Koons, Jeff

▪ 2002

      In the summer of 2001, the completed paintings from American artist Jeff Koons's much-anticipated and ongoing series of works were exhibited to great acclaim at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria. They represented his most ambitious project, Celebration, an extensive series of large-scale paintings and sculptures that had occupied him since 1993 and that included canvases and sculptural works depicting popular recognizable imagery, notably children's toys, snack foods, or a colourful pile of Play-Doh set against a Mylar-silver background.

      Koons was born on Jan. 21, 1955, in York, Pa. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art, he moved to New York City in 1976. His career as a commodities trader on Wall Street helped fund his artistic endeavours, which in the beginning involved the purchase of consumer goods and the repositioning of them as art objects. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries in the New York art world of the 1980s, Koons and his art embodied the flashy materialism and technique of appropriation that were associated with that period; for Koons, however, it was a matter of context. One of his first series consisted of brand-new vacuum cleaners placed in glass cases, lit by fluorescent lights, and showcased like precious objects or cultural specimens. He followed with Equilibrium Tanks—ordinary aquariums filled with water in which basketballs were suspended. Many visitors to his exhibits, in addition to critics, dismissed Koons as a fraud, declaring him and his work facile at best and insincere, talentless, and totally corrupt at worst. These opinions were fostered in part because of the atelier of assistants and fabricators who performed much of the labour involved in making a “Jeff Koons.” Koons, however, viewed his work in an almost moral dimension; as he explained in a 1997 interview, “I have the need to maintain a spiritual trust in the work, so if somebody is viewing it they will never feel let down.”

      The provocative nature of his work reached its high point when Koons first showed his controversial Made in Heaven series at the Venice Biennale in 1990. This group of works included small glass sculptures and numerous photographic tableaux of Koons and Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star better known as Cicciolina, engaging in sexual acts. A combination of kitsch, theatricality, and explicit sexuality, the works were intended by the artist to celebrate his love for Cicciolina, whom he married in 1991. The couple produced a son, Ludwig, but separated in 1992.

      Koons's work was also playful at times, conveying an almost childlike innocence. After Made in Heaven, he created a series of three-dimensional brightly painted ceramic figures of dogs and cats and porcelain bouquets of flowers. His monumental sculpture Puppy was an example of his desire to create archetypal images that would be understood by everyone. The 12-m (40-ft)-high puppy covered with many thousands of live flowering plants was unveiled in 1992 in Arolsen, Ger., and was later shown in Bilbao, Spain, and it most recently was displayed at Rockefeller Center, New York City, in 2000. Celebration signaled that a new, mature phase was under way in Koons's career.

Meghan Dailey

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▪ American artist

born Jan. 21, 1955, York, Pa., U.S.

      one of a number of American artists to emerge in the 1980s with an aesthetic devoted to the decade's pervasive consumer culture. Koons managed to shock the art world with one audacious work after another, from displaying commercial vacuum cleaners and basketballs as his own art to making porcelain reproductions of kitsch objects to showing homemade pornography.

      After graduating from the Maryland Institute of Art (B.F.A., 1976), Koons moved to New York City, where he sold memberships at the Museum of Modern Art. He later worked as a commodities broker on Wall Street while making art during off-hours. In the early 1980s he began making art full-time.

      In his early years, Koons characteristically worked in series. To name only a few, a series called The New (1980–83) included commercial vacuum cleaners and floor polishers in vitrine cases; his Equilibrium series (1985) consisted of cast bronze flotation devices and basketballs suspended in fluid; and his Made in Heaven series (1990–91) was a group of erotic paintings and sculptures of Koons and his former wife. Most of the time, Koons eschewed the traditional role of the artist, appropriating his work (i.e., borrowing elements from another artwork), employing commercially fabricated objects, or using objects made by assistants in a workshop. By these means, Koons addressed the implicit hierarchies of material culture by transforming both high and low images into unblemished, glossy objects of porcelain, stainless steel, carved wood, and other materials. His work also exposed how issues of status and power are embedded in everyday objects.

Additional Reading

Sarah Cosulich Canarutto, Jeff Koons (2006), is a biography. Exhibition catalogues include Angelika Muthesius (ed.), Jeff Koons (1992), in English, German, and French; and Jeff Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook (1992), Jeff Koons (1992), published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal (2000).

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