Jeff Koons - The Emperor’s New Clothes
Comments(0) The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago has appropriated the phrase “Fear no art” Babyclothing8083 promote the museum and its various collections and exhibits. Generally, I agree with that sentiment. Art should be viewed with an open, curious mind, a willingness to at least try to understand its meaning and significance, regardless of how off-putting or just plain bizarre it may seem. However, that phrase could also have its emphasis on the second word, “Fear no art”, meaning to fear the lack or presence of art, an artless void. That interpretation applies very well to the current MCA show, a retrospective of the work of Jeff Koons.
The show holds some 60 pieces from the museum’s and others’ collections. At first glance several of the pieces appear to be inflatable plastic toys or giant balloon figures, but then you learn they are really stainless steel that have been painted. There are huge replicas of kitschy figurines, and a few pieces incorporating “ready-mades”, actual everyday objects such as vacuum cleaners mounted in clear lighted cases. Some large paintings and a brace of pornographic photos round out the show.
Ironically, viewing the show without benefit of much prior knowledge about either the work or the artist is probably more satisfying than seeing it knowing what it’s all about. It’s kind of like wandering into a couple of rooms of over-sized Disney or Las Vegas props. A huge yellow gemstone, a broken egg big enough to hatch a Prius, and the previously Americaneagleclothes2609 Thanksgiving Day Parade sized balloon animals mingle with stainless steel replicas of old statues and Jim Beam bourbon train cars. The technical expertise involved is first rate and taken as a whole it’s a reasonably entertaining Alice-in-Wonderland bit of eye candy.
That is until you peer around a corner at a display space hidden from general view and encounter several gigantic photos of Koons and his then porn star wife (who later became a member of the Italian Parliament, no less) engaged in full blown sex acts. At least it looked that way; it may have all been staged with stunt doubles for all I know. These are not images reminiscent of Botticelli paintings, demure in their depiction of human anatomy, but uncensored closeups of The Act, unflinching in their academic completeness. It’s a jolting unpleasant transition, certainly not erotic, revealing a highly narcissistic Wholesalefashion7599 of the man’s personality.
It turns out, it seems, that Koons has sex on his mind a lot. The volunteer docent giving us the tour alluded to the many and heretofore unimagined sexual components of a large number of his pieces. A stainless steel bunny rabbit with a carrot in his paw, the long handle and round brushes of a Hoover vacuum cleaner, the shape of a lobster hanging from a chain. It’s like anything either long and narrow or round or branching off gets his inner Hugh Hefner going.
He also seems to think plagiarism is great art. He has taken existing posters and print ads, framed them, and passed them off as original art because they supposedly make a statement about rampant consumerism, alcoholism (another recurring theme), or some other ism. Using ready-mades or found objects in art has a long history, going back to Marcel Duchamp’s famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, submission of a urinal to an a art show almost 100 years ago. All kinds of justifications have been made, some rightly so, about the validity of such efforts, but hijacking a Nike ad and calling it art seems to be stretching this just a tad too much.
The most disturbing aspect of all this is that he apparently doesn’t Banjo4113 any of the work himself. He has a large staff of people who build the pieces and even do the paintings using a computer generated paint-by-number technique. He’s the facilitator, the conceiver, the guy in charge of the worker bees. Not one to get paint under his fingernails. Artists, especially successful ones, have always had assistants and apprentices to help with mundane chores like prepare paints and brushes, do the heavy lifting, work with customers and so on. Some, Like Dali and Warhol, were masters of self promotion and made Rocawearhoodies9399 household names, using their vast egos and personalities to spread the word, but they all knew how to expertly handle the business end of the brush.
In a sense, he’s embodied the image many people have of the old fashioned snake oil salesman, full of hubris and bluster. He’s used a lot of art-speak psychobabble to convince people to part with a big chunk of their income in the belief that they’re getting something really special and important. The fact that many of the pieces are done as a series, Designerdiscountitalianmenswear1837 stamped out copies, doesn’t seem to deter his Pavlovian followers from throwing more money at him, salivating for the next celebrity tinged morsel. P. T. Barnum would be proud.
Denigrating artists for being commercially successful is as old as art itself. “If it’s that popular, it can’t be any good, right?” Often it’s true. Witness the supremely banal and cloying output of Thomas Kinkade. To summarily dismiss a body of work by attaching a dollar value to it is often the result of petty jealousy or a misguided sense of value. Such is not the case here. How much money an artist generates is irrelevant. How he(she) informs the work, the reason for its existence is. By infusing his rhetoric with allusions to all those isms, he becomes disingenuous, any Fauxdesignerbags9069 of meaning vaporizing like raindrops on a hot sidewalk.
The show runs through Sept. 21st, and information about it can be found at mcachicago.org If you go and view it as a collection of exuberant over-sized kitsch, it’s not bad. Just don’t look for any deeper meaning beneath the shiny surface.
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