Easyfun - Whitney Museum of American Art

JEFF
Koons
a �et�ospective
Over the past three decades, Jeff Koons (b. 1955) has become one of the most
influential, controversial, and best-known artists of our time. He was raised in York,
Pennsylvania, and studied in Baltimore and Chicago before moving to New York in
1977, where he still lives today. Koons emerged in the 1980s amid a generation
of artists who pushed the crisp surfaces of Minimalism and the found imagery of Pop
art even further toward their sources in industry and the media. Throughout his
career, he has pioneered new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries
between art and popular culture, and challenged the limits of fabrication in works
of great beauty, technical finesse, and emotional intensity. Koons has also embraced
the cult of celebrity and the global marketplace, transforming the relationship of
art and artists to both these spheres. His example and his work shine a hard light
on the culture in which we live and on art’s place within that culture, offering a
powerful picture of the world today. Yet ultimately he insists that his work only finds
completion in the feelings it inspires in each of us.
This retrospective is the most comprehensive ever devoted to Koons’s
art and is the first monographic exhibition to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s
Marcel Breuer–designed building, as the Museum prepares to move downtown
next year. Gathering more than 130 objects in a wide variety of mediums, the survey
illuminates the full arc of Koons’s career—from his earliest mature works, made
in 1978, to monumental pieces completed in the past few months. Here, Koons’s
most indelible icons are situated once again within the diverse series in which
they initially appeared, and we can see for the first time how these bodies of work
form a multifaceted whole. The exhibition begins on the Museum’s second floor
and proceeds in chronological order as you ascend through the building, with works
from two of the artist’s most recent series featured in the adjacent gallery and
sculpture court downstairs.
Introduction
Leadership support for this exhibition
is provided by
The exhibition is sponsored by
Significant support is provided by Neil G.
Bluhm; Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen
Foundation, Inc.; Susan and John Hess;
Cari and Michael J. Sacks; and the National
Committee of the Whitney Museum
of American Art.
Major support is provided by Anne Cox
Chambers, Nancy C. and A. Steven Crown,
Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Lise and
Michael Evans, Anne Dias Griffin and Kenneth
Griffin, Dakis Joannou, Allison and Warren
Kanders, Amy and John Phelan, Brett and
Daniel Sundheim, and David Zwirner Gallery.
100
Generous support is provided by The Broad
Art Foundation; Melva Bucksbaum and
Raymond Learsy; Wendy Fisher; Mr. and Mrs.
J. Tomilson Hill; Antonio Homem, Sonnabend
Gallery; Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins;
Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Linda and Harry
Macklowe; the Mugrabi Collection; Brooke
and Daniel Neidich; Almine Rech Gallery;
David Teiger; and Fern and Lenard Tessler.
Floor 2, Gallery 2: The New section text
EquilibRium
Koons staged his first solo gallery exhibition in 1985 at International with
Monument, a center of activity amid the flourishing Lower East Side art scene.
Entitled Equilibrium, the show presented a multilayered allegory of, in Koons’s
words, unattainable “states of being” or salvation. Cast-bronze floatation devices,
for example, maintained a permanent inflatedness, yet they would kill rather than
save their users. On the walls hung framed, unaltered Nike posters whose stars
Koons saw as “sirens” beckoning young people (particularly African Americans)
with the promise of social mobility through sports. Traveling to the company’s
Oregon headquarters, Koons procured mint copies of the posters that conjoined
the perfection of his appropriated prints with that of the famous athletes they
featured. The exhibition’s best-known works remain the tanks in which basketballs
miraculously hover. These sculptures expand philosophically on The New; while
that series addressed the perfect moment of creation, Koons considers Equilibrium
a moment of pure potential: “Equilibrium is before birth, it’s in the womb, it’s about
what is prior to life and after death. It’s this ultimate state of the eternal that is
reflected in this moment.”
Around this time, Koons’s own fortunes began to change. In 1982 he had run
out of money and could not continue to fabricate his work to the high standards
on which he insisted. He had to spend six months with his parents in Florida and
also held jobs on Wall Street to finance his artistic projects. Yet with the Equilibrium
exhibition, critics and collectors started to take more serious notice of his work.
Floor 2, Gallery 3: Equilibrium section text
LuxuRy and
DegRadation
The works in Luxury and Degradation address the marketing and consumption
of alcohol to raise questions about the relationships among advertising, class, vice,
and art. Canvases printed with oil-based inks make artworks out of liquor ads,
while Koons further seduces viewers with shiny stainless-steel casts of vessels and
accessories for serving alcohol. “I thought stainless steel would be a wonderful
material,” he remarked. “I could polish it, and I could create a fake luxury. I never
wanted real luxury, instead, I wanted proletarian luxury, something visually
intoxicating, disorienting.”
While these “luxurious” surfaces may draw us in, they are also a ruse, since
the steel is not a precious metal but one more common to appliances than fine art.
If in his previous series Koons largely employed objects that had practical functions
(a vacuum, a teapot, a raft), here he points to the “degradation” of being in thrall
to things primarily intended to decorate our lives and confer social status—or at least
nurture fantasies of it. His readymade sources run the gamut of money and taste
from a humble pail to a Baccarat crystal set, all transformed into artworks that
promise viewers yet another level of sophistication. Indeed, in the roiling market of
the mid-1980s, contemporary artworks increasingly became seen as accouterments
of the good life and commodities to be traded—a condition these sculptures keenly
and self-consciously reflect.
Floor 2, Gallery 4: Luxury and Degradation section text
StatuaRy
Equilibrium and Luxury and Degradation established Koons as one of New York’s
hottest young artists, and in 1986 he was invited to show his work at the
prestigious Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo. He conceived of a series titled Statuary,
a term that suggests a borderland just outside the domain of sculpture. Fittingly,
Koons based this series on a broad range of readymade models, from corny massmarket curios to distinguished portrait busts. Statuary’s interest derives from
the tension between these sources, which might and might not properly be called
art. On the one hand, Louis XIV and Italian Woman have historical precedents,
while on the other, Bob Hope and Doctor’s Delight are cast from cheap collectibles
and souvenirs.
Koons amplified and confused the distinction between these poles by
rendering all his models for this series in stainless steel, a metal more often used
for pots and pans than fine art. His casts are so finely detailed that they suggest
the variety of their source’s original materials and draw us into a slow delectation
of their precisely articulated parts. Yet they lack particularities, such as color, that
might localize or limit a viewer’s associations and are therefore more open to
projections based on our personal histories and preferences. By transforming his
lowbrow readymades into highbrow art and making his historical sources more
contemporary, Koons achieved a kind of democratic leveling of culture. Taken
together, the Statuary works evoke a panoply of emotions and styles—melancholy
or joy, realism or caricature—and demonstrate Koons’s keen manipulation of
ingrained ideas about art and taste.
Floor 3, Gallery 5: Statuary section text
Banality
Expanding on the lowbrow subjects of Statuary, Koons’s next series, Banality,
ventured further into the realm of kitsch. He even adopted the strategies of
a commercial product launch to unveil his new work in simultaneous exhibitions in
New York, Chicago, and Cologne, which he publicized with a glossy ad campaign.
In so doing, Koons seized on the increasing role of advertising and celebrity in
the art world of the 1980s and provocatively acknowledged that his work was
often perceived as embodying the crass ostentation for which that decade had
become known.
Unlike Koons’s earlier sculptures based on readymade sources, those in
Banality are mash-ups of stuffed animals, gift shop figurines, and images taken
from magazines, product packaging, films, and even Leonardo da Vinci. Nothing
was too corny, too cloying, or too cute. Working with traditional German and
Italian craftsmen who made decorative and religious objects, Koons enlarged his
subjects and rendered them in gilt porcelain and polychromed wood, materials
more associated with housewares and tchotchkes than contemporary art. As with
his previous series, he conceived of Banality as an elaborate allegory, this one
aimed at freeing us to embrace without embarrassment our childhood affection for
toys or the trinkets lining our grandparents’ shelves. By flouting avant-garde critical
and artistic standards, Banality caused a sensation in New York, where many
observers felt Koons had taken his love affair with mass culture too far, surpassing
even the Pop artists of the 1960s. Yet this celebration can also be considered
a critique in which the cute becomes monstrous and the banal turns subversive
and menacing.
Floor 3, Gallery 6: Banality section text
Made
in Heaven
If with Banality Koons proposed to liberate his audience from the stigma of bad
taste, with Made in Heaven he promised nothing less than emancipation from
the shame of sex. The billboard from 1989 at the entrance to this floor announced
a feature film that Koons planned to realize with the world-famous porn star
and Italian parliamentarian Ilona Staller (also known as La Cicciolina), whom he
hired to pose with him on her sets. Koons was drawn to the fairytale aesthetic
of Staller’s pornography, as well as to her unabashed celebration of her sexuality,
which he felt made her immune to the degradation of voyeurism. Although Koons
ultimately decided not to make the film, he fell in love with his costar and produced
a body of increasingly explicit work in which the pair played a contemporary Adam
and Eve surrounded by symbols of fidelity and affection, such as dogs and flowers.
Koons’s work and public relationship caused a media sensation, which
climaxed in 1991 with the couple’s marriage and the opening of Made in Heaven in
New York. The works forcefully blurred the line between Koons’s life and art by
portraying graphic sex acts between the artist and his muse, who had become his
wife. Critics at the time decried Koons as narcissistic and misogynist, declaring
his images of unprotected intercourse irresponsible at the height of the AIDS crisis.
However, one might also consider the strange ways in which Made in Heaven
scrambled social and gender codes. Wearing heavy makeup and trailed by
butterflies, the male artist is seen as a visitor to the fantasy world created by his
wife. To this day, the work stands not as pornography but an extremely risky and
vulnerable form of self-portraiture as well as an enduring experiment in fame.
Floor 3, Gallery 7: Made in Heaven section text
Easyfun
Shortly after he completed Made in Heaven, Koons entered one of the most
difficult periods of his artistic and personal life. His marriage to Staller ended
acrimoniously, and she abducted their young son to Italy, leading to a protracted
international custody dispute. Meanwhile, Koons embarked on Celebration
(on view on the fourth floor), a series of large paintings and sculptures that were
extremely difficult to execute for technical and financial reasons. After years
of frustration, with Celebration still underway, Koons created Easyfun in 1999 as
a deliberate attempt to free himself from these difficulties and to work in a faster
and more direct manner.
The colorful mirrors lining these walls suggest a joyous menagerie of cartoon
animal silhouettes, yet their blank faces and exaggerated scale also evoke a
darker sense of foreboding. Crisp and cool, these works substitute the Baroque
and Rococo references of Made in Heaven with modern stylistic attributes, such
as monochrome color and abstract forms. Importantly, they also shift attention from
their maker to their viewers. We find ourselves reflected and distorted in these
oversized mirrors, which act like Rorschach blots to trigger our psychological
projections. Easyfun also comprises Koons’s sculpture Split-Rocker and his first
handmade oil paintings, one of which is on view in the adjacent gallery.
Floor 3, Gallery 8: Easyfun section text
EasyfunEtheReal
Although Koons had explored different forms of painting since the early 1980s,
Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal signal the start of his engagement with hand-painted
oils on canvas, a medium he continues to use today. For Koons, this centuries-old
tradition conveyed a greater warmth and psychological energy than the more
mechanical means of his earlier paintings, yet his new process was anything but
old-fashioned. As with the Banality sculptures, he began each composition with
readymade images culled from product packaging, advertisements, and magazine
photography, particularly those featuring the sensual pleasures of food and sex.
He then imaginatively grafted these fragments within paper studies that he
scanned and manipulated further using the advanced cropping and layering tools
of Photoshop software. To execute each painting, Koons worked with teams of
assistants for up to six months, painstakingly transferring his digital collage to
canvas entirely by hand.
Looking clockwise around this gallery, we can observe the increasing
complexity of Koons’s process, as his compositions became more intricately
interwoven and the paint handling progressively finer. The Easyfun canvases, such
as Loopy, demonstrate a nostalgic and innocent, if somewhat warped, take on
postwar American life and a relatively loose and open brushwork. Yet this sense
of spontaneity disappears behind the tauter surfaces of Easyfun-Ethereal, in which
adult sexuality commingles with the signifiers of childhood and mass-produced
products to suggest the desires of the collective consumer unconscious. Although
these canvases brim with an unbridled exuberance and abundance, their
disjointed elements and phantom limbs can also hint at the manic and disorienting
side of overconsumption.
Floor 3, Gallery 9: Easyfun-Ethereal section text
CelebRation
Koons conceived his series Celebration in 1994 as a paean to the milestones that
mark a year and the cycle of life. Fittingly, it was inspired by an invitation to design
a calendar for which he created photographs that referred to holidays and other
joyous events. These images formed the basis for large-scale sculptures and
paintings that the artist hoped might serve both as archetypal symbols accessible
to a broad public and as a personal reminder to his abducted son that the boy was
constantly on his father’s mind. Taken as a whole, the sixteen paintings and twenty
sculptures of Celebration evoke birth, love, religious observances, and procreation,
whether in the form of a cracked egg, a giant heart, the paraphernalia of a birthday
party, or the sexually suggestive curves and crevices of a balloon animal.
The extraordinarily ambitious series Celebration comprises some of the
most technologically demanding objects ever produced in the history of postwar
art. Although a sculpture like Cat on a Clothesline might look deceptively simple,
no commercial fabricator was readily equipped to cast plastic in the style of a toy
at such large scale, nor was it easy to achieve many of his sculptures’ complex,
curving steel surfaces without the slightest ripples or surface distortions. In his
pursuit of perfection, Koons pushed specialized fabricators in sites around the
world to work in ways they never had before, and the most challenging sculptures
in the series remain unfinished even after twenty years. Far from extraneous,
these high production standards are central to the meaning of Koons’s work since
they amplify the emotional impact and sense of wonder his art inspires.
Floor 4, Gallery 10: Celebration section text
Popeye
The Popeye series is named after the pugnacious cartoon sailor featured in some
of its works, yet its true subject may be the artist’s strategic reexamination of the
readymade. This device had played a central role in Koons’s earlier bronze and steel
casts of consumer products. Yet here, rather than transforming a found object
into a sculpture by conspicuously translating it from one material into another, he
concealed this metamorphosis entirely behind a faultless similitude rarely achieved
in the history of art. The cast-aluminum and spray-painted menagerie of pool toys
that populate Popeye are stunning feats of artifice, exhibiting minutely rendered
crimps and puckers along their seams. The sculptures’ hyperreal quality is
heightened by the laborious paint handling that perfectly captures the subtle textural
distinctions of the original floats, from their lustrous vinyl to their matte printing
to their glossy handles and valves.
In some sculptures, Koons pairs these doppelgangers with actual massproduced objects, such as trashcans and chairs, leading us to wonder which
elements he found and which he made. This contrast challenges and heightens
the illusionism of Koons’s casts and raises complex questions about the nature
of representation—something he also explores in the related paintings. These
canvases create confusion through illusion, blending references to art history,
pop culture, and even Koons’s own work, all within seamless surfaces that emulate
the look and feel of their human, artistic, and manufactured subjects.
Floor 4, Gallery 11: Popeye section text
Hulk Elvis
With Hulk Elvis, Koons extended and complicated his renewed interest in the
readymade, employing not only casting but also cutting-edge technologies to further
blur the distinction between real things and their copies. The sculptures in this
gallery are the result of complex techniques, including milling, in which machines
carve solid materials like stone and wood. To create them, Koons has pioneered
methods for capturing source data and fabricating objects that rival the most
advanced capabilities of science and manufacturing. His approach allows for
an unprecedented precision, making the sculpture Gorilla a perfect granite
enlargement of an imperfect wax toy, while the ripples of the Incredible Hulk’s
bronze waistband appear as pliant as actual vinyl.
This exactitude contributes to the “strong, heroic” quality Koons sought in
Hulk Elvis (which takes its name from the cartoon antihero and the virile pop star),
whose stance recalls that of Elvis as painted by Andy Warhol in the early 1960s.
The deliriously layered compositions of Koons’s canvases also include a grinning
monkey, an erotic scene from a Japanese print, and a linear depiction of a horsedrawn carriage confronting a train. These interwoven images suggest sexual union,
the clash of opposing worlds, permanence and evanescence, and a sense of power
and confidence made all the more compelling by the threat of obsolescence and
deflation. Here Koons counterposes a sense of raw energy with stasis in images
and objects that feel startlingly alive yet frozen in time.
Floor 4, Gallery 12: Hulk-Elvis section text
Antiquity
In his most recent work, Koons has greatly expanded his range of subjects
and freed himself to treat them more abstractly without losing hold of his hallmark
precision. While his previous art-historical references spanned decades
or centuries, in Antiquity he looks across millennia to Paleolithic and classical
precedents that evoke the themes of love, beauty, and desire. Yet even these
ancient sources have been filtered through multiple lenses, as Koons’s newest
works subtly acknowledge how the idea of classical sculpture has evolved
and been re-created over time. His model for a work like Metallic Venus is not
a Greek or Roman original, but a porcelain knickknack, itself likely based
on a later copy.
Koons marks his place in this chain of history by using advanced CT scans
and other forms of digital imaging to examine his sources before translating them
into stone or mirror-polished stainless steel. In some cases, his surfaces retain
an almost liquid quality, as though coming into being or melting before our eyes.
Their contours feel both precise and abstract, like images enlarged on computer
screens beyond their resolution. Koons has embellished two of these works
with live flowers, emphasizing the relationship between life and art. Here, as always,
he walks a fine line between high and low references, the original and the copy,
the traditional and the startlingly new.
Floor 4, Gallery 13: Antiquity section text