Jeff Koons
8 November – 20 December 2002
In a 2000 interview in Parkett, Jeff Koons tells James Rosenquist, ‘One thing I always loved about your work is that when I look at the work I feel almost like a deer caught in headlights.’ It is this feeling of delirium – in his adopted Warholese – that’s induced by Koons’ new paintings, a suite of Pop-Surrealist collages that indeed owes much to Rosenquist. The oil paintings reprise the trademark Koons elements of innocence and nostalgia, consumption and sex, but are more intricate and involved, rendering explicit many of the desires and ironies that underlaid his earlier masterpieces.
Giant thongs, bagels and lox, blue fishnet
stockings, backyard pool toys – the pieces contain enough associations to
keep Freudians happy for years. They play with visual juxtapositions –
fishnet stockings and chain-link fences, for example – and with the
substitution of material that gave the Surrealists some of their best
shockers and jokes (Magritte’s The Rape, or the lobster telephone by Dalí,
one of Koons’ early heroes). In Koons’ hyperreal style, in contrast to the
rougher work of his forebears, the erotic, subversive associations of hair
and food – those classic Surrealist elements – seem less whimsical and
almost threatening. A bikini made of dark brown hair, painted like a
billboard advertisement, is less a proposition than a fait accompli, a
nightmarish possibility made real.
The swimsuit recalls the work of the sixties Imagist Christina Ramberg, who,
likewise channelling Pop and Surrealism, painted a series of corsets made of
hair. But while Ramberg was interested in the corset for its shape – it
represented a woman’s torso as well as an urn – Koons’ concern is first and
foremost in tactile material and surface aspect, and it is this focus that
makes his sculpture so powerful (the banal prettiness of the Puppy flowers,
or the incongruous stainless steel of Rabbit). This talent is best showcased
here in his depictions of food: the preservative-laden, processed,
prepackaged American brand. A ham and cheese sandwich, rendered huge, is
obscene. The Wonderbread looks like congealed Play-Doh; the slick ham flaps
out like the tongue of a dog. In Butter, a giant smear of gooey, shiny,
plasticine butter is more arresting than the enormous thong in the
foreground.
The densely packed collages somewhat give the impression that Koons became too wrapped up in the layering of images to appreciate the larger composition – they look better up close, an unusual effect for Koons, whose earlier work captured the slam-dunk visual explosion of advertisements. In the show’s lone sculpture, a blow-up dolphin (a plastic pool toy) is suspended from the ceiling by yellow chains, with metal pots and pans dangling from its underside like some sort of Nigella Lawson-inspired udder. It has neither the pithy wit of his earlier sculptures, nor the laboured complexity of his paintings here.
By the end of the nineties, Koons was obituaried as an artist whose career had peaked and ended in the eighties. A regrettable exhibition – photographs of himself and his then wife, an Italian porn star, in the act – was widely regarded as nothing more than pornography. It was followed by an artistic drought, financial troubles and a drama-spiked divorce. In 1999 Koons returned with a bold suite of paintings, titled Celebration, and he has since been approached with wariness – with viewers waiting to see if his work will fall on the Michael Jackson with Bubbles side, or on the side of Ilona on Top. In these works Koons again reveals his astute criticism of – and participation in – consumerism and pop culture, but gallantly and skillfully, through new and more elaborate means.
Melissa Gronlund