Scott Rothkopf

JEFF KOONS –– A RETROSPECTIVE SCOTT ROTHKOPF –– With contributions by –– ANTONIO DAMASIO, JEFFREY DEITCH, ISABELLE GRAW, ACHIM HOCHDÖRFER, MICHELLE KUO, RACHEL KUSHNER, PAMELA M. LEE, AND ALEXANDER NAGEL WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK DISTRIBUTED BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON NO LIMITS –– SCOTT ROTHKOPF THE MOST proved too confining; Koons is “the most subversive artist alive today” or “one of the art world’s most famous and From the beginning, Jeff Koons provoked superlatives. controversial figures.”7 And in the eyes of at least one Mere adjectives seemed insufficient to describe the jolt of writer, his achievement could not rightly be limited to the his art — and soon him. As early as 1983, just three years “art world,” when the whole world might be a more fitting after his public debut, critic Roberta Smith described his stage for “one of the most famous and popular artists on work’s “presence” as “one of the strangest and most this planet.”8 One imagines that if the presence of extra- unique of contemporary art practice,” and only months terrestrial life is ever definitively confirmed, this frame later, poet Alan Jones declared that practice “one of the might expand further still. most consistent programs of high voltage art-making Such superlatives cut both ways. Koons has also going on today.”1 By the end of the decade, Koons was been dubbed nothing less than “the most active par- hailed as the “most incisive commentator” of the age, ticipant in the debasement of art.” 9 And even the effu- as well as “the hottest young artist in America” and the sive examples cited above were not always proffered as maker of its “most shocking art.”2 This last sentiment was praise, nor would those that were be universally taken as given personal resonance in 1993 by Robert Rosenblum, such. As far as art and artists are concerned, shock, fame, who wrote, “Koons is certainly the artist who has most expense, controversy, subversiveness, and ambition are upset and rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the certainly not accepted unanimously as virtues. Finally, it last decade.”3 That the veteran art historian could com- must be said that not one of these claims (apart from the pare this disturbance to his initial encounter with the art Balloon Dog’s auction record) could be verified as true. of Jasper Johns, which he had been among the first to They may be hyperbole, opinion, generalization, mutu- champion, makes these words even more — or perhaps ally negating, or some combination thereof. But my point the most — forceful. in marshaling these assertions is not to test their veracity The list goes on: “the ultimate entrepreneur of the so much as to marvel at the fact that Koons prompted new art market” (a year after his solo gallery debut in their existence — in such great number, on such diverse 1985); “one of the world’s most bankable artists” (just topics, and over such a long period of time. At the risk six years later); the producer of “the most expensive art of another hyperbolic generalization, I’d wager that no work by a living artist ever to sell at auction” (in 2013, artist of the past thirty years has inspired more mosts. This when Balloon Dog [Orange] broke the record a different alone is enough to make Koons worth thinking about. But Koons sculpture had set once before).4 Writing of another what exactly makes him such an exceptional case? of Koons’s canines, critic Jerry Saltz lauded Puppy as “the Koons, I would argue, has been such a durable and most purely pleasurable public sculpture I’ve ever seen,” ineluctable force in the art world in part because he has while New Yorker columnist Peter Schjeldahl called it tested its limits and those of what art and an artist can “hands down, the most richly and subtly painterly sculp- be. Picture the field of contemporary artistic production ture ever made.” These remarks seem modest when as a vast terrain, the porous perimeter of which is marked compared to those of Susan Freedman, the president by numerous stakes circumscribed by an elastic cord. of New York’s Public Art Fund, who extolled the topi- Each post represents the outer limit of a term or condi- ary terrier as “one of the most significant sculptures of tion germane to art making today — exhibition practice, the twentieth century.”5 Koons himself has been called the market, the readymade, narrative, craft or industrial “the most influential” and “arguably the most impor- fabrication, an artist’s sincerity or cunning, the inheri- tant” artist of his generation, as well as “the most mis- tance of Pop or Minimalism, or the explosion of celebrity understood.”6 Yet for some this generational context has and hype, among many more. Although these terms or 15 No Limits conditions predated Koons, in each case he moved the stakes farther out on the field, expanding the boundary in which all art occurs. We now — for better or worse — all stand within that distended arena. Koons struck down old limits and established new ones that are often impossible for his successors to attain, much less supersede, which is not to suggest they should aspire to. Some might try; some might know better; others might turn their backs on this periphery entirely. But still it remains in mind, a frontier borderland, both mythic and real, alluring and forbidding, full of risk and reward. A retrospective such as the one this catalogue accompanies offers a chance to take full measure of an artist’s work. Although Koons has been the subject Untitled etching from Koons’s undergraduate studies at the of many exhibitions bringing together the multifarious Maryland Institute College of Art, 1974 parts of his oeuvre, none has attempted to assemble them into as comprehensive a narrative since the one organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art challenged the art world’s critical pieties, and in the pro- in 1992, just thirteen years into a career that now spans cess has been described both as a symptom of our age nearly thrice that number. In charting Koons’s lifework, and as one of its architects. Saying as much risks align- the present exhibition resituates his many icons within ing him with some of the less salubrious forces at play in the context of the complex and multifaceted series in the art world and the world beyond, two spheres he has which they originated, and also demonstrates how those consistently endeavored to enmesh. Early in his career series might together form a cohesive if diverse whole. he spoke of the contemporary artist’s limited cultural The plate section that forms the core of this volume sug- power relative to that of the pop star or the designer of gests the arc of that narrative, adhering to the unusually a Baroque church — a narrow purview that he hoped his precise rubric by which Koons has organized his bodies work might transcend.11 He has certainly done this, in of work. Each series is accompanied by an appendix of part through his individual artworks, and in part through sorts that elaborates a constellation of reference points: his personal and professional conduct. It is impossible process images, source material, and installation pho- to deny that Koons’s art and career stand as a series of tographs. The plates are followed by a series of essays limit cases, and this, finally, may be what matters about that are intended not to recapitulate the totality of this him most. story, which has been recounted elsewhere, but rather to illuminate various aspects of Koons’s practice and the disparate contexts in which it might be considered.10 To ART AND THINGS that end, their authors represent a wide range of disci- plines, from scholars and critics of Renaissance and con- One could tell nearly the whole story of Koons’s art — and temporary art to a novelist and a neuroscientist. Taken of the art of the past century more generally — through together, they offer a sense of Koons’s broad reverbera- the lens of the readymade, so it makes a good place tions within the realm of art and beyond. to begin. Since Marcel Duchamp first exhibited his uri- Few artists, living or dead, have had such reach. nal in 1917, few artists have been as associated with My aim in this essay is to examine that scope through that gesture or have grappled with it as variously as has a series of interrelated case studies hinged on the sen- Koons. At one extreme, he has displayed unadulterated sibilities Koons has challenged, the high wires he has found objects as his own, and at the other, he has made traversed, the conceptual gambits he has offered, and painstaking replicas of such things. Between those poles the peerless objects on which these maneuvers depend. he has explored so many approaches to the readymade It is impossible in the space provided here to offer a com- that we could say it acts as a kind of lodestar in Koons’s prehensive account of Koons’s achievement and influ- practice, even when he seems to stray from its light. This ence, the latter being particularly difficult to assess given wasn’t always the case. As a student at the Maryland that his singular example can be daunting to emulate Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the and even, at times, a cautionary tale. Koons has pushed Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1970s, Koons primarily art’s limits, sometimes to uncomfortable ends.

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