July 17, 2008
defending jeff koons
It was when I saw Koons’s sizzling 60-work retrospective that’s now on view in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that I started to figure him out. As curated by Bonami, the show has no walls. You see the whole exhibition at once. At first it’s a mess—like being in a mall. Slowly, however, I grasped that Koons and Bonami had transformed the entire museum into a vitrine and that I was inside it. The show turned into an architectural evocation of Plato’s cave in reverse: Instead of only seeing shadows of reality, you see everything with a vividness and clarity it’s never had before.With Coloring Book, I began to understand much more about Koons’s work. For years, he has worked on a series of highly realized photo-realist paintings of things like lobsters, employing scores of assistants to make them. Koons has maintained that these paintings refer to Dalí, Warhol, and others. Now, saying a lobster refers to Dalí is sort of stupid. But although the paintings are still pointless if looked at only iconographically, they come alive as 21st-century versions of proto-modernism if you confine your gaze to the surface itself. There are no lines to be seen: Koons has meticulously separated every area of paint into a well-defined mass or island that interlocks perfectly with every other area without ever overlapping it. It’s like looking in a microscope and seeing what had formerly been a blur resolve into distinct forms.
more from New York Magazine here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 04:06 PM | Permalink
Comments
What is the connection between Koons and the New Yorker cover of the Obamas?
Several years ago I heard a talk by Jeff Koons at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
An audience member asked if his art work was part of the then current post-modern art trend of irony. He answered "No".
As I recall he did not further elaborate on his answer. And, there was no way of refuting it!
This points up the problem with irony. It is both socially and historically contextualized and very individualized(the eye of the beholder). "Man is the measure of all things"?
Now we can see, once again, why Plato was horrified by this viewpoint .
Posted by: tom | Jul 18, 2008 9:29:40 AM
Hey Morgan, this takes me back to the early days, when you guys had that long discussion of the meaning of Art in the comments to your Koons piece. Good times. But only a couple of years later, I don't think you would find many people who would dispute the view that Koons is a great artist, don't you think? His work has been assimilated, or has assimilated our culture.
I think Jerry Saltz has written some really nice sentences here, especially, "Whether you like his work or not, Koons allows you to toggle between abstraction and reality like few other contemporary artists."
Posted by: Asad Raza | Jul 18, 2008 1:54:07 PM
Morgan, Tom, Asad & others --
Jeff Koons has the attention to detail and obsessive sense of mission of a great artist, but that's a highly meaningful way to refer to an artist -- a phrase that, when I use it, cannot refer to Koons. "Artist with a major career" is more like it, according to me. Yet, most discussion of him seems to take for granted that his stature and his gifts are just about equal, so that he is not even slightly underestimated in his own time. This is a slightly different readership than a few years back -- maybe someone can tell me why, other than to honor the hip orthodoxy involved in the call, Koons is that rare thing, a great artist.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 18, 2008 3:58:35 PM
To me, he merely seems a not very charming parade float manufacturer with a fan base. But that they are steel, his balloon works have nothing over thanksgiving in NYC; his Bilbao puppy (though adorable) merely a rosebowl entry without wheels; his porn merely the cheesecake sans taffeta atop the floats. No point mentioning the lobsters, monkeys or superheroes in this context, they belong in the Surf 'n Sand beach towel aisle.
Toggle between shlock and hype, perhaps.
But I curmudge.
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 18, 2008 4:35:57 PM
I recommend Morgan's original piece to start with. It would take a long time, and a rehearsal of the history of 20th-century art (as opposed to 20th-c. hipster orthodoxy), with special attention paid to Minimalism and Pop, to get at what Jeff Koons is doing. And then that wouldn't be enough, because artworks are not fully rationalizable, explicable objects. But in short, I'd say that few other artists are making works that are so confusingly, deeply immanent to our late-capitalist society and the tortuous ways it has redefined concepts like value, craft, production, decadence, sincerity, affection, reality, irony, nostalgia, surface, and depth.
Posted by: Asad Raza | Jul 18, 2008 5:51:47 PM
"It would take a long time, and a rehearsal of the history of 20th-century art (as opposed to 20th-c. hipster orthodoxy), with special attention paid to Minimalism and Pop, to get at what Jeff Koons is doing."
Thanks, Asad. I'm okay on 20th century art -- really. I get irony, too -- although I like it better when it's not a supreme aesthetic, because then it's forced irony, never far from camp. Sometimes I wish our era would mine some other seam -- all across the arts. And the original post + thread, which I read a while ago, was indeed fascinating. This blog is great for so many reasons, one being that people who stand outside many orthodoxies while being intensely aware of them will say what they think without unseemly worry about being hip -- worry which is itself so unhip.
Taste in art, provided it is shared by enough people, can be a very precise determinant of who enters art history and who is, in turn, relegated to the status of a footnote in the history of taste. So, I believe, taste needs to be considered in its own right, as a fit subject for criticism. Especially taste in revivals and revaluations, since that's where the art history of the future will come from, and we could be -- have to be -- reaching into that future now.
Carlos, in a self-described curmudgeonly mood above, derogates from the Koons experience along fault lines of taste that would allow me to guess the names of some other artists he likes and dislikes. If I didn't know what you were reading from reading what you've written, I could make some not too dumb guesses from your remarks above, and guess also a few names on your list of interesting artists. That which we may consider not a matter of taste but enduringly worthwhile, lying beyond the claims of taste, could itself be a manifestation of taste -- almost has to be, since we all have a taste for pondering what is ultimately worthwhile.
Thanks for letting me know why you respond to Jeff Koons. Those are some of the same criteria that moved people who responded to Georg Grosz. I am wondering now whether his works being "confusing" in the sense you describe is emotionally stirring to you -- and wish you would write more about immanence in the way you mean it here.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 18, 2008 8:11:32 PM
I appreciate minimalism & I'm actually a huge fan of pop art. My BFA came loaded with an appreciation of a very wide range of art history, as taught by artists to artists, so it's not like I have no frame of reference.
Nor am I narrow in my likes and dislikes. In this case, I am a philistine.
My first hit googling 3quarksdaily Koons, came up with a short biography by Mr. Meis that speaks to me far more than Koons' work does:
And finally:
Much as I would have regretted the destruction of the adorable puppy, that would have been a tour de force work of performance art. Flowerpots! Gotta love Spaniards, even those opposed to topiary. If Koons was behind it, I'd give him that one if he'd allowed it to succeed.
But I'll track down the original thread (unless you could post a link).
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 18, 2008 8:18:27 PM
Elatia,
You're on. Guess away! (Hint: Hate Bacon, love Freud)
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 18, 2008 8:41:32 PM
3qd Koons debate
Found it. Really good stuff.
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 18, 2008 10:02:48 PM
Elatia and Asad,
Asad, thanks for the thoughts. And I think you sum up the basic argument very nicely in your reply to Elatia (PS sorry we didn't get to watch any of the euro cup, I ended up leaving town... but let's have a drink soon).
In the end I'm not all that interested in the type of judgments that go into deciding what is 'great' art and what isn't. But, I do think it is interesting to make a claim for something, to produce reasons and thus, implicitly to attempt a CONVINCING argument as to why Koons (or anyone else) is doing something special. Of course, when disagreement hits a certain point I'm fine with it. I don't need everyone to agree that Koons is great. I.e., I'm not a Kantian.
Anywhoo... Elatia, I really think that the stuff Arthur Danto has written on Koons is the best. The Banality and Celebration essay in "Unnatural Wonders" is the one to read but there are a few others where he has something interesting to say about Koons.
I also think Douglas Coupland's piece on Koons has some great points but it seems it's been taken off-line.
If you can get hold of the Danto pieces in particular I'd be interested to hear what you think about them.
cheers,
morgan
Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 18, 2008 10:38:05 PM
Carlos,
If you’re a philistine on this one, I guess that makes me a very damaged Hellene in exile, who occasionally takes breaks from the easel to dream of fire and blood in the corridors of MOMA.
What is missing from these airy debates about art is sociological and historical analysis, either disinterested or partisan (but from the other side). Institutional Modernism destroyed the great pedagogical tradition that was born in the Renaissance with one eye focused on Greek antiquity and one eye on the natural world before them, and came to be transmitted in the grand Academies of Europe and eventually America. The level of craftsmanship found in the late 19th century ateliers is no longer possessed by anyone inhabiting those spaces, it has gone extinct. The question then: natural causes or murder? Until the collapse of the French salon and the infiltration and Babelization of juried shows, artists set the standard for works of merit. The great story of 20th century art boils down to the new direction opened up by visual modernism (which I do think is valid) but also the rise to power of the critical taste-makers of new art, who where not themselves expert practitioners in the mediums of which they judged. The denigration of “Academicism” was a central tactic in the new art critic/theorists consolidation of power, for as soon as craft is judged as valuable then craftsmen are going to have to be consulted and given a place at the table. This has not happened and so Modernism’s “Other” remains unincorporated and hence we do not have a true “pluralism” just a pseudo version, with many different styles that all swim in the wake of earlier adventures in the so-called avant-garde. I am not proposing that craft be an end in itself (though I would still prefer looking at a well made quilt or a Native American basket than that asinine balloon dog) but merely the grit that spawns the pearl. What art, other than the inbred world of contemporary visual art, is devoid of craft? Name a great poet, dancer or singer that doesn’t have it. Part of the wonder of great artistic achievement for me, whether it’s reading Browning or listening to Fischer-Dieskau, is the recognition of a fellow human’s effort and yet the awe inspiring gulf that their special ability opens between us. Koons offers nothing of this kind
And so when Danto looks at a Brillo box in a gallery and sees an art object I would argue that he is really just seeing a reflection of his institutional power that allows it such status– a necessary intellectual mirage that crystallizes the modernist critic as top-dog arbiter of cultural objects.
Posted by: Jesse | Jul 19, 2008 8:26:21 AM
Well-argued, Jesse! I am wondering if some of the synergy you miss -- between idea and craft -- is not easier to locate in Modernist design, and its fabrication, than in much of 20th century art.
You may or may not be too hard on visual artists, however, whose labors seem dissimilar to those of their musical or literary peers. With his finish fetish, Koons can't be faulted on needing a thing to be well-made, and going the distance for that to happen -- he's almost Amish that way.
I see the problem of Modernism a little differently -- not an abandonment of craft (before he he stretched it, Picasso lined the canvas on which he painted "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Kandinsky's level of craft was towering, with his studio almost a laboratory), but a crucial shift in the intended audience -- an abandonment of one audience for another, much smaller one. Visual artists are of a piece with other artists in this, if the last composer who seriously meant his music to reach everyone in the world, leaving no one out, was -- well, maybe Mahler? Once you commit as an artist to a course that will leave behind people who lack specialized -- note, I do not say superior -- intellects, then you have actually taken something away from yourself, the "I and Thou" of your very language. This puts art in danger of becoming a redoubt, even if one where there's lotsa money to be made, or a cult kept going by a vast priestly caste of critics, whose need of it is more demonstrable than that of other people.
I do not mean to suggest that art since Modernism is just a pretext for intelligent people to signal insider status to one another, when art has always been -- among so many other things -- its own business that way. What I do mean to suggest is that both artists and critics are serving taste, if taste is about endowing an ordinary object with special powers so that it can then be discussed. The search for context-independent art is probably a fruitless one, but the search for art that does not require a spell spoken over it to come alive is pretty easy to conduct.
It's difficult to think -- aloud -- about these subjects without sounding like I'm positing the famous gulf that separates the vernacular from haut chit-chat, and coming down -- Hillary-like -- on the side to which I cannot really belong. Great artists, it seems to me, obliterate these distinctions -- for they are distinctions of taste. And genius is always beyond taste.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 19, 2008 10:53:11 AM
I went and finished the previous exchange between Meis and Don. Between Don and Jesse and Elatia, it's pretty much all been said.
So I just have a final question. Given that they probably are equivalent in terms of annual income and public influence, and even though one of them can paint and the other can't, of the two preeminent business artists obsessing over infantile feel good consumerism, which is the greater: Jeff Koons or Thomas Kinkaide?
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 19, 2008 11:57:10 PM
For years I've been listening to Jesse rail against MoMA and all that it stands for, and I have to say this is the most compelling case I've seen him make so far. I'm a big fan of insitutional-reductionist arguments of the sort he makes, and I, like Jesse, have to confess that I would much rather spend my time studying up on aboriginal crafts than struggle to keep up to speed on what the Siskel-and-Ebert art-world juries deem worthy of a thumbs-up from season to season.
Posted by: Justin Smith | Jul 22, 2008 3:56:33 PM
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