Modern art was born into a market economy, and by the early twentieth century it could no longer ignore its status as a special commodity well-suited to speculative investment. While some artists sought to escape this condition with austere forms of abstract painting, others worked to underscore it with everyday products nominated as artworks, otherwise known as readymades. In its first incarnation with Dada, this device was taken to be critical of the socioeconomic system in which art was enmeshed. By the time of Pop, however, such negativity had largely drained away. “A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,” Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, “but Son of Dada is accepted.”1 With Jeff Koons, acceptance has passed beyond affirmation to “celebration” (his term).
The child as a figure of innocent vision is another old trope that reaches back at least to the Romantics. This avatar also takes on a new twist with Koons, who aims to convey a youthful wonder at the object world around him. Here, though, innocence does not mean freedom from convention so much as delight in consumerism, even identification with it, as Koons suggests in a primal scene recounted to the critic David Sylvester:
Childhood’s important to me, and it’s when I first came into contact with art. This happened when I was around four or five. One of the greatest pleasures I remember is looking at a cereal box. It’s a kind of sexual experience at that age because of the milk. You’ve been weaned off your mother, and you’re eating cereal with milk, and visually you can’t get tired of the box. I mean, you sit there, and you look at the front, and you look at the back. Then maybe the next day you pull out that box again, and you’re just still amazed by it; you never tire of the amazement. You know, all of life is like that or can be like that. It’s just about being able to find amazement in things.2
This point of view—of the world seen by a boy precociously alert to the sexuality incited by consumerism—is one key to Koons. Certainly, it drives his refashioning of the readymade as a deluxe product with an eye to the child that commercial culture often asks us all to be at heart. In fact, his retooling of the readymade tradition has as much to do with display, advertising, and publicity as with the commodity per se. His father Henry was an interior decorator who owned a furniture store in York, Pennsylvania, and even in his youth, Koons was an avid salesman. (He went on to sell mutual funds and trade commodities briefly on Wall Street.)
Koons broke through as an artist in the early 1980s with a series titled “The New” consisting of vacuum cleaners and other pristine appliances set in fluorescent light boxes in a way that makes them glow with a semi-divine aura. Among these New Hoover Convertibles was The New Jeff Koons (1980), a self-portrait enlarged from a family photo of the artist-to-be not long after his fateful encounter with the cereal box. It too radiates a special well-being, here of a middle-class boy circa 1960: shirt buttoned up, hair neatly parted, young Jeff sits at a desk with a coloring book, a crayon poised in his chubby fingers, and smiles up at the camera. (The adult Koons also beams in photos.) In his lexicon, “The New” implies perfection in the sense of pure as well as packaged, and The New Jeff Koons exudes both qualities. Although this family photo is obviously staged, so thoroughly does young Jeff inhabit the appointed role of budding artist that it seems authentic, too. Again, this world is to be celebrated, and why not if your vision of life brooks neither death nor decay?
Koons gives a Panglossian gloss to his objects, images, and statements alike, and, as with Warhol, who also “liked” everything just as it is, this prompts the question: Is Koons sincere or ironic or somehow both at once? It is difficult to call his bluff (again as with Warhol, one gets stuck in his language) or to catch him out. (For four decades, Koons has scarcely stepped out of character, an impressive performance that might be his greatest piece.) “I hope that my work has the truthfulness of Disney,” he told Sylvester, and here as elsewhere it seems both that Koons believes what he says and that his version of sincerity is the most sardonic thing ever. Yet, when he immediately adds, “I mean, in Disney you have complete optimism, but at the same time you have the Wicked Witch with the apple,” we are given a useful insight into the wily workings of both impresarios.3
Jeff Koons, The New Jeff Koons, 1980. Duratan, flurorescent light box. 40 5/8 × 30 5/8 × 8˝. © Jeff Koons.
This poisoned apple, this witchy charm, is what Koons offers in his best work, and when this ambiguity is not active, the performance falls flat. Thus, his recent paintings are mostly a computer-assisted updating of Pop and Surrealism, equal parts James Rosenquist and Salvador Dalí (his first love), and his recent sculptures that mash up pop-cultural figures like Elvis and Hulk are also usually overdone. So, too, Koons often fails to inflect the three categories that are his bread-and-butter—kitsch, porn, and classical statuary—with much edginess or even oddity. Nevertheless, some of his objects do cast a spell, especially early ones, such as his Hoovers presented as fetish gods and his basketballs submerged in a watery state of “equilibrium” (the title of a 1985 series), which Koons likened to a fetus in a womb as well as to a state of grace. He is also able to fascinate with objects that are not what they appear to be, such as Rabbit (1986), a bunny cast in stainless steel and finished to the point where it looks exactly like the cheap plastic of the inflatable toy that is its model. This is a talismanic piece for Koons; it also marked his shift from the deskilled device of the readymade to the skilled manufacture of the facsimile.4
Here, Koons adapts an unusual genre, ambiguously positioned between art and craft, of the trompe l’oeil object (the pictorial version of such illusionism is familiar enough), as when he exactly reproduces a tacky curio (such as a Bob Hope statuette) or an ephemeral trifle (such as a birthday party favor like a balloon twisted to resemble a poodle) in an unexpected material such as stainless steel. The thing (which is already a multiple) becomes its own weird simulation, at once faithful and distorted, and, paradoxically, this illusionism reveals a basic truth about the ontological status of countless objects in our world where the opposition between original and copy or model and replica is undone.5 With this illusionism, Koons also turns the readymade on its head, as cheap knickknacks are transformed into ultra-expensive luxuries. The ultimate in this vein is his “Celebration” series (1994–2006); polished to a mirror shine, these violet hearts, diamond rings, and the like are inspired by lavish gifts exchanged on special days of celebration. Such outsize decorations might strike even jaded viewers with the amazement that the young Koons felt in front of his cereal box. Certainly they are fit for a king or whatever the plutocratic equivalent is today.
What is the point of this work? Koons claims that he wants to relieve us of our shame, which is why he focuses on two subjects where humiliation runs deep: sex and class. “I was just trying to say that whatever you respond to is perfect, that your history and your own cultural background are perfect,” Koons says of the tchotchkes reworked in his “Banality” series (1988), in terms that recall the language of a motivational speaker.6 Yet here again his work is only effective when our shame, or at least our ambivalence, is triggered, not wished away. When Koons deeroticizes sex, as in the images created with his then-wife, the Hungarian-Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller (aka La Cicciolina), in the “Made in Heaven” series (1989–91), there is little charge beyond the initial shock of graphic pictures. However, when he eroticizes “things that are normally not sexualized,” such as children, flowers, and animals, an edgy unease is sometimes produced.7
Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986. Stainless steel. 41 × 19 × 12˝. © Jeff Koons.
Jeff Koons, Hanging Heart (Red/Gold), 1994–2006, as displayed at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2006. Brass, stainless steel, transparent color coating. 9´7˝ × 9´2˝ × 3´4˝. © Jeff Koons.
Consider the porcelain boy and girl in Naked (1988). Rather than an Edenic purity, these prepubescent twins evoke a nasty prurience as they gaze into an abundant flower that looks as though it might hold a dark Bataillean secret about the true nature of sexual organs. Koons makes his animals even more polymorphously perverse; based on toys and curios, they are creepily semi-human to begin with. For example, Rabbit is an infantile thing, but it is also an adult symbol of rampant sex, and this one is erect in all its bulbous parts. (In fact, Koons refers to his bunny, which has a carrot at its mouth, as The Great Masturbator, a nod to a 1929 Dalí painting with that title.) Or consider Balloon Dog (1994–2000), which at first appears as innocent as a birthday decoration. “But at the same time,” Koon remarks, “it’s a Trojan horse. There are other things here that are inside: maybe the sexuality of the piece.”8 And, in fact, it does recall a provocative poupée by Hans Bellmer updated for a super-rich kid today. Edgier still is the sexuality evoked by Bear and Policeman (1988), a polychrome wood piece that shows a cartoonish bear in a striped shirt gazing down on a boyish bobby (whose whistle the bear is about to blow), and in Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), a well-known porcelain piece that shows the King of Pop cuddling with his pet chimp. (Koons anticipates a whitened Jacko here.) The two sculptures point to an illicit love that crosses not only generations but also species, and Bear and Policeman implies a further joke about English pop culture (the juvenile bobby) schooled by the bigger, badder American version (the papa bear).
Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988. Porcelain. 42 × 70½ × 32½˝. © Jeff Koons.
“My work” is intended to “liberate people from judgment,” Koons told Sylvester; “I’ve always been aware of art’s discriminative powers, and I’ve always been really opposed to it.”9 Yet, as with sex, so with class: his work is more pointed when it sharpens our sense of social difference and tweaks our guilt about bad taste, not the opposite. Thus, in the cocktail accessories that Koons made in stainless steel in his “Luxury and Degradation” series (1986), his ice pail, travel bar, and Baccarat crystal set call out rather than erase distinctions of class. And in the kitschy curios of the “Banality” series, we are not released from judgment so much as we are invited to entertain a campy distance from low-brow desires.
In a telling moment, Koons avows to Sylvester that his work is “conceptual” insofar as it uses aesthetics as a “psychological tool.” At the end of this conversation, he makes this extraordinary comment:
What I’ve always loved about the Pop vocabulary is its generosity to the viewer. And I say “generosity to the viewer” because people every day are confronted by images, and confronted by products that are packaged. And it puts the individual under great stress to feel packaged themselves … And so I always desire … to be able to give a viewer a sense of themselves being packaged, to whatever level they’re looking for. Just to instill a sense of self-confidence, self-worth. That’s my interest in Pop.10
This credo suits the therapy culture long dominant in American society—the only good ego is a strong ego, one that can beat back any unhappy neurosis—but it also fits the current ideology of neoliberalism, which seeks to promote our “self-confidence” as packaged commodities, our “self-worth” as human capital, that is, as so many skill-sets that we are compelled to develop as we shift from one precarious job to another.11 Does the perfectly presented boy in The New Jeff Koons gaze into the future and behold us?