Jeff Koons – La Rétrospective Unsettling Pop Reflections
Broodthaers announced his debut as a visual artist with the statement that it was the thought of making something insincere that got him started straightaway. With Koons, we are troubled by an artist who is all too sincere, giving us a plain affirmation of art, banality and beauty all at once. We are troubled by his unconcealed ambition to make ‘beautiful’ works for ‘everyone’ (including his collectors). His work oozes this ‘certain brazenness’, as stated on the walls of Koons’s La Rétrospective in the Centre Pompidou.
Koons’s work leaves very few untouched. For instance, it incites most visitors to make biased close-ups. Even some photos from the catalogue give strange close-ups rather than a detached overview of the works. Also, the texts on the wall accompanying the work are curiously cheerful, blatantly promotional even – it reads as a press release. On Michael Jackson and Bubbles from 1988: “Jeff Koons’s magnificent, meticulous rendering of the extraordinary gilded porcelain sculpture of the ‘King of pop’ and his monkey Bubbles harks back to the decorative excesses of Rococo art.” It seems that everyone is losing it when facing a Koons. Whatever one holds of Koons, one must admit the works are dazzling, it does amass a crowd in awe.
What I hadn’t expected was to be enchanted too, to be faced with works that are flawless, untouchable almost. Koons on the aforementioned Michael Jackson and Bubbles: “There is this uplifting quality about it, this feeling of one’s social standing being increased just by being around the material.” After 26 years it still looks impeccable. The proof: it’s immune to parody. Paul McCarthy’s golden pastiche of this work leaves its aura intact. Or take Jonathan Monk’s Deflated Sculpture (I-III) that is more than just a commentary, first and foremost a bad copy: it mostly points towards the perfection and resulting daze that it lacks.
This exhibition is so unsettling because it shows a gamut of works that deal with taste, shame, self-advertisement and class struggle, underlining Koons’s ambition to relieve the viewer of his burden of cultural guilt and shame. When Koons depicts himself as a boy in a ski suit pushing a pig with two cherubs, who is he then ushering in banality? If we find Koons disturbing, it might be because we have a hunch to whom the pig is referring. This is quite ironic: precisely because Koons wants to make art that doesn’t intimidate the viewer, it is found deeply unsettling by most middle and high-brow spectators. One is not accustomed to look at art that is overtly presented as a shiny commodity, pumped up with nothing but joy, bland conviction and craftsmanship.
If one visits the exhibition late in the evening, and if one listens closely, one can hear pop songs played in the nearby restaurant Le Georges resounding in the exhibition. Maybe one doesn’t like looking at glistening objects, but why would one single out Koons to proclaim this preference? Jeff Koons’s work is a neat reflection of the world that surrounds it.
What is Koons doing when he shows us the arse of the porn star La Cicciolina all the while penetrating her? It’s bad taste to most, but is it kitsch? The Centre Pompidou had to show it with a warning and the work is totally absent from his own website. However superficial Koons presents himself (“I’ve returned to the ready-made. I’ve returned to really enjoying thinking about Duchamp”), his work can’t be equated with grandiose banality tout court.
Jeff Koons – La Rétrospective
Centre Pompidou, Paris
26 November 2014 – 27 April 2015
Laurens Otto
