Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Features  
Subject: 20th Century    

According to the eternally youthful and perpetually controversial Jeff Koons, whose creations include a forty-foot high topiary dog and a monumental polychrome sculpture of a kitten trapped in a sock (“a modern version of the crucifixion,” in his words, “but much more cheerful”), contemporary art is in a state of crisis.
 

“Art has to redefine itself now perhaps as never before,” he explains. “It’s always in flux, of course, but now new technologies have come in which have made certain aspects of art, particularly the craft side, more and more obsolete. Artists seem very marginal these days, and it’s reflected in their economic status too. There was a time when artists like Picasso, or Henry Moore, were among the richest men alive. But that is not true any more. Art really has to find its place in the modern world again.” Koons, one of 15 contemporary artists chosen to contribute to “Apocalypse”, this autumn’s much-hyped main event at the Royal Academy, says this by way of a speculation about the choice of such a doomy title for the exhibition. “I can kind of see why they chose it, I think. It is, um, an apocalyptic moment for art.”
 

Some people, unmoved by Koons’s cute kitten and unpersuaded by his gilded porcelain statue of the singer Michael Jackson reclining with pet monkey Bubbles, see him and all his works as a symptom of modern art’s parlous state, rather than a solution to it. Robert Hughes, the distinguished critic of Time, has gone further than that, vilifying him as the Antichrist incarnate of modern American art, a “starry-eyed opportunist” and dumber-down cynically bent on the debasement of modern taste. Koons for his part claims that his work is “spiritual”. The final programme in Hughes’s recent television history of American art, American Visions, contained a richly comic encounter between the two in the artist’s studio. Clearly finding Koons’s claims about his own work somewhat indigestible, the critic looked up into the pleading face of Cat in Sock – then a mere work in progress – and asked its creator just how, precisely, he intended to inject “spirituality” into it. Koons replied that he was going to have it painted in very, very bright colours. Particular attention would be paid, he added with unctuous enthusiasm, to the eyes. “It will have really beautiful, Bambi eyelashes.” As he smiled fixedly and impenetrably at his interrogator Hughes harrumphed and stumped off, muttering indignantly.

The Koons smile, experienced in the flesh, is certainly somewhat unsettling. It is often said that artists resemble their work and in his case the remark seems especially true. There is an eerie, Stepford Wives quality about his relentlessly upbeat and optimistic persona which leads, perhaps inevitably, to doubts about whether it is all a faux-naif pose. Dressed in a neat and preppy slacks-and-sports-shirt combination, he is an almost disconcertingly happy and smiley individual - so much so that it is hard not to suspect him, together with his almost overpoweringly sugary art, of harbouring some sinister inner vacancy. He has the too-good-to-be-true, puppy-dog enthusiasm of people in advertisments (but he maintains it all the time, so who is to say where the truth lies?) and often seems to be speaking in slogans or jingles: “I like beauty in simple things”; “I don’t believe in discriminating against anyone’s taste”; I want to make an art that includes everyone”. It has often been assumed that his work is fundamentally ironic. He cannot really love the debased baroque of those mail-order statuary “collectibles”, Capo di Monte and the like, which so much of his sculpture seems to mimic. He must inwardly abhorr the gross and sentimental Toys ‘R’ Us cuddly toys that he uses as source material, even as he refashions and recategorises them, with a sly Duchampian nod and wink, as Modern Art Objects. Or so it is said. But Koons has always steadfastly denied any ironic intent on his part. “A viewer might at first see irony in my work but I see none at all,” he wrote in The Jeff Koons Handbook, a convenient pocket-sized guide to his life, work and philosophy published several years ago. “Irony causes too much critical contemplation.”

Despite his remarks about the contemporary artist’s comparative financial poverty Koons himself would seem to be doing pretty well. His light and airy studio, which occupies the first floor of what must be a very high-rent brownstone building in downtown Manhattan, consists of no fewer than five enormous interconnecting rooms, each one the size of a large New York loft apartment. The place is among other things a treasure trove of the type of thing that inspires him. There has been an invasion of winsome inflatable elephants balancing footballs on the tips of their trunks while. Koons’s main working space contains several tables piled high with magazines, generally open at the ads. Pictures of doughnuts or coca-cola bottles have been cut out, together with pages from toy mail-order catalogues, and panels from cereal packets showing cartoon cats and dogs and other cheery characters contentedly munching away at their milky mush of choice – all pure, unadulterated Koonsiana. “I’ve always enjoyed the impact of ads, and in many ways I prefer them to fine art. I’m for an optimistic art, which I think advertising is. It’s very rare that advertisers are negative about the product, and very rare that they say negative things to the public. And sometimes, you know” – he says this with the saddened expression of a parent talking about a wayward child – “modern art is involved in a negative dialogue. It’s negative about the world, or it’s negative about the artist himself, or negative about the public.”

Consistent with his pronouncements about the obsolescence of “craft” in art, Koons delegates most of the actual making of his work to others. Even as he speaks “Gary”, ponytailed footsoldier in a veritable army of studio assistants, is busily at work on a piece of “optimistic” art. Gary is tweaking a computer-generated collage which will be printed out and passed to some other assistants, who will in turn transfer the design to canvas and transform it into a large painting. The image shows three manic characters from the back of a Cheerios cereal packet cavorting in front of a fairground roller-coaster. There are some blue poles in the foreground. Koons says he intends to call the picture Blue Poles, in reference to the celebrated work of the same title by the pioneer of American Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock. He likes drawing motifs from the back of cereal packets, he adds, simply because he likes the ethos of cereal-eating. “It’s a very sensual experience. It’s oral. It’s a little bit like mother’s milk. So, psychologically, it brings people to a sense of feeling security, a sense of being cared for.”

Koons says that he tries “to see the positive in all kinds of art, to be open to everything”. He “loves” Dali and the Surrealists as well as Boucher and Fragonard and Baroque art of all kinds (although he has one or two reservations, he says, about Bernini’s handling of toes, which he thinks often look too large and distorted) and it is almost impossible to get him to say that he dislikes or disapproves of any particular artist. But his work does carry the occasional implied sideswipe at the art of others. Koons’s Blue Poles is surely more affront than homage to Jackson Pollock; while Bunny, his stainless steel replica of a plastic inflatable rabbit, is certainly (among other things) a parody Brancusi. Koons is a canny student of the art of the past and he knows the modern art collections of New York, in particular, inside out (he worked at the Museum of Modern Art for a while when he was younger, selling memberships, and apparently doing so more successfully than anyopne else in the institution’s history). When I interviewed him in New York his ephemeral sculpture Puppy, a monumental Highland Terrier formed from some 70,000 flowering geraniums, begonias and other cheery annuals, had recently been installed in Rockefeller Plaza. The fun, dumb and immensely popular floral dog seemed to cock a snook, if not a leg, at the would-be civic solemnity of its surroundings, having been cheekily set close by the General Electric Building with its reliefs by Lee Lawrie extolling man’s higher attributes (“Wisdom and Knowledge Shall be the Stability of the Times”), and just above Paul Manship’s somewhat cackhanded and garish 1938 gilt bronze statue of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.

This was the triumph of Koons-style kitsch, a deliberately vulgar art with nothing to say, over Thirties kitsch, an accidentally vulgar art taking itself far too seriously; and it was a resounding victory. When I was there people came daily from all over the city, in their hundreds, to be photographed in front of the multi-coloured pooch or simply to luxuriate in its spectacularly silly carnival splendour. It remains the most perfect example yet of Koons’s lowest-common-denominator, mass-franchise art. To the solemn cultural aspirations of the earlier twentieth-century he blatantly counterposes a diametrically opposed view of art and its proper function. In his world, art exists not so much to redeem us from the mundanity and banality of everyday existence  but to reconcile us to it, even immerse us in it. He has spoken in the past of trying to induce what he sees as a kind of enlightened stultification in his audience, a state of  benign “stupidity” in which people might be “released” from adult standards of discrimination and their ingrained notions of good and bad taste. Looking at Puppy, it is almost (almost) possible to understand his claims about the presumed “spirituality” of his work. “I want to make an art that does not alienate enybody, an art that communicates, that is generous, that generates a communal experience. I think of theology, I think about responsibility to the rest of humanity, a sense of oneness…”

Certainly, almost everything that Koons makes looks like an incitement to infantile regression of one sort or another. His work, like much of the advertising and product styling which he acknowledges as an influence, plays cleverly on the deepseated willingness of most adults to regress, at least from time to time. There is a wit in his calculated witlessness and it is possible that his art may annoy some people so much precisely because it reminds them that they do indeed have all sorts of childish characteristics – a fondness for shiny toys and bright colours, or a love of eating, thoughtlessly, to satiety – of which they may not be particularly proud. For his part, Koons preaches a message of indulgence; and even if his work offends just about every conventional propriety it does have a sticky, undeniable appeal.

“If you like ice cream, have a large helping”, is one of his mottoes. Cake, one of Koons’s recent paintings, exemplifies this out-and-out spirit of hedonism and excess, being a large photorealist representation of nothing but an extremely generous slice of screamingly purple raspberry cake. “The reason I did it,” he says, “is that I felt it was rather a feminine image. In fact it reminded me of the female form, a particular part of the female anatomy. It was meant as a celebration.” Armed with the knowledge of the artist’s intentions the viewer may see the picture anew and notice that the stripe of jam bisecting the cake has, as he suggests, been cunningly fashioned to suggest the female sex organ. A slice of cake with subliminal sex appeal may not (so to speak) be to everyone’s taste, but like many of Koons’s works the painting takes an aspect of contemporary life and makes it peculiarly, blatantly visible. Anyone walking down the street in any major city will be bombarded with advertising images expressly designed to sell product through sly sexual insinuations of just this kind. In many ways Koons’s work is preferable, and less manipulative, because all it has to sell is itself. He offers the low pleasures and seductions of advertising without its often unpleasant consequences.

This is a conscious strategy. A few years ago, he says, he became fascinated by advertisements for alcohol and the packaging of liquor. There was a lot of emphasis, he noticed, on rippling streams and abstract shiny surfaces, on imagery with an almost hypnotising cleanness and clarity to it. “It all seemed designed to make the oblivion of intoxication enticing and beautiful. They were using a visual language of luxury to degrade people.” His response was a series of works called “Luxury and Degradation”, which included a number of gleaming solid silver containers for bourbon fashioned in the shape of covetable toys: model trains and skyscrapers and the like. Koons’s collectors were told that should they ever break the seal on any of these nice shiny decanters and actually drink its contents, they would have destroyed it forever as a work of art. So they remain inviolate, each one a modern version of a tantalus, the locked drinks cabinet designed by the Victorians to keep the servants off the booze.

Koons was brought up by Pennsylvania Lutherans, which may have coloured some of his attitudes. Not that home was an entirely po-faced place, to judge by an old photograph he shows me of Mom and Pop Koons at an alligator park in Florida, sticking their heads through one of those absurd painted boards still occasionally encountered in English seaside resorts. (Koons has created his own version of one, which turns whoever pokes their head through it into a laughing cereal-packet cow; and he obligingly strikes a pose in it for the Sunday Telegraph’s photographer). His father, now deceased, owned a furniture and interior-decorating store and the artist has spoken fondly of the pleasure he used to get when, as a child, he would visit what he terms its “articulated environment” of improvised bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Koons Senior took to including his son’s juvenilia – copies of old masters, for the most part – in the store displays and often managed to sell them for several hundred dollars apiece. Koons went on to study art history in Baltimore before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago – which also numbers the founding father of American Pop Art, Claes Oldenburg, among its alumni – and having graduated he moved to New York.

In summer he keeps all his windows open and the noise of the city below filters constantly into his studio. “Manhattan is my centre,” he says. “If I were to move out of Manhattan I might as well move anywhere, it would never be the same. I’m an American artist, you know.” Being based on lower Broadway in the middle of So Ho, he is in a part of the city, full to bursting with shops and delis and stores and street markets, where the sense of New York as a great thronging bazaar is peculiarly strong. Like the Pop Artists whom he acknowledges as his role models, who first dared to suggest that elements of traditionally “low” culture like burger ads or Coke bottles might be worthy of incorporation into traditionally “high” art, Koons has surely been moulded by the city in which he works. His art speaks of and to New York’s spectacular 24-hour-a-day culture of more – more goods, more greed, more gratification, more everything. But if he captures the city’s spirit of excess, he also seems to want to tame it, to preserve all that excites him but also to make it all safe, like a playground or some urban garden of Eden (with Puppy, perhaps, as its guard dog).

Koons is hardly an innocent artist – he is far too canny and knowing for that – but nearly all his work seems animated by a yearning for a kind of innocence. This has taken some fairly idiosyncratic forms. In 1991 he married the Italian porn star and Member of Parliament, Ilona Staller, alias “La Cicciolina”, with whom he collaborated on an x-rated series of works to which he gave the collective title “Made in Heaven”. These consisted, mostly, of very large and disconcertingly explicit photographs of the couple having sexual intercourse. Koons now says it was his way of trying to reinvigorate the erotic rococo mythologies of a Boucher or Fragonard. Although the images were, by any responsible censor’s standards, completely obscene, they were also completely anodyne. The heavily made-up artist and his blonde consort, cherubically shorn of all her pubic hair, looked as though they might almost be made of plastic: a Thunderbird puppet making love to a Barbie doll. Like “Luxury and Degradation” this seems like another and yet more weirdly skewed attempt to purify something potentially damaging – pornography, this time, rather than the bottle – and transform it into something as serenely innocent and enjoyable as a children’s game. “We are the new Adam and Eve” was one of the statements Koons issued at the time.

Their relationship, however, turned out no better than that of their biblical forebears and the couple divorced very messily just a few years after their erotic apotheosis. Koons was awarded custody of their young son, Ludwig, who was subsequently abducted by his mother and taken to Italy, where he still lives. The artist, who can only see the boy once a month, has spent fortunes trying to have him repatriated to America. He is currently suing the Italian government in the European Court because, he says, “as far as I am concerned Italy the country is the abuser, the kidnapper.”

Koons’s troubled personal life can only have enhanced his determination to make an art of child-like blatancy and appeal. It may, too, help to account for the hints of  melancholia or discontent which his work sometimes gives out. His main contribution to “Apocalypse” is a sculpture called Balloon Dog, a large red stainless steel simulacrum of one of those dachsunds dextrously twisted from coloured balloons by children’s entertainers. It seems a characteristically goofy and memorable object, as well as one well calculated to infuriate the moral minority who believe there is no place for that sort of thing in an art gallery. But there is also something rather monstrous about it. It might be a celebration of the pleasures of kidding around, pure and simple. But it could also be seen as a gross and shiny indictment of the complacently indiscriminate and morally void taste to which it appeals – an appropriately ludicrous sausage-dog-shaped mirror held up to an age lazily and guiltlessly wallowing in its own banality. Balloon dogs are made of breath, the artist says, which makes his sculpture the image of a breath held forever: a rather unpleasant thought.

Perhaps everything isn’t entirely rosy in Jeff Koons’s artful Garden of Eden. He ponders the question with his usual courtesy and discretion and concedes that some of his sculpture “has a Trojan Horse aspect to it”. But that is all he is saying. Then he just smiles that eerie smile.