Jeff Koons: Beyond taste and shame

Something about Jeff Koons gets people very bothered. When the artist appropriated in 1992 a kitsch image of a vacantly grinning couple with a litter of puppies to blissfully creepy effect, blown up to life size in polychromed wood, the greeting-card photographer who owned the image sued. Judge Richard J. Cardamone of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled against Koons, taking care to note that many found the artist “truly offensive” and that his works sold for over $100,000.

Koons’ work prompted Basque terrorists to pose as florists and arrange bomb-laden flowerpots around Koons’ giant topiary “Puppy” outside the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997. (They were busted by two Spanish policemen, one of whom was shot dead.)

Even absent puppy trouble, there are the perpetual upset clucks of ruffled moralists. Barry Schwabsky in The Nation declared Koons, in a review of the artist’s current Whitney Museum retrospective in New York City, “a cheerleader of the neoliberal economy.” (This was not meant in a friendly way.) For his part, Jed Perl in The New York Review of Books was inspired to denounce Koons as “the apotheosis of Walmart,” going on to take brave swats at “the couch potatoes who are only now wearying of reality TV.” Take that, couch potatoes!

Many critics have shored up their seriousness by scolding Koons, that cynic, that horrid philistine, that threat to the art world’s pristine reputation and high morals. But the anti-Koons brigade can ease off, as the polarizing artist’s soon-to-end retrospective at the Whitney marks the end of Koons’ reign as carnival king of the art world. His best work decades behind him, the artist has become, like his gilt porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson with pet chimpanzee, an object lesson in the perils of success. 

Koons is often taken as a noxious symptom of Reagan-Thatcher materialism because of his glorification of mass-produced images, his smooth reflective surfaces and his naked lust for success.

But it is a failure of criticism to miss the artist’s critical attitude, for the young Koons was no philistine or cynic but an engagé artist of rare and silent cunning. Take his very first solo gallery show from 1985, in which he displayed framed Nike advertisement posters (collected straight from Nike HQ) featuring star basketball players, presented framed without any comment, alongside basketballs submerged in glass tanks and bronze casts of flotation equipment: an Aqualung, an inflatable raft, a snorkel. Connect the dots and a lamentation sounds out about the cruelty of ambition in a society that promises fulfillment, even stardom, with every commercial break, all while offering ever less social mobility, with the only apparent salvation found in trompe-l’oeil deadweights that will drown you. Koons likened these basketball players to nautical folklore’s sirens and compared the call of sport stardom to the lures of art world success.

The following year, Koons displayed liquor advertisements, whose staged phoniness is all the more cringeworthy without superimposed artistic commentary, alongside liquor industry paraphernalia — think train cars containing real Jim Beam but recast in stainless steel. This is postmodern appropriation, yes, but it’s also the latest link in a long tradition of vanitas paintings, a still-life subgenre originating in the Calvinist 17th century Netherlands that mocks the vanity of fleeting pleasures, the empty promises of unattainable joys and satisfactions, in this case incarnate as metal-encased booze.

Stainless steel is a prosaic medium that Koons put to great strategic use, making soft, inflatable bunny rabbits out of the hard metal, transforming them into something arresting and sinister in his 1986 show, “Statuary.” But Koons truly came into his own in his 1988 show, “Banality,” when he tapped the hidden potential of horrid souvenir trinkets by magnifying them to enormous size, commissioning skilled craft workers to build puppies, cartoon-cute animals often with people in pairings both sacred and secular, done up in gilt porcelain or polychromed wood. These uncanny uber-tchotchkes are still pretty hilarious, and creepy nearly three decades after their 1988 show (And those griping that Koons did not make each one of these sculptures all by himself should remember that Rembrandt and Rubens also employed entire workshops to crank out product for the market.)

Strongest among them is the gilt porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, about 80 percent larger than life size. The global pop god’s face, remade by a fortune’s worth of skin whitening and rhinoplasty, is both delicately beautiful and grotesque in Koons’ rendering. There are few better embodiments of immense talent and energy giving way to destruction and masochism: the self-indulgent death wish of American power and money in a failed carnival of dreams come monstrously true.

One reason Koons is held under such suspicion is that his art constantly threatens to ruin the art world’s credibility by taking its pretentions and self-importance just that extra step too far. In 1988, he even took out an ad in ArtForum magazine that showed him smiling sweetly before a classroom of children, with slogans like “Exploit the masses” and “Banality as saviour” on the blackboard behind him, an ambiguous jab at the art world’s self-image as a shaper of consciousness and emancipatory force.

The cherished vision of the artistic sphere as a wildlife preserve of free-range subjectivity, with occasional nonthreatening center-left activism, buckles under Koons’ pronouncements and aphorisms, heavily adulterated with self-help jargon: “Art is inside all of us!” “Jeff Koons is a victim, and I hope everyone is a victim; one must be victimized in order to absorb one’s culture and participate.” These nuggets of wisdom are, of course, garbage, but they aren’t that much more absurd than most of the usual art babble.

The artist’s naked ambition reached a new degree of nudity in the “Made in Heaven” series, made from 1989 to 1991, the comic-orgasmic apotheosis of Jeff Koons: enormous portraits of him copulating in a variety of positions with Ilona Staller, a pornographic film star and former member of the Italian parliament, professionally known as La Cicciolina, who soon after became the artist’s wife. These inkjet canvases, set in a rococo artificial paradise, with matching sculptures in white marble and pastel-tinted glass, aim for a prelapsarian state beyond all shame and taste. “It takes a lot of confidence to show your asshole,” say Koons in an audio commentary for “Ilona’s Asshole,” which he names as one of his favorite pieces. Museumgoers with an eye for form will note that Staller’s immaculate anus is echoed in the tidy pneumatic crimps of Koons’ stainless steel inflatables.

The struggle for worldly success has been Koons’ great theme; it has also been his undoing. Since 1991, he has not made anything of much significance. His divorce in 1992 from his porn-star wife and a nasty trans-Atlantic child-custody fight seem to have thrown him off his game. But it’s just as likely that the fulfillment of his ambition for stardom and success has neutralized his talents.

In the mid-1990s, Koons returned to painting. Many of his canvases, which resemble bad-trip breakfast cereal boxes, are unfocused. His attempts to graft himself onto the trunk of art history in more recent works — his riffs on Bernini and classical statuary, for example — are clunky and literal. (By now Koons’ tacky assaults of the classics feel rote, ritual desecrations that have lost their magic, depleted of the nutty blasphemy of his earlier work. That said, his monumental mound of colored Play-Doh, made of polychrome aluminum and 12 years in the making, delightfully mocks the macho impasto of so much abstract expressionism.) While his inspiration isn’t wholly depleted, it is not clear how often Koons can rise above the self-imitation that afflicts most artists after they have said their bit and made their splash.

After Oct. 19, the Koons circus will pack up migrate to Paris, where, for some, it will confirm every last stereotype of American brain death. Others will discern the grinning skull inside the faceless bunny, the soul within the kitsch, and embrace Koons as a fellow sufferer in an obsessive-compulsive consumer society — “Sous le fouet de plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci” (Driven by the buggy whip of pleasure, that merciless torturer), as one 19th century Frenchman put it.

Jeff Koons — with his inside-out Calvinist excess, his mockery of all taste, his gym-tight 59-year-old bod and pathologically upbeat grin — is, in spite of or perhaps even because of his creative decline, a great American sculptor for our time.