Content provided in partnership with
The Critics: Visual Arts - His art's banal - and that's just how he
Independent, The (London), Aug 19, 2001 by Charles Darwent
Easyfun - Ethereal Fruitmarket Gallery
EDINBURGH
It's hard to say which is the most memorable thing in Jeff Koons' Edinburgh Festival show, "Easyfun - Ethereal". Dozens of contenders jostle for choice. There's the moment when Koons, in town to talk about his work, describes his mid-Nineties inflatable silver rabbit as "a symbol maybe of the Resurrection, of the Playboy bunny, of masturbation". (Masturbation? How, exactly?) Then there is his striking appraisal of porcelain as "a very spiritual material" because "it shrinks 19 per cent in the oven". Of course, Koons' claim to have been making "a body of work in the tradition of Boucher and Fragonard" also takes some beating, as does the comparison of his picture, Donkey, with the target paintings of Jasper Johns. For sheer bravura, though, I'd plump for the moment when the artist shows a crowd of thoughtful-looking Edinburghers a slide of himself performing cunnilingus on his (now ex-) wife, and then remarks that it reminds him of Manet's Dinner on the grass. (Try not to think about why.)
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
So far, as they say, so-so. Shock is hardly a new material in contemporary art, and talking dirty in granite-faced Edinburgh is rather too much like shooting fish in a barrel. The really interesting thing about Koons' discourse - and maybe about his work - is that its shock value now lies less in its sexual frankness than in its pretensions to art.
Boucher, Fragonard and Manet are not the only artists with which the 46-year-old Koons compares himself. Leonardo, Picasso, Duchamp and the entire German Baroque also put in an appearance, as, more currently, do John Baldassari, Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock. One of the seven bright new, billboard-sized pictures in the "Easyfun - Ethereal" series contains a Rosenquist Cadillac, while another is called Blue Posts after Pollock's painting of that name.
If this sounds like something in the way of homage, though, think again. Pollock's work was about all those things - colour theory, process, action - that occupy the High-Art high ground in modernist aesthetics. Koons' Blue Posts is exactly the opposite. Its subject, referred to in the painting's title, is a blue-painted fairground ride, in front of which dance artificial lobsters and prawns with mouths made out of Cheerios. These have been snipped by the artist out of a magazine, collaged, blown up to poster size and then painted in ad-agency colours by Koons' regular fleet of studio assistants. This is not Low Art but No-Art, the process of the pictures' making as studiedly banal as the pictures themselves.
Which is not to run Koons down, because, allegedly at least, that's what he wants his art to be. One of his earlier sculptures was called Banality, with the artist starring in it as a small boy pushing along the pig from whose name the work takes its title. ("I always like to think of myself as the kid at the back," croons Koons, "with God's help, ushering in Banality.") Then again, he's his own life-sized sculpture of a myopic wooden sheepdog, "looking at the world without cultural eyes".
If all this sounds familiar, then it's because it's easy to think of Jeff Koons as the all-too-likely offspring of Andy Warhol and Gilbert and George. His appropriation in the "Easyfun - Ethereal" works of trash objects from American culture - breakfast cereals, cartoons, spangly mauve eye-shadow - follows in the line of Warhol's Campbells' soup-cans. His exquisite good manners, Mormon suits and po- faced insistence on the seriousness of what he is doing - "It's not kitsch, it's beautiful," whispers an apparently wounded Koons - are straight out of G&G.
But, as in his work, it's an act that doesn't quite come off. Koons wants us to see him as part of a commodified, over-sexualised, trailer-park world. Actually, you imagine him being a good father and settling down of a summer's evening with the latest novel from E Annie Proulx. Likewise, his work is about banality, which disqualifies it from being genuinely banal. It's not genuinely anything, except maybe slick. A picture like Niagara - a quartet of slingbacked women's feet dangling next to trays of glazed doughnuts - exists only to annoy.
The trouble is that it doesn't particularly, because we sense that Koons is faking it. Women equated with confectionery! Trash transferred to canvas (and by assistants, yet!). An artist who compares his artfully artless pictures with Baroque painting! You could bust a blood-vessel looking at Jeff Koons' new works, if you hadn't died of boredom first.
c.darwent@independent.co.uk
`Jeff Koons: Easyfun - Ethereal': Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (0131 225 2383), to 12 September
Copyright 2001 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
