed: New York City, February 6, 2000) in Easyfun-Ethereal, 25. 17 observes that, “Koons has virtually annihilated the traditions of savoring an artist’s personal touch, which now exists only in conceptual, not material terms.”22
When art critic Calvin Tomkins paid a visit to the Koons’ studio in 2007 he observed “six or seven” assistants working at computers and in the painting studio, twenty-plus canvases being worked on by three assistants each.23 Not all of Koons’ painting assistants work directly on the canvas but instead have specific roles that include mixing paint to exactly match Pantone Color Specifier Chips. With so many employees and such a large amount of work to produce, the studio runs like an office building:
Monday to Friday, nine a.m. to five p.m., similar yet quite different from Warhol’s studio-cum-nightclub, the Factory. This matter-of-fact approach to making art goes hand in hand with Koons’ philosophies regarding the middle class viewer: he has “exchanged the artist’s ivory tower for the assembly line.”24 The large cadre of assistants is also reminiscent of the Renaissance and Baroque studios that were commonplace in Europe for centuries. Though criticism has been leveled at him for such practices Koons is not alone among contemporary artists who make or made use of skilled technicians and craftsmen: Warhol, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra, among many others.
Like many of his peers in the 1980’s, the initial impression of Koons’ paintings is one of pastiche and appropriation: seemingly random and unrelated images from various sources brought together on one canvas and more often than not communicate a meaning that is confusing or ambiguous [Fig. 13]. Looking at a number of Koons’ paintings together, however, will demonstrate that the imagery is not random but is chosen for
22 Rosenblum, “Dream Machine,” 51.
23 Tomkins, 60.
24 Rosenblum, “Dream Machine,” 46. 18
specific reasons and can be grouped into several categories. Both Alison Gingeras and
Robert Rosenblum divide the Easyfun-Ethereal painting subjects into two categories in
what Rosenblum succinctly describes as “kid stuff and sex.”25 Koons simply locates his
subject choice as a search for archetypes, whether it is food, women, tropical paradises,
or pop culture icons. One might also describe his choices as the presentation of pleasure,
desire, and perfection through modern media images and objects.
Koons paintings are not unique in their heavily collaged appearance, but owe a
great deal to Robert Rauschenberg’s and Jasper Johns’ paintings in the late 1950’s and
1960’s as well as to those of James Rosenquist and more recently, of his 1980’s art star
peer, David Salle. The stylistic influences extend to include the precision of Photorealism
and Roy Lichtenstein, the sources and imagery of Pop, and the juxtapositions of Salvador
Dali and Surrealism. Koons is most indebted to Rosenquist because the similarities are
numerous: both create large-scale canvases incorporating advertising imagery, abrupt
juxtapositions, and an amalgam of American cultural symbols that are unified in a flat,
contemporary realist style. Unlike Salle who incorporates contrasting painting styles on
one canvas, Koons always works with a single style (hard-edge photorealism) because it
helps maintain the work’s objectivity. The single, unified style allows various people to
work on a single painting without their individual personalities showing up on the canvas.
As Tomkins says, “there is no room for individual initiative in this shop.”26
The role Photorealism plays in the look of Koons’ paintings cannot be
overemphasized. Emerging in the 1970’s a number of artists embraced a hard-edged,
25 Rosenblum, “Dream Machine,” 49; Alison Gingeras, “The Comeback of Sincerity: Jeff Koons 1995- 2001,” in Gingeras and Eckhard Schneider, Jeff Koons. exh. cat. (Bregenz, Austria: KUB, Kunsthaus Bregenz; Cologne, Germany: Walter König, 2001), 85.
26 Tomkins, 60. 19
meticulous painting style based on photography that is alternately described as
Photorealism, Super Realism or Hyper Realism. The work of seminal Photorealists such
as David Parrish, Don Eddy, Audrey Flack, Charles Bell, and John Kacere all inform
Koons’ current paintings. While many Photorealists focused on storefronts and
motorcycles, those that depicted still life and manufactured objects have a great affinity
to Koons: manufactured pop objects (figurines of Elvis, James Dean, and Rocky),
marbles, pinball games, gumball machines, dense compositions, reflection and shine
seem to permeate all of Koons’ work from Celebration through Hulk Elvis. The influence
of Kacere’s closely cropped studies of lingerie clad women appears most notably in
Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal where the female body is fragmented and isolated.
Gingeras states that, “stylistically, [Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal] seem like a perfect crystallization of American, neo-avant-garde painting since 1960.”27 Considering Koons’
reliance on Pop prototypes and 1980’s painting trends this is quite accurate.
Painting and Art History
The proliferation of paintings in Koons’ oeuvre over the last decade attests,
perhaps, to his desire to be measured against and included with the greatest in art history.
Several of his earlier two-dimensional photographic works bear titles intended to remind
one of the greatest painting masters ever, and perhaps to include himself in that pantheon.
Manet (1991) from the Made in Heaven series makes reference to Manet’s
groundbreaking modernist masterpiece Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass;
1863). Reaching back further in history, he conjures reminiscences of Michelangelo’s
27 Gingeras, 85. 20
Sistine Chapel ceiling with another Made in Heaven work, Jeff in the Position of Adam
(1990) [Fig. 14]. Here, Koons reclines in the languid pose of Adam in the chapel’s central
ceiling panel except instead of God the Father’s extended finger reaching forth to give
him life, la Cicciolina lies prone before him swooning. In fact, the entire Made in Heaven
series owes a debt to Koons’ viewing of Masaccio’s famous fresco, Expulsion from Eden,
and the rococo tradition of Boucher and Fragonard.28 Furthermore, Koons intended the
scale of the work in the Celebration series, his first to include paintings proper, to rival
that of Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures.29 Koons’ ridiculously lofty intentions for
Celebration are at once apparent and his ambition seems only to have grown since Made in Heaven despite the hostile reaction to that series and his subsequent financial setbacks.
Comparing one’s work to Michelangelo can be attributable to arrogance or overconfidence but certainly not to ignorance because it is done intentionally. Of course, in the case of Made in Heaven and Celebration it seems likely that Koons’ art historical references are intended to provoke high-minded critics as much as anything else.
In a 2006 interview with Modern Painters Koons explains his use of art historical allusions: “I like the dialogue with art history. It’s about partaking in the community, interacting with the language of art and making different references to other artists or other pieces in our history…the viewer doesn’t need to know these references but it does give a sense of continuity.”30 In addition, creating conventional paintings gives him claim over both of the traditional pillars of fine art: painting and sculpture. The proliferation of
28 Jeff Koons: Pictures 1980-2002, 24.
29 Jeff Koons: Pictures 1980-2002, 65.
30 Anouchka Roggeman, “Koons on Koons,” Modern Painters (June, 2006), 64. 21 paintings, then, is a method for linking Koons with art’s history as well as a way for him to expand his effort to communicate with the public. 22
CHAPTER 4: THE SERIES (1994 – PRESENT)
Celebration (1994 – 1998)
After Made in Heaven and Puppy, Koons remained on a virtual hiatus from the public while embarking on the Celebration series. From 1994 to 1996 Koons and his assistants worked on the series but financial and legal setbacks along with Koons’ perfectionism left the completed and in-process works untouched for two years. Initially,
Celebration was scheduled for a 1996 show at Guggenheim SoHo in New York and though many of the pieces have been exhibited, a number of them have not been completed until the last several years. Since then, the number of works in the series has ballooned to include sixteen paintings and fifteen sculptures (fifty-one sculptures when counting multiples). Celebration not only marks Koons’ return to the international art scene but also his first paintings since the late seventies. This foray into paintings proper
(i.e. oil on canvas) is his first as a mature artist. They are not typical of his paintings in subsequent series because of their single subject focus and lack of pastiche or appropriated imagery.
The paintings in Celebration are primarily solitary objects ensconced in shiny, reflective backdrops: cellophane, Mylar and wrapping paper. Just like all of his sculpture since the mid-1980’s, they maintain a single-subject focus throughout the series with few exceptions and are very similar in approach to his sculpture. For example, Cake (1995-
97), Bracelet (1995-98) and Cracked Egg (1995-99) all take as their central theme a 23 single object centrally placed in the middle of the canvas [Fig 15]. Behind each is a relatively simple background arranged ingeniously to intensify this focus: shiny foil reflecting a single color and a single object. In other cases, the focus includes two or more objects but again with the same centrality of location on the canvas and emphasis on the group of objects as a whole. Some of these works include Boy with Pony (1995-
2007) and Plate Set (1995-98), where a single color predominates and there is a distinct figure-ground dichotomy and a centered composition [Fig. 16]. In all of these examples the images consist of analogous colors and convey a single, dominant hue.
Thematically, the paintings revolve around the joy of childhood as though Koons made an inventory at a child’s birthday party and depicted all of the objects there. Pink
Bow (1995-1997) and Ribbon (1995-1997) [Fig. 17], with their gift-wrapping subjects and Party Hat (1995-1997), Balloon Dog (1995-1998), and Donkey (1996-1999) all depict typical elements of children’s birthday parties. He did not forget the gifts themselves depicting children’s toys in other paintings including Boy with Pony (1995-
2007), Building Blocks (1995-2007), Play-Doh (1995-2007), and Shelter (1996-1998).
The only thing missing from these paintings is a child. The title “Celebration” is apt but the series is also colored by Koons’ separation from his young son, Ludwig, who was taken to Europe with Staller. Many of the images in the series are reminders of Ludwig and also subtle messages and symbolic gifts to him. Central to this idea is the motif of gifts and gift-wrapping. The sculptures Baroque Egg with Bow (1994-2008), Smooth Egg with Bow (1994-present), Hanging Heart (1994-2006), and Sacred Heart (1994-2007) along with the paintings Hanging Heart (1995-1998), Ribbon, and Pink Bow all feature wrapped objects and/or bows that function as symbolic gifts for Ludwig. The personal 24 nature of this series is unmatched in Koons’ oeuvre and lends additional weight to the objects and images he presents. These works bear correspondence to Rosenquist’s Gift
Wrapped Doll series from the early 1990’s that also contains children’s toys (dolls) wrapped in cellophane. However, the pathos in Rosenquist’s images is unmistakable, while Celebration’s menace and loss remain masked by bright colors and optimism.
Only Donkey, Building Blocks, and Shelter stand out in this series as being different from the others. Thematically they fit into Celebration but compositionally they are cluttered with images and are arranged with different formal goals in mind. Shelter and Building Blocks are unusual in that they group together a number of the children’s toys, some featured in other paintings, in a virtual tableau. Included in this tableau is a distinct division of foreground, middleground and background, creating a traditional
European “view through a window.” This is the result of Koons’ arranging and then photographing the scene on which the painting is based. In Shelter, a Lincoln-log house occupies the center of the composition surrounded by a yellow M&M figurine and an inflatable pony to the right and to the left, a green dinosaur rocker featured later in the
Split-Rocker sculptures (1999 & 2000) [Fig. 18]. The foreground features a variety of plastic figures (Fisher-Price people, Frosty the Snowman) cavorting amid scattered ears of popcorn. All of this is arranged before a scenery painting depicting the ubiquitous purple mountains of the Southwest. Like the other paintings in this series, the whole canvas is painted in a hard-edge, photographic style that captures every seam and mold- mark in the cast plastic toys. The composition, however, is quite a departure. Despite its uniqueness in Celebration, the approach used in Shelter is not repeated in later series.
Instead, it is Donkey that serves as the blueprint for Koons’ next series, Easyfun. 25
Donkey is the only painting in this series to feature a two-dimensional subject but also it incorporates a pastiche of images that has characterized Koons’ paintings ever since the
Celebration series [Fig. 19]. All the other paintings in Celebration feature images that could be arranged with three-dimensional objects, but Donkey’s set-up can only exist in two dimensions because it is a collage. In the background of the painting is a plastic play mat with a scattered assortment of brightly colored toys and superimposed on the top layer is a donkey illustration reproduced from a children’s party game. To the right of the donkey is a column of donkey tails that in the original game would be cut out and used to
“Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey.” Though this painting is not the best in the series, it does demonstrate Koons’ interest in the layering of images and by extension, the layering of meaning. Aside from the subject choice Donkey is better suited to another series.
The one factor that seems to hold the Celebration series paintings back and is perhaps the reason that Koons does not revisit them as subjects for future paintings is that almost all of them take their point of departure from previously or simultaneously executed sculpture. The sculptures with counterpart paintings include Cracked Egg (1994-2006),
Hanging Heart (1994-2006), Tulips (1995-2004), Play-Doh (in process), and Balloon
Dog (1994-2000). In most cases, the superior work is in three dimensions and while the paintings have a degree of charm, they seem secondary and therefore inferior to their counterparts. For example, Balloon Dog (1995-98), a painting of a red balloon dog on a backdrop of reflective Mylar, is a solid painting but does not compare favorably with the freestanding sculptures of the same title [Figs. 20 & 21]. In terms of size the painting is equal to the sculpture measuring 102 inches by 143 inches to the sculpture’s 121 inches by 143 inches by 45 inches but despite the painting’s monumental scale it cannot offer 26 the three-dimensionality, the intensity of color, the reflection of the material, or the physical autonomy that makes the sculptural version so definitive. Arthur C. Danto adds that “an argument can be made that Balloon Dog [sculpture] is his masterpiece,”31 further reinforcing the superiority of the sculptures.
The reflective nature of the materials depicted in the Balloon Dog painting—balloon and Mylar—are reproduced painstakingly in oil but by the very nature of the medium and the photorealist style, they are frozen and seem sterile when compared with the real-time flux of reflections on the sculpture’s high chromium stainless steel surfaces. Of his fondness for this material Koons states: “It's the reflective surfaces that, I think, bring
[the work] back to the viewer. The work is a reflection of one's self when you view it,” and it is precisely this reflection that is not present in the paintings.32 Though both the painting and the sculpture are the result of a tour-de-force virtuosity in execution, the sculpture is less mediated, more playful and more satisfying than the painting, and thus is more successful. Additionally, the sculptural version of Balloon Dog manifests the whimsy and absurdity of a balloon toy rendered ten feet tall and in the opaque, solid, but reflective material of stainless steel. In this instance, Koons is akin to Pop sculptor Claes
Oldenburg, who renders everyday objects in anomalous materials and scales.
Oldenburg’s Clothespin (1976) in Philadelphia transforms a lowly wooden clothespin into a 45 foot steel colossus that not only contrasts with the modernist architecture it fronts but incorporates the Dada and Surrealist impulses to frustrate normal expectations.
More so, Koons’ sculpture plays with the tactile expectations of balloons the way
Oldenburg’s papier-mâché, plaster and canvas sculptures did in the 1960’s. If Clothespin
31 Danto, 300.
32 Glenn McNatt, “Jeff Koons Makes Pop Art with No Apologies,” Baltimore Sun (April 9, 2005). 27 were only a few feet tall it would lose most of its cachet.
Like the Celebration series as a whole, the personal nature of Balloon Dog lies in the anguish of Koons’ divorce from Ilona Staller and the separation from his then thirteen- year-old son: “I was trying to let [Ludwig] know that I was thinking about him,” Koons says. “Beyond that, though, I wanted to make something that was almost like a Trojan horse, where there's a sense that even though it's very light and open and party-oriented, there's a darker side to it as well.”33 This darker side manifests itself more immediately in the sculptures than in the paintings. The paintings, however, do stand on their own as powerful images and demonstrate the ambition of scale and technical prowess that is evident in all of Koons’ paintings.
Easyfun (1999 – 2000)
In 1999 Koons began the Easyfun series, which consists of paintings and colorful mirrors and continues to address his feelings for Ludwig and childhood desire. Easyfun is a relatively small group of works that function as a transition between the more conceptually solid Celebration and the more mature compositional approach of Easyfun-
Ethereal. It is Koons’ first series consisting entirely of two-dimensional works and is therefore unique in his oeuvre. In November of 1999, Easyfun, which then consisted of three paintings (Cut-Out, Hair, and Loopy, all 1999) and eleven mirrors, was exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. The series has since grown to include five paintings
(all measuring 108 by 79 inches) and thirteen colorful mirrors of similar size shaped in the silhouettes of cartoon animals (monkey, donkey, bear, cow, sheep, etc.) [Fig. 22].
33 McNatt. 28
The mirrors are constructed of crystal and mirrored glass, plastic, and stainless steel
and resonate with their simplicity of form and refined craftsmanship. The cartoonish
shapes of the mirrors clearly reflect a thematic relationship to Celebration with their
reference to children’s toys and animated characters as well as the bright “celebratory”
colors: pink, red, yellow, blue, green, etc. Eckhard Schneider writes in his introduction to
Koons’ 2001 show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz that the message of the mirrors “is
unmistakable, their promise boundless. I am what my form dictates and I am more: light
and color reflecting surface, and I offer to each new surrounding and each new individual
its own reflected reality . . . [The mirrors] keep the viewer constantly in the present of his
time and being.”34 In this way, the mirrors continue Koons’ use of shiny, reflective
material to make the spectator’s inclusion in the work visually manifest in a similar
manner to Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s use of mirrors in his work. Additionally,
the whimsical shapes and bright clash of colors reinforce the idea of “fun” as they mimic
toys, television, candy, the circus, etc., and reflect the constant flux around them. The
aura of optimism seems apparent and is intended to infuse each spectator as he looks at
and into the works. In Koons’ words, “my work is about the viewer more than anything
else. My work creates a support system for people to feel good about themselves and to
have confidence in themselves.”35
The five paintings of the Easyfun series are Cut-Out, Hair, Loopy, Pot Rack and Saint
Benedict. The first three were produced in 1999, while the last two were painted in 2000
to complete the series. These five paintings fully embrace the collage-like pastiche that is
34 Eckhard Schneider, “Surface and Reflection” in Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Gingeras and Schneider (Koln, Germany: Walther König; Bregenz, Austria: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2001), 18.
35 Sylvester, “Jeff Koons Interviewed,” 17. 29
still inchoate in Celebration’s Donkey. Here, Koons has mined the imagery of magazines, advertisements, postcards, and other printed detritus (“visual junk”) and combined them in swirling compositions that prominently feature food items.36 The many dense layers of
each painting overlap and intersect yielding abrupt changes in tone, hue and form.
Similar to the technique of Celebration, the Easyfun canvases are painted in a hyper-
realistic, hard-edge style. Unlike Celebration, the paintings abandon single subject focus and analogous colors for a visually complex arrangement of forms, source imagery, and hue. Alison Gingeras divides the pastiched images of Easyfun and the next series,
Easyfun-Ethereal, into two groups: childhood indulgences (junk food, games, amusement park rides) and adult pleasures (lingerie, nude models, cook ware).37 The dichotomy is somewhat more complex, but certainly pleasure and desire are significant elements. The aura of the group seems to radiate positivity and optimism, whether the motifs allude to children or adults.
The first painting of the series, Cut-Out, features a horse with an empty oval in the face to provide a humorous photo-op at a county fair or amusement park [Fig. 23]. Seen through the empty cutout of the horse is an explosion of Cheerios and milk from a cereal box and in place of sky is Mount Rushmore. Koons explains the combination of images as relating to his own background: “I was trying to show that I come from a provincial background.”38 The provincial is represented by the rapidly painted cut-out horse because of its association with such things as the county fair as well as the kitschy devices Koons adds to it: the straw hat with a flower, the wooden yoke, and the straw in the horse’s
36 Rosenblum, “Dream Machine,” 49.
37 Alison Gingeras, “The Comeback of Sincerity: Jeff Koons 1995-2001,” in Gingeras and Schneider, 85.
38 Sylvester, “Jeff Koons Interviewed,” 17. 30 mouth. The Cheerios and splashing milk represent a peculiar combination of Koons’ childhood delight in looking at cereal boxes and childhood sexuality.39 Mount Rushmore serves as a message to the audience that they can be anything or anyone they choose. The entire image is uncharacteristically coherent in theme because of its almost giddy motivational tone.
Cereal and milk also feature prominently in Loopy and Hair, the latter depicting a woman’s disembodied coiffure above a chocolate chip cookie splashing into milk and the former depicting a smiley face made of Kix cereal superimposed in front of a spoon of whipped cream and the looming visage of the Trix cereal bunny. The fascination with cereal and milk are not only linked to Koons’ childhood associations but are also part of his larger goal to reference archetypes in his work. Food, “a bare essential,” is for Koons an archetypal image and hence it appears prominently in Celebration, Easyfun, and
Easyfun-Ethereal. The food in the Easyfun series tends to revolve around items Koons’ reads as sexual: milk, cereal, splashing liquid, and cookies. Interviewer David Sylvester perceives the chocolate chip cookies seen in Hair and Pot Rack as eroticized items or stand-ins for erotic images.40
The latter two paintings of Easyfun, painted in 2000, up the ante for collage and pastiche. Pot Rack combines a nude model and hanging pots and pans atop a giant cookie with cascading chocolate chips, while wigs and cherries are randomly dispersed on top
[Fig. 24]. Saint Benedict prominently features a borrowed image from the Austrian
Rococo painter Martin Knoller’s (1725-1804) paintings in the Neresheim Abbey in
39 “It’s kind of a sexual experience at that age because of the milk. You’ve been weaned off your mother and you’re eating cereal with milk.” Jeff Koons in Sylvester, “Jeff Koons Interviewed,” 20-21.
40 Sylvester, “Jeff Koons Interviewed,” 18. 31
Germany. Atop the saint’s face is a cascade of coffee splashing from cup to cup on its way across the canvas. Superimposed over this is a lime green arabesque that swirls brilliantly around the image and makes Koons’ love of Baroque and Rococo traditions quite apparent. The Baroque swirl is evident in four of the five paintings of this series, appearing elsewhere in the metallic spiral at the center of Pot Rack, the cereal and looping Matchbox car track of Loopy, as well as in the elaborate swirls of a woman’s tresses in Hair. Gingeras notes that what distinguishes these paintings from the work of
Rosenquist or Salle are just these Baroque elements that Rosenblum refers to as
“barococo.”41 With Easyfun Koons widened his paintings’ themes and imbued them with a compositional flair that makes them more visually active but also less coherent than the comparatively simple Celebration paintings.
Easyfun-Ethereal (2000 – 2002)
In an almost continuous surge of production at the turn of the century, Koons’ transitioned from Easyfun right into Easyfun-Ethereal, his next series of paintings. The seven original paintings of the Easyfun-Ethereal series were commissioned by the
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and exhibited there in late 2000. The commission and exhibition marked another significant event in a long relationship between Jeff Koons and Germany: the sculpture Kiepenkerl in Munster, 1987; Puppy in Schloss Arolsen,
1992; a retrospective at the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1993; Balloon Flower from
Celebration in the Marlene-Dietrich Platz, Berlin, 1997; and, Koons’ own residency in
Munich in the early 1990’s.
41 Gingeras, 85; Rosenblum, “Dream Machine,” 50. 32
Easyfun-Ethereal maintains the baroque attributes of Easyfun but with a more focused choice of images, as women’s hair, bikinis and lingerie, food, and landscape elements dominate. The choice of food imagery is expanded from milk and cookies to include grilled cheese, vegetables, brownies, sandwiches, and bagels. The focus shifts from the sexual associations of food in Easyfun to a broader connection with advertising imagery and archetypal images. Most notable in these paintings are the lack of bodies and faces; instead there is a profusion of disembodied hair and autonomous bikini tops that hug invisible curves, giving the viewer a frustrating notion of the absent women beneath.
Cheeky (2000), for example, combines a disembodied string bikini top and bottom, a chunk of flowing chestnut hair, and lacy hot pants curving along an invisible posterior.
Behind all of this are a sweeping tropical coastal scene and a grilled cheese sandwich jutting in from the upper corner [Fig. 25]. Koons presents a sexually frustrating amalgam of pleasure and desire. He combines tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying glimpses of contemporary femininity that never materialize, views of vacation paradises, and the desire for food that satisfies our appetites and not just our hunger.
This concern with pleasure and desire continues throughout the series and the fracturing of the female form is occasionally reversed by removing the titillating clothing and leaving only portions of exposed belly, thighs, arms, or legs. Again, the viewer is left with the frustration of seeing only disjointed and de-contextualized parts of the female anatomy and never a whole figure. Both Pam (2001) and Venus (2002) employ this approach giving us enough of the faceless female body to stimulate our desires but not enough to feel any satisfaction [Fig. 26]. Rosenblum calls these glimpses of fragmented female form “the fetishes of advertising lure” and notes a connection between them and 33
the Surrealists, particularly René Magritte and Salvador Dali.42 Besides evoking the
Surrealist penchant for body parts and warped anatomies, these fragments also comment on contemporary advertising and how it has been absorbed into our consciousness: the paintings offer glimpses and hint at desire and pleasure but refuse to deliver that which we believe we want or need. Instead, the fragments that comprise each painting seem truly vacuous, more about style than substance or sustenance.
Gingeras counters that “it seems reductive to read Koons’ new paintings as a simple commentary on the alienation of the human subject in contemporary consumer society.”43
Instead, she believes that Koons’ true aim in the Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal paintings is to defy stable meanings thus frustrating interpretation and “unveil the societal expectation of art.”44 In other words, these series point out the value systems in which art is created, viewed, and interpreted. In one sense, that has been Koons’ project from the very beginning of his career through his use of readymades and advertising imagery.
However, because the images fall into several fixed categories it seems unlikely that he is creating an “opacity machine” in order to elide all interpretation.45 While he may indeed be questioning the “societal expectations of art” he is also putting forth pictures about desire and pleasure. Whether they are accepted or rejected is left up to the viewer.
42 Robert Rosenblum, “Dream Machine,” 51-52.
43 Gingeras, 85.
44 Gingeras, 86.
45 Gingeras, 86. 34
Popeye (2002 – 2003)
In 2002, Koons’ rebound from personal, legal, and financial troubles was
completed by his marriage to his second wife, the birth of three sons, and the
reconciliation with an adult daughter put up for adoption when Koons was a college
student. From this position of stability Koons began the ambitious new Popeye series in
2003. Like Celebration, the Popeye series features both sculpture and painting and is
ambitious in scale. The Popeye series, however, marks a significant departure from the previous three series by establishing new techniques and visual motifs in both media.
As is typical of Koons’ creative patterns, motifs are introduced into his vocabulary and then repeated in a variety of compositions and forms. At times these icons are exhausted and fail to reappear but in many cases the imagery is reinvested with new energy and used again as is the case with Balloon Dog. In this series, the most noteworthy visual addition is a bright red inflatable lobster. The lobster figures prominently in a number of sculptures including Acrobat, Bicycle Rack, Lobster, and
Lobster Log and the paintings Elvis, Moustache Lobsters, and Popeye (all 2003) [Fig.
27]. In addition, the image of the monkey, prominently featured in the subsequent Hulk
Elvis series, makes its first appearance in the sculpture Monkeys (Chair) and the paintings
Backyard and Monkeys (all 2003). Also, a disembodied curled moustache becomes an important motif that is present in the sculpture Moustache and the paintings Monkeys and
Moustache Lobsters (all 2003). In some cases, a work will feature several of these icons together as in Monkeys and Moustache Lobster. 35
All three of these visual themes: the disembodied moustache, the monkey and the inflatable lobster have some precedent in Koons’ previous work. The monkey is present in Koons’ group of highly colorful shaped mirrors in the Easyfun series as a silhouette head in Monkey (Dark Pink) (1999) though the source images are different. Similarly, the lobster appears in a previous painting from Easyfun-Ethereal, Bluepoles (2000), though in a different form than the inflatable pool toy. The moustache also turns up in Easyfun-
Ethereal in the painting Sandwiches (2000) that includes a superimposed moustache silhouette in solid brown. This image appears in more or less the same form in the
Popeye series.
Koons’ links to the Spanish Surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, extend throughout much of his work, such as the paintings of Easyfun-Ethereal, but in Popeye the use of the lobster and the moustache make his association with Dali more explicit. The eccentric
Spaniard’s face with its distinctive twirled moustache is as iconic as any of his paintings and Koons uses the disembodied moustache to reference Dali in a number of works. As
Tomkins observes, the moustache can also allude to Duchamp’s famously irreverent
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), a poster of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with penciled in facial hair.46 That the moustache floats autonomously in several paintings and sculptures pays homage to the dream-like imagery and collage-like combinations of the Surrealists. Likewise, the lobster is also a symbol strongly associated with Dali, appearing most famously in his
Lobster Telephone (also known as Aphrodisiac Telephone, 1936), in which a plastic lobster is attached to the receiver of a phone. Why Koons wants to evoke references to the Surrealist painter is not as clear. As mentioned earlier, Koons was interested in
Surrealism as an art student and in the continuity between his work and the history of art.
46 Tomkins, 60. 36
A link with Dali and Surrealism helps legitimize or explain the bizarre and unprecedented combinations in Koons’ Popeye sculptures. Perhaps Surrealism also demonstrates an ideal way to circumvent conventional associations and create a more liberating, thought- provoking combination of childhood innocence, adult sexuality, and consumer culture.
Additionally, Koons has been interested in Dali since he was a student, even taking a trip to New York during college in order to meet him in the lobby of his hotel.
As in Koons’ sculptures, inflatables play an important role in the iconography that he employs in Popeye. In this series, however, they are all water or pool related toys as opposed to balloons or other objects. In addition to the lobster float there are inflatable dolphins, seals, walruses, colorful inner tubes, caterpillars, and inflatable kiddy pools.
Koons says that the inflatables: “relate to people, but at the same time everything is on the interior – your interior life is dense, the interior of your body is more compacted than what you experience externally. And with an inflatable it’s the opposite.”47
To find the ideal shapes for these sculptures and paintings Koons inflates ten or twenty toys in order to find the most iconic or archetypal form. The inflatable toys are used to create plaster molds in the studio, every fold and pucker intact, and then reproduced in painted aluminum. Like Statuary and Celebration, the source objects are transformed from soft, flexible materials to the hardness of metal but unlike previous series, the recast objects of Popeye are not highly polished or enlarged to monumental scale. Instead, they are rendered actual size and meticulously painted by hand in the studio to resemble their original look, an approach also utilized by Jasper Johns in small bronzes in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. The reasons for this trompe l’oeil deception of painting and materials may relate to several different factors. The most basic reason is
47 Mark Rappolt, “Jeff Koons: Power Up!” Art Review, no. 12 (June 2007): 87. 37
purely practical; in order to maintain its shape permanently and support the weight of
additional elements such as chains, tires, or logs of wood, the inflatables must be
rendered in a strong, durable material like aluminum. Second, Koons’ relation of the
inflatable to the human body may necessitate a solid “skin” for the sculptures in order to
protect the interior. Also, Tricia Van Eck in a recent catalog relates this “amplification of
production values of a pre-existing readymade object” to irony and Koons’ liberating
experience with the production of his 1987 sculpture Kiepenkerl.48
Along with the definitive introduction of several important visual icons, Koons
makes some important departures in sculptural technique and composition, which relate
to the paintings of this series: most strikingly, the re-introduction of relatively unaltered
consumer products such as steel trashcans, aluminum ladders, chain link fence, wooden
chairs, coated steel chains, stainless steel pots and pans and a rubber tire. Not since the
early 1980’s in The New and Equilibrium has Koons featured the mass produced commodity without some sort of alteration in materials. Additionally, several sculptural works such as Dogpool (Logs) and Lobster Logs (both 2003) also include raw logs of firewood, unaltered save for their cutting from the tree. Compositionally, Koons’ use of
Surrealist combinations is the most significant characteristic in the Popeye works in both sculpture and painting. Lobster Log (2003) combines an unusual group of objects including a lobster float, a log of wood, a child’s inflatable inner tube, and a coated steel chain [Fig. 28]. The lobster seems to be bursting out of the sliced end of the log with only its front half present. Opposite the lobster, the log is penetrating a turquoise inner tube emblazoned with the Tasmanian Devil. The entire structure is less than five feet long and is suspended from the ceiling by a red steel chain. Lobster Log is steeped in references to
48 Bonami, 99. 38
Surrealism from the disjointed combination of parts and altered anatomy of the lobster to
the implied sexuality of the inner tube’s penetration.
Other sculptural works such as Seal Walrus (Chairs) (2003-present) and Dogpool
Ladder (2007-present) combine inflatable toys impossibly intersecting ordinary objects
such as a stack of plastic chairs or a folding step ladder. Bicycle Rack (2003) and Dipstick
(2003) both incorporate wrought iron armatures that hold various objects in the air yet are permanently connected to each other. Bicycle Rack, one of the larger pieces in the series at almost 8 feet tall by 10 feet wide consists of a T-shaped iron structure holding both a lobster and trashcan aloft while the whole is “balanced” on the nose of an inflatable seal.
The sculpture takes its name from the iron crosspiece that mimics the tight curves and parallel lines of a conventional bike rack. Besides being indebted to Dali, Bicycle Rack also contains several references to Duchamp including his famous readymade, Bicycle
Wheel (original 1913). What Lobster Log, Dogpool Ladder, Bicycle Rack or any of these means is not decipherable on an individual basis, but the group of works as a whole conveys an amalgam of themes: sexuality and innocence, childhood and adulthood, freedom and bondage, desire and pleasure, function and non-function, art and non-art, etc. The entire Popeye series is infused with the spirit of Surrealism that frees both the artist and the viewer: the artist is free to create as his instinct and intuition direct and the viewer is freed from the desire to assign stable meanings.
The paintings of this series combine a number of the elements from the sculptures including the inflatable pools and floats, chains, chairs, and trashcans, as well as some new and old imagery.49 The paintings Beachhouse and Hook both incorporate strategies from Easyfun-Ethereal: dense layers of pastiche, fractured female body parts (such as the
49 All Popeye paintings 2007 except Backyard, 2002, and Triple Elvis, 2007. 39
cleavage in Beachhouse), and free-floating bikinis and hot pants. Others, such as Saddle,
Elvis, and Moustache Lobsters, return to a centralized and symmetrical composition but with the pastiched imagery intact. New additions to Koons’ repertoire include the Roy
Lichtenstein inspired use of comic book and cartoon heroes in Popeye, which replicates the printed Benday dots of newspaper imagery, and Olive Oyl, which features superman prominently above a barely decipherable Popeye [Fig. 29]. Both the painting Popeye and
Olive Oyl stand out as being the most derivative of Pop art and Lichtenstein because of their comic book origins. Despite this, they are so densely layered that they are clearly products of computer manipulation. In addition, Koons’ recently completed three new paintings featuring the Popeye character: Popeye Train (Crabs), Popeye Train (Birds), and Triple Popeye (all 2009).
In addition to these new elements, the paintings Elvis and Triple Elvis make use of the full female body in the form of a Playboy centerfold posed twice in Elvis and three times in Triple Elvis [Fig. 30]. The two poses of Elvis are re-used in Triple Elvis along with a third, and the same imagery is repeated in both except for a difference in orientation from vertical to horizontal. In both, the red lobster float cuts across the canvas but doesn’t obscure the model’s face or voluptuous body. In the background of both
Elvis’s and in Moustache Lobsters is the work of Chicago Monster Roster artist, H.C.
Westermann (1922-1981). Koons appropriated Westermann’s woodcut Dance of Death
(San Pedro) (1975-76) from The Connecticut Ballroom Suite to serve as wallpaper for the background of both Elvis paintings. The reference to Elvis Presley in the title is due to the fact that the centerfold’s expression reminded Koons of Elvis. More important, however, is the reference to Warhol’s Elvis paintings from the early 1960’s that appear in 40
similar multiples such as Double Elvis (1963) and Triple Elvis (1963). The specter of
Elvis, which first appears in Popeye, lends its name as well as certain conceptual elements to the next series, Hulk Elvis.
Hulk Elvis (2007 – 2008)
Koons’ most recent series of works, Hulk Elvis, is completely comprised of oil on canvas paintings. As with his other paintings, the Hulk Elvis paintings are computer designed and rendered in monumental proportions on canvas (many as large as 108” x
138”, or larger). Like Easyfun-Ethereal and Popeye, dense layers and meticulous painting technique are utilized, yet in Hulk Elvis the methods yield a different effect than before: the work looks more mature, more complete and more focused thematically and visually.
James F. Schlatter in a recent interview with Koons in Art in America concurs: “the initial impact of the works is one of pastiche or collage, but the elements are carefully organized and overlaid to suggest” among other things: historical artifacts, an “evolving American mythology” and even religious devotion.50
Despite the title, Hulk Elvis centers around two key images, neither of which is
Elvis: the Incredible Hulk and an inflatable plastic monkey. The Hulk was introduced in
1962 in Marvel Comics and went on in the seventies and 1980’s to become the subject of
TV movies and a series, both animated and live-action. Most recently, the Incredible
Hulk was the CGI star of feature length films in 2003 and 2008. There is little doubt that the Incredible Hulk has seeped into the American consumer’s consciousness over the last
50 James F. Schlatter, “Jeff Koons at Gagosian,” Art in America 96, no. 2 (Feb. 2008): 156-57. 41 forty-plus years to become part of an ever-growing pantheon of iconic pop figures.
Rather than an image of Lou Ferrigno (star of the syndicated live-action TV show; 1978-
82), the Hulk that Koons appropriates is a plastic blow-up version of the original comic and cartoon incarnation. This version of the character is the archetypal Hulk, one that encapsulates and evokes all of its myriad versions: bulging green muscles, shredded purple pants, clenched fists, roaring mouth, and raging eyes [Fig. 31]. Koons told interviewer Calvin Tomkins that, “The Hulk represents for me both Western and Eastern culture and the sense of a guardian, a protector, and at the same time this sense of power.”51 As in Celebration, Koons’ juxtaposes something rather innocent, a cartoon character, with menace, though here it is much more explicit.
The Hulk featured in these paintings is not just the comic book icon, but also a commercially fabricated inflatable toy. Again, this is a clear connection to Koons’ almost thirty-year-old obsession with inflatables. Another, almost decidedly older obsession, sex, plays into the choice of the Hulk as well. When asked whether the raging aggression of the green monster was related to current political contexts, Koons replied, “I think it relates to sexual tension.”52 Perhaps the sexual tension of the Hulk serves as a counterpoint to the seductive Playboy model in Elvis from the Popeye series. In Elvis
(2007) the woman who looks at us is clearly in the act of seduction, touching her own body suggestively and seeming to promise sexual fulfillment; still, of course her look is only a reproduction and thus unobtainable. The Hulk’s expression is one of rage at the frustration of this sexual tension that exists between them. It seems that Koons’ is reacting to the promise of pleasure and subsequent frustration (à la Duchamp) in his
51 Tomkins, 60.
52 Rappolt, 84-90. 42 previous work with an image that openly displays it. In addition, the inflatable Hulk may also function as a surrogate for the artist who at one time possessed a fantasy woman himself in the person of Cicciolina.
The other central image of the series, the inflatable monkey head, is a continuation of an image that appeared a number of times in the Popeye series. The polychromed aluminum Monkeys (Chair) (2003) and the two oil paintings Backyard
(2002) and Monkeys (2003) feature the complete figure of the blow-up toy from which the head was used. The monkey’s head, however, doesn’t carry the pop cultural associations of the Incredible Hulk and therefore creates a dichotomy between the two images. The inflatable monkey’s head appears in eight paintings from the series and is alternately the central focus of the composition as in the five Monkey Train paintings (all
2007) or repeated in wallpaper fashion behind the Hulk’s figure in Hulk Elvis Monkey
Train (Blue) (2007) and Hulk Jungle (2005) [Fig. 32]. In each example, the benignly smiling head of the monkey contrasts to the rage and intensity of the Hulk.
In the five Monkey Train paintings the smiling monkey head is large and centered as though we are looking at a portrait or religious icon. In the background of each is a stencil-like image from a late 19th century or early 20th century illustration depicting a horse drawn carriage and a steaming locomotive. This image is repeated in several other paintings as well, such as Peg Leg (2007), Liberty Bell (2007), Hulk Jungle (2005), Hulk
Elvis Monkey Train (Blue) (2007), and Geisha (2007), always as a solid white element in the background. Why Koons has chosen the locomotive as a repeated element in many of
Hulk Elvis’s paintings can be linked to his search for distinctly American archetypes of which the steam engine locomotive is certainly an important one. Train imagery is 43
featured in Luxury and Degradation, a number of Popeye and Hulk Elvis paintings as well as his current project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: a full scale working replica of a 1943 Baldwin steam locomotive to be suspended nose down from a crane. When completed, the train will reach seventy feet in length and three times a day will run its engines, spewing smoke, turning its wheels and blowing its horn. The 20 million dollar project is slated for 2010 but Koons’ interest in steam locomotives is already embedded in the Hulk Elvis series. The train for Koons is an archetypal image for
Americans, a connection to history and also a standard for what ingenuity can accomplish; a machine-age superhero that represents the industrial might and brute strength of America. The train, of course, was instrumental in opening the western half of the United States to settlement and industry but is also a sexual symbol: “I think the train has a tremendous sexual quality to it, but not just masculine – there’s a feminine element.
For the train, because it’s so phallic, the whole world becomes feminine.”53
In other paintings Koons incorporates similar schemes to the stencil-like locomotive and carriage. In six paintings, Hulk Elvis I, II, & III and Triple Hulk Elvis I,
II, & III (all 2007), the Hulk figure is overlaid with an unidentifiable white pattern that appears to be drawn from similar sources as the locomotive and carriage image. In
Geisha (2007) a Japanese print of a nude geisha is superimposed as the top layer of the work. Likewise, Dutch Couple (2007) incorporates a similar strategy with a superimposed white outline from an image of a seventeenth century Dutch print. Liberty
Bell (2007) that features three stencil images: the locomotive and carriage, the geisha, and Popeye and Olive Oyl on top of the central image of the bell.
53 Tomkins, 67. 44
The “‘feminine’ counterpart to the green monsters” in the Hulk Elvis series is a
group of landscape paintings that counterbalance the Pop-style paintings, presumably
included to relieve the “tension” in the Hulk paintings. 54 They are unlike any paintings
Koons has produced before because they don’t prominently feature appropriated imagery
or objects save for the barely distinguishable photographs that make up the
“backgrounds.” In these works, Koons has taken inspiration from several contemporary
Germans painters, borrowing techniques from both Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke to
create works that are refreshingly different in Koons’ oeuvre. All ten of the paintings that
comprise the landscape group feature a tree [Landscape (Tree) I, II & III] (2007), a
waterfall [Landscape (Waterfall) I & II and Landscape (Waterfall) Horizontal] (2007), or a female as in Girl (Dots) (2007), Waterfall Couple Dots Blue Swish (2008), Hole I
(2008) and Hole II (2008) [Fig. 33]. Seven of the ten paintings, however, do contain a rapidly sketched line drawing of a woman’s vulva superimposed in the top layer of painting. Koons’ intentions seem quite clear in this case: a sexual metaphor is created between nature and the female sex organs. This relation of nature and femininity is an old trope in art history and again connects Koons to the Rococo. For example, Jean Honoré
Fragonard’s 1771 painting Love Letters makes the metaphor even more explicit in which the softly feathered trees in the middle ground create a hole that “elicits penetration” by the (presumably) male viewer.55 Koons’ metaphor is not as visually apparent as
Fragonard’s but it is clear, nonetheless. This combination is also indebted to David
Salle’s juxtapositions of sexually charged female imagery and seemingly unrelated
54 Rappolt, 84-90.
55 Daniela Salvioni, “Jeff Koons’s Poetics of Class” in Jeff Koons. exh. cat., ed. Fronia M. Simpson (San Francisco, California: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1992), 23. 45
pictures as well as Duchamp’s Étant Donnés (1946 – 66) that features both a waterfall and a nude female figure.
In formal terms, these seven paintings include expressionistic-style marks that create a visual energy and a stylistic approach that is new. Wild looping brush strokes of red and blue corkscrew across several canvases and five of them contain patches of apparently splashed on paint and muddied pigments that seem more at home in a Joan
Mitchell painting than a Jeff Koons. Despite the Abstract Expressionist look of these paint patches, they are not the result of spontaneity or chance but instead are painstakingly created so that what appears as a single stroke is actually composed of hundreds of small, precise ones. If one observes carefully it is seen that the “splashed on” paint is carefully reproduced in minutia from one painting to the next so that the expressionist areas of Landscape (Tree) II are the same in Landscape (Tree) III and all three of the Landscape (Waterfall) canvases [Fig. 34]. In this way, Koons has incorporated Richter’s technique of creating abstract paintings that mimic the spontaneity of expressionism but ironically displace the expressive aspect. The expressive aspect is displaced through a separation from the original act of painting by using photography and/or computers and then reconstructing the brushstrokes again in a deliberate way.
Through this elaborate separation Koons is able to maintain the objectivity he seeks in his images. Besides Richter and Polke, this approach also owes a debt to Lichtenstein whose graphic “brushstroke” paintings of the 1960’s are precursors. Sigmar Polke’s influence is strong as well throughout the series manifesting itself in two ways: the use of superimposed stencil-like images discussed above, and the use of enlarged half-tone dots, similar to Benday dots, which infuse more than half the paintings in the series. 46
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
Sculpture was Koons’ exclusive mode for almost two decades until he chose to
reinvestigate the medium of paint in the mid-1990’s. Even after several series of works
largely or completely consisting of paintings he is still known primarily for his three-
dimensional pieces. Painting, however, has become an increasingly prominent aspect of
his output. While he has employed the use of flat works in almost every one of his
previous series since Equilibrium, they are almost exclusively advertising photography
and photo-based lithographs. Likewise, Made in Heaven consists primarily of large-
format images of oil inks on canvas that Koons refers to as “paintings;” but not until the
Celebration series in 1994 does he produce conventional oil paintings along with
sculpture. Despite his increased focus on paintings, critics generally align with Calvin
Tomkins’ assessment, “I tend to agree with the critics who say that Koons’ best work is
in three dimensions.”56 Arthur C. Danto writes, “In general I have reservations about
Koons’ paintings: I feel he has lost touch with the surface of ordinary life, which his
57 concept of morality presupposes.”
Thirty years of production have yielded work that embraces a variety of ideas:
Conceptual art, consumer products, Pop art, Photorealism, advertising imagery, the readymade, pornography, issues of taste and cultural history, Surrealism, childhood, pleasure, perfection, and desire. According to Tomkins, “If art is ever delivered from the
56 Tomkins, 60.
57 Danto, 300.
47
grip of postmodern irony, a large share of the credit will go to Jeff Koons.”58 It is Koons’
continuing optimism and sincerity that guides his creative life and allows him to make the
work he does. His sincerity is manifested in his staunch belief in technical perfection,
even at great financial expense to himself, and even in his brief marriage to Ilona Staller
to complete the work of Made in Heaven. While he is often regarded as an ironist and his
work as a critique of consumerism, he has persistently denied these labels and
demonstrated his serious or celebratory commitment to his art and its motifs. Rather than
ironically showcasing contemporary consumerism, he has chosen to embrace it, making
its acceptance a critical aspect for understanding his art. If there is irony, it comes from
the audience and our reaction to consumer goods and advertising imagery and themes
being given back to us as fine art.
The Celebration series signaled Koons’ return to conventional painting and
though he suffered numerous personal and professional troubles through much of the
1990’s, it is his most significant group of work to date. Celebration addresses several important themes that remain central in almost every subsequent group of works: childhood, desire, and the inflatable. Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal continue in this vein, though Celebration remains the most complete and ambitious series to date. His latest two groups of works, Popeye and Hulk Elvis, continue to use the inflatable motif and also advance new materials (aluminum), new arrangements, and refine Koons’ approach to painting. Each series since Celebration has demonstrated that though many themes remain consistent, Koons’ paintings continue to develop. Celebration’s paintings are fairly straightforward, relying heavily on Photorealist techniques and centered compositions of single objects. Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal are very similar to each
58 Tomkins, 60. 48
other and demonstrate the artist’s penchant for pastiche, dense layers of imagery, and
fragmented form. Thematically, pleasure, perfection, and desire move to the forefront
with most of the paintings consisting of women, food, and tropical locales. Popeye
advances the Easyfun program by incorporating traditional Pop subjects (Superman and
Popeye), including full figures (Elvis), and engaging different approaches to pastiche.
Koons’ latest series Hulk Elvis is most concerned with archetypes; hence the prevalence
of the Incredible Hulk and also less Pop oriented paintings that incorporate strategies
from Richter and Polke.
Koons’ work is rooted in the traditions of art history: he makes paintings and
sculpture and maintains a Renaissance-style atelier, but continues to present new challenges to critics, historians and spectators, alike. His colossal ambition, use of computers, appropriation of consumer goods and images, and international lifestyle demonstrate his commitment to the present but he also strives to maintain a strong link to the past. His most recent two series, Popeye and Hulk Elvis, reveal an art concerned with advertising and consumer goods without being defined or limited to it. He has shown the art world a glimpse of what art can be in the 21st century: commercially and conceptually oriented work that is not limited to rhetorical statements but yields something tangible and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. Koons’ depictions of pleasure, perfection and desire remain a central theme through much of his work. Though his status as a “great” artist is still to be determined by historians, his importance to contemporary art can’t be denied. 49
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FIGURES
Fig. 1 Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny) (1979) vinyl, mirrors, 32 x 25 x 18 inches
Fig. 2 Toaster (1979) toaster, acrylic, fluorescent lights, 27 x 9 x 13 inches 54
Fig. 3 New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Hoover Quik-Broom, New Shelton Wet/Dry 5 Gallon, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Tripledecker (1981-1987) 3 Hoover Deluxe Shampoo-Polishers, 1 Quik-Broom, 1 Shelton Wet/Dry 5 Gallon, 1 Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon, Plexiglas, fluorescent lights, 91 x 54 x 28 inches 55
Fig. 4 Dr. Dunkenstein (1985) framed Nike poster, 45 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches, Edition of 2
Fig. 5 One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. J 241 Series) (1985) glass, steel, sodium chloride reagent, distilled water, 1 basketball, 64 3/4 x 30 3/4 x 13 1/4 inches, Edition of 2 56
Fig. 6 Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Engine (1986) stainless steel, bourbon, 11 x 17 x 6 1/2 inches, Edition of 3 plus AP
Fig. 7 Bob Hope (1986) stainless steel, 17 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches, Edition of 3 plus AP 57
Fig 8. Rabbit (1986) stainless steel, 41 x 19 x 12 inches, Edition of 3 plus AP 58
Fig. 9 Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) porcelain, 42 x 70 1/2 x 32 1/2 inches, Edition of 3 plus AP
Fig. 10 Ushering in Banality (1988) polychromed wood, 38 x 62 x 30 inches, Edition of 3 plus AP 59
Fig. 11 Ilona on Top (Rosa Background) (1990) oil inks on canvas, 96 x 144 inches, Edition of 1 plus AP
Fig. 12 Puppy (1992) stainless steel, wood (at Arolsen only), soil, geotextile fabric, internal irrigation system, live flowering plants, 486 x 486 x 256 inches; Installations at Arolsen 1992, Sydney 1995-96, Bilbao 1997 (permanent installation), New York Rockefeller 2000, private collection (permanent installation) 60
Fig. 13 Auto (2001) oil on canvas, 102 x 138 inches
Fig. 14 Jeff in the Position of Adam (1990) oil inks on canvas, 96 x 144 inches, Edition of 1 plus AP 61
Fig. 15 Cake (1995–1997) oil on canvas, 125 3/8 x 116 3/8 inches
Fig. 16 Plate Set (1995–1998) oil on canvas, 116 1/8 x 125 3/4 inches 62
Fig. 17 Ribbon (1995–1997) oil on canvas, 102 x 143 inches
Fig. 18 Shelter (1996–1998) oil on canvas, 118 1/8 x 148 1/8 inches 63
Fig. 19 Donkey (1996–1999) oil on canvas, 114 x 179 inches
Fig. 20 Balloon Dog (1995-1998) oil on canvas, 102 x 143 inches 64
Fig. 21 Balloon Dog (Yellow) (1994-2000) high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating, 121 x 143 x 45 in
Fig. 22 Donkey (Orange) (1999) crystal glass, mirrored glass, carbon fiber, foam, colored plastic interlayer, stainless steel, 76 3/4 x 59 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches, 4 unique versions (Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Yellow) 65
Fig. 23 Cut-Out (1999) oil on canvas, 108 x 79 1/4 inches
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Fig. 24 Pot Rack (2000) oil on canvas, 108 x 79 inches
Fig. 25 Cheeky (2000) oil on canvas, 108 x 84 inches 67
Fig. 26 Pam (2001) oil on canvas, 108 x 84 inches
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Fig. 27 Moustache Lobsters (2003) oil on canvas, 102 x 138 inches
Fig. 28 Lobster Log (2003) polychromed aluminum, wood, stainless steel, coated steel chain, 42 x 55 x 42 inches, Edition of 3 plus AP 69
Fig. 29 Popeye (2003) oil on canvas 108 x 84 inches
Fig. 30 Elvis (2003) oil on canvas, 108 x 93 inches 70
Fig. 31 Hulk Elvis II (2007) oil on canvas, 108 x 84 inches
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Fig. 32 Monkey Train (Orange) (2007) oil on canvas, 108 x 84 inches
Fig. 33 Waterfall Couple (Dots) Blue Swish (2008) oil on canvas, 102 x 138 inches 72
Fig. 34 Landscape (Tree) II (2007) oil on canvas, 108 x 84 inches
*All figures reproduced from the artist’s website