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18/7/2002

Jeff Koons

Guggenheim Museum, New York

With his stated artistic intention to "communicate with the masses," Koons draws from the visual language of advertising, marketing, and the entertainment industry. Testing the limits between popular and elite culture, his sculptural menagerie includes Plexiglas-encased Hoover vacuum cleaners, basketballs suspended in glass aquariums, and porcelain homages to Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther. In extending the lineage of Dada and Marcel Duchamp, and integrating references to Minimalism and Pop, Koons stages art as a commodity that cannot be placed within the hierarchy of conventional aesthetics.

These seven large-scale paintings foreground happy-face deli sandwiches, enormous lips, spiraling roller coaster rides, and wind-swept hair all set against sublime landscapes. Working from computer-scanned reproductions taken from the media and personal photographs, Koons combines familiar yet sometimes unrelated images to create collage-like paintings rendered with photo-realist perfection.

These works recall the advertising iconography and billboard-style painting technique present in James Rosenquist's paintings. Yet by comparison, Koons's work exudes a sense of excess and effervescence. Compressed into the foreground, his subjects are purposefully flat and opaque, denying any specific social critique or psychological implications. Instead, his imagery emphasizes complete and total self-gratification, celebrating adult sexual desire and allure, as well as an ever-wanting child's consumption of popular culture.

Koons's new brand of Pop painting cleverly engages other art-historical references, in particular Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Lips, for example, is a disjunctive free-floating fantasy. The disembodied succulent lips and drifting lush-lashed singular eye recall the work of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and René Magritte, while the surrounding streams and splashes of juice echo the abstractions of Jackson Pollock, to whom Koons makes a direct reference in another painting titled Blue Poles. His fusion of Pop representations with Surrealist and abstract overtones creates a hybrid of fun and fantasy, forming a body of work that depicts gravity-defying forms of dreamlike pleasure. In creating this series Easyfun-Ethereal, Koons engages both past and present, employing the new technology of computer imagery while recalling various movements from the history of art.

IMAGE: Jeff Koons, Lips, 2000. Oil on canvas, 120 x 172 inches. Photo by David Heald.

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