If you take the persona of the artist Jeff Koons at face value and figure him to be effusive and seductive but also innocent, a bit like William Gaddis’s fictive eleven-year-old money genius, J R Vansant, you might expect the voice of this man Jeff Koons to be smooth, upbeat, and boyish. Buoyant and motivational. A voice as slick as his mirror-polished balloon dog, the single artwork everybody knows—even children know the balloon dog, even grown-ups who disdain contemporary art. Jeff Koons, after all, is a man of the people—this despite being a visual artist, a career generally met with suspicion, if not derision. But Koons is different. He’s a showman and salesman, keeping the dream of American entrepreneurial success alive.
And yet, as I discovered the first time I heard the actual, real voice of Jeff Koons, as he explained various of his artworks (“these twins from hard-core porn look just like Elvis”; “the mustache on this lobster refers to Duchamp”), it was a voice, to my surprise, that was hoarse and low. It had so much doubt and rasp to it that I could not match it to the beaming, gleaming, schoolboy face of the world’s most famous artist.
In 1975, Jeff Koons interviewed the musician David Byrne. There is a video of their conversation on YouTube, which for some reason shows only Koons. Byrne, the subject, is off-screen. Koons has a mustache and sideburns. His face is coated in a sheen of nervous sweat, or maybe it’s just summertime-in–New York sweat. Regardless, this brief bit of vintage footage is a rare glimpse of Koons without the camera-ready perfection we’ve come to know, the manicured Ken doll in a soft collared shirt or a dark and expensive suit or a tuxedo, beaming with his eyes open a little too wide.
In this 1975 video, his eyes frequently narrow in amusement as he chews gum, endures awkward silences, cracks a sly grin. He tells David Byrne he’s from central Pennsylvania, his words spoken with some kind of central Pennsylvania accent. “They have Bird-in-Hand, Cherryville, Pleasureville,” he says. These are the names of towns, enunciated for irony. Maybe he and Byrne are both stoned on weak 1970s weed. We hear a toilet flush.
David Byrne: “Things go on in other towns, but it’s more secret. Here, you can pay to see those things.”
Koons, with disdain: “Where I’m from, that’s all they have is middle-class bars.” Later he tells Byrne about a bar he went to that he liked, in Baltimore, on New Year’s Eve, a strip club with nude girls. It was “comfortable,” he says, and “real.” At which point Byrne changes the subject.
The seamless and clean-cut salesman persona that Jeff Koons has confected over the last thirty years is a long way from this greaser with a mustache longing for what’s “comfortable” and “real” about a Baltimore titty joint. The young Koons seemed like he wanted to be cool, and he was cool: he was interviewing one of the hippest downtown musicians. He wasn’t yet performing his man-child consumerism, claiming that happiness, to him, “is a full box of cereal and a full carton of milk.” But some of Koons’s own artwork has interfered with his breakfast cereal persona too.
I’m thinking in particular of the series Luxury and Degradation, which features exact reproductions, in oil on canvas, of liquor advertisements that were contemporary when Koons made them, in 1986. The paintings pair well-known slogans—“I could go for something Gordon’s” and “I assume you drink Martell”—with staged images, combinations whose effects are both curiously meaningless and strangely charged. Replicated and monumentalized as art, they are not bubblegum Koons—dazzle that masquerades as innocence and puerility, under which lies a kind of darkness, even nastiness—and instead, flat and caustic at once.
Hard liquor is not the aesthetic or spiritual hearth of a feel-good world, the mirror in which people want to see themselves. Even if liquor does hold some promise of revelry, of escape, the ads for it are a mediated layer away from that. They are corporate fictions that do not ignite privately stored memories from good times, bad times, or any times. Mostly, they ignite memories of looking at the ads themselves—in magazines, on roadway billboards, or elsewhere—giving a sense of déjà vu. (What is being done to me? Something, but I can’t name it.)
Koons himself, whenever discussing Luxury and Degradation—in a MoMA lecture, in a TV documentary made about him—seems habitually to absent the conjunction, saying instead, “Luxury Degradation,” suggesting that one modifies the other, the degradation of luxury, or luxurious degradation. A lot of Koons’s works, giant puppies made of flowers, or Michael Jackson cuddling his pet chimp Bubbles, or the bows, hearts, and balloon dogs of his series Celebration, are about gazing upon images and objects that reflect back as splendid and universal—or so the account goes of Koons’s populist appeal. Everybody loves puppies and hearts and ribbons. They’re universal. Liquor, too, is universal. But it isn’t a touchstone of carefree moments. And thus the pieces in Luxury and Degradation don’t contribute to Koons’s undisputed status as the artist most loved by children, a Bernini for the masses with a monopoly on the kitsch-sublime. Children who can say unabashedly that the giant puppy in flowers is art would not know that the liquor ads are art. And because the liquor ads are such uninflected appropriation—reprints in oil on canvas of the originals—the average museumgoer may see the ads as generational, nostalgic, but remain unsure what they are, what they are doing. And without that nostalgic layer—let’s pretend it’s 1986, and these ads are contemporary—what is the effect?
This body of work also includes fabricated stainless-steel replicas of liquor company “collectibles,” such as Jim Beam miniatures of a steam train and a Model A Ford, as well as a travel bar based on one that Koons’s father, a furniture salesman and interior decorator, apparently owned. What person ever used a travel bar? No one. Characters in Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor stories use travel bars. Lonely salesmen who die unattended on the side of the road.
Koons’s steam train is a set of cars cast in stainless steel, the material used in fermentation vats, filled with whiskey, and sealed with a tax stamp. Break the seal, enjoy the liquor, and you get a perfect lesson in art’s auratic qualities: you drink the value, wreck the art. Koons’s own comment about the materials he chose was that stainless steel looks fancy but is proletarian, “what pots and pans are made of.” But the kitsch objects he’s copying are proletarian to begin with, now downsized (and transubstantiated) into a limited number of artworks that will not be flooding eBay and the shelves of thrift stores, as the original “collectibles” do.
If we made a star map of appropriation, advertising, alcohol, and America, we could plot the obvious points: Jasper Johns (who replicated cans of Ballantine Ale in solid bronze); Andy Warhol (who joked that he could have been even more famous if only cult leader Jim Jones had poisoned his followers with Campbell’s soup instead of Flavor Aid); Richard Prince (whose Marlboro Man evokes addiction and premature death as rugged individualism, iconography, men and the West); Cady Noland (who, like Richard Prince, evokes iconography, men and the West—but as chain-link fencing, Budweiser cans, barricades, ripped flags). Meanwhile, Koons’s liquor ads are not a commentary, nor are they an ironic appropriation. They are a straight appropriation. While Prince is emphasizing the power of the myth and Noland is draining myth to the bottom of the vat, Koons is replicating the myth itself, in its seemingly empty formality.
The liquor ads are mysterious and ambivalent. They are plain old advertising and, like advertising, flat and ungiving. They take a moment that is pretend-eternal in its representation of an idea, a demographic or fantasy demographic, and they redouble that moment: render it brighter and more garish—but, as ever, eternally mute. Since Vance Packard’s 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, we’ve all understood that ads use varying degrees of nuance to seed desire. Packard opened the discourse on the power of suggestion. Later came Subliminal Seduction (1974) by Wilson Bryan Key, who saw satanic imagery in the ice cubes of liquor ads and the word “sex” imprinted on the surface of Ritz crackers—providing, unwittingly, a perfect straw man for the ad industry, which could claim Key was a lunatic. Urban legend of the seventies had it that grocery stores played hidden messages in their Muzak, asking customers, sotto voce, not to steal.
One could argue that the Cold War made everyone paranoid about mind control, but the cunning of the marketplace, the structural requirement for demand, gives all the cause a person needs to feel manipulated. Advertisers are sophisticated, at least about the people they hire: those with quick minds and a deft understanding of the relation between language and image. It’s no accident that William Gaddis wrote text for corporate brochures and that Don DeLillo produced copy for Ogilvy & Mather.
The liquor ads that Koons chose to reproduce, a process that involved going to the original agencies and borrowing the printing plates for each image, are all staged scenes with semidetached captions. The words float free but remain inside the frame of the image. Each advertisement is a scene, a make-believe-realist portrait of contrived life, which functions as a sort of temporal hinge, pointing to what might have just been taking place and, more important, what will happen next. The caption, meanwhile, guides us to an interpretation of what we see and what we can intuit as imminent. It is choreography. And we are choreography too: trained to read these things in a certain way. Commercials utilize configurations of men and women in tableaux of “hyper-ritualization,” as the sociologist Erving Goffman calls it. Ingrained in us is the index to the signals we see. Also ingrained in us is the instinct to decode the scene. But the decoding requires small leaps. The scenes lack information. They are oblique, truncated, and in some cases abstract.
“I assume you drink Martell,” the attractive virago with shining white eyes says. I remember this ad. It was on billboards all over America in the mid-1980s. You assumed correctly, lady friend. Whatever she assumes is fine. It doesn’t matter what she assumes. The answer is yes.
“I could go for something Gordon’s.” The man tugs on the woman’s shirttail as she dips her brush, an easel before her. They’re on the beach. She’s trying to paint. He’s trying to distract her. I love it when you play like you have a hobby You’re beautiful when you’re concentrating You’re cute when you’re serious. When you insist on this… plein air thing. Also I love your “tabula rasa” low-cut white-on-white outfit, which is waiting to get splattered with… ocean spray? A bit of paint? He plays the gentle, supportive companion who will bide his time until he can transition from the (playacted) role of sidekick, doing nothing but enjoying the negative ions at the beach while she paints, to his real position as dominant enabler, who pours her a drink. Screw the paints and the easel, I could go for something Gordon’s (how many steps away is the beach house, unseen in this image, but the point of retreat that the something he could go for involves?).
The company had another ad in the same series, a similar couple, good-looking young professionals, reading different parts of a newspaper that is spread over the floor in some kind of magnificent domicile, huge and unfurnished. Trying to decode what kind of space it is, I’m reminded of a comment in Amazons, a novel DeLillo wrote under a pseudonym, that “apartments sprawl,” while “houses ramble.” We are in the territory of the sell. The couple lounges around in a sprawling apartment somewhere on the East Coast (he’s wearing sockless loafers). It’s clearly Sunday, given the size of the newspaper dismantled on the floor. He touches her hair with the end of his pencil. It’s the same gesture, if a different pair of actors/models, as the light tug on the shirttail at the beach. It’s, Stop pretending to finish that Times crossword puzzle. What happens next is off-screen, but on the screens of our imagining. Not anything explicit. Just possibility.
What else does Gordon’s make besides alcohol? Nothing. So the message is: let’s drink. But also: female ambition must be neutralized for happy relations. Then again, it could be she who is saying it. “I could go for X.” Meaning, I wasn’t serious about this. Let’s pretend for five or ten more minutes that I was serious and then let’s go for something Gordon’s.
A similar message comes through in the Hennessy ad Koons chose to replicate. The man has been up late working on the briefs for an especially tough case. He’s the lawyer, the arbiter, the judge. She’s the partner, wife, paralegal, or girlfriend. But she’s tired of waiting around while he insists on acting out his ego needs, to be ambitious and preoccupied. Come on, honey, join me for a nightcap. That’s where the message comes in: his work is not done. He can still litigate, legislate, judge. Justice can be served, but with his woman, while putting his case to rest. “The civilized way to lay down the law.”
From two terms of Obama’s counterterrorism policy, we learned that the “civilized” way to lay down the law was with drone strikes, not Hennessy. But let’s try to look at what this could mean, in the ad, as a floating message synchronous with its image. The realm is that of domestic law, not juridical or geopolitical—patriarchal, but imposed not on children, only women.
Koons himself has called these works “sociological” evidence of the different income levels the companies target, brand to brand and ad to ad. The ad campaigns, Koons has commented, veer toward “abstraction” at the higher levels, the upper social classes.
“I just rode the subways here in New York. And I would go from one economic area, from Harlem, to the other, Grand Central Station. I got the whole spectrum of advertising. You deal with the lowest economic base to the highest level. I realized how the level of visual abstraction is changing. The more money comes into play, the more abstract.”
Koons’s example of this upper-level “abstraction” is a Frangelico ad, a liquid amber background and the words “Stay in Tonight.” No people. No dramatic tableau. It’s almost a monochrome.
“It was like they were using abstraction to debase you, because they always want to debase you.”
Koons’s linking of refinement with debasement recalls Joan Didion’s closing comment in her essay on the Getty Villa, which, she says, serves as “a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them the least.” Tacky and overt signs of luxury are for the poor. Tasteful, subdued signs of luxury are for the rich. But the very richest do not buy Frangelico. They buy Jeff Koons paintings of liquor advertisements, sure that they are in on the joke, which is how any palpable contract—between peddler and consumer, artist and critic, artist and collector—functions best.
In a mise en abyme of these dyads, the Whitney Museum catalog for the Jeff Koons retrospective included an in situ image of I Could Go for Something Gordon’s in the living room of a collector’s lavish mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Gordon’s ad is huge, above a colonial revival marble fireplace. Its acid hues—the red and yellow Gordon’s distillery label, a slice of lime—are next to a wall dominated by an abstract Gerhard Richter painting in the same registers of fire red, sun yellow, and lime green. Koons and Richter, low and a version of high, neutralize each other on adjacent walls.
But these aren’t just any walls, even among the small and rarefied world of the obnoxious rich. This is the home of disgraced former Whitney Museum trustee Warren B. Kanders, who has made a fortune from “defense equipment”—body armor, and “less lethal” weapons including stinger grenades and tear gas. Tear gas canisters traced back to his parent company, Safariland, were fired on migrants, including women and children, on the US border with Mexico in the fall of 2018.
At the height of a roiling controversy, before Kanders ultimately resigned from the Whitney board—and well before Safariland tear gas canisters were fired on crowds of American protestors in cities small and large across this country after the murder of George Floyd—I found myself in a social situation that included a different Whitney trustee, at a dinner party where this trustee felt comfortable and assumed she was with her own kind. (One of the many ironies of the art world is the palpable contract between the wealthy who sustain the art and artists who make it. The lowly writer, outside this contract, is nonetheless occasionally summoned to appear, paid in dinner, and expected to behave.) This trustee, a woman in a silver bubble jacket, assured me that “Tear gas is not only necessary but sometimes it’s really quite desirable!” The civilized way to lay down the law. “I mean, imagine if we didn’t have it!” She invoked Ferguson and other “scary” situations. I transitioned away from her and poured myself a drink.
What the trustee meant to make explicit, without having to spell it out—because why should this woman in a silver bubble jacket, esteemed patron of the arts, have to speak in a language not graced with nuance, given that abstraction, after all, is the language of the rich?—what she really meant to communicate to me was that the alternative to tear gas was shooting people, and with live ammunition, and at least none of the trustees were involved in that!