Jeff Koons Is Back, And He's The Establishment

Striving Artist

Koons’s job at MoMA gave him the opportunity to immerse himself in the history of modernism, in particular the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, who changed art history by showing how everyday objects, or “readymades,” could be elevated into the realm of art, depending on context. Duchamp’s theories were a revelation to Koons. While at MoMA he started to fool around with a bunch of cheap inflatables, blowups of flowers and bunnies, riffing on Duchamp’s idea of readymades and propping them against mirrors in his apartment. “The sexual power of the imagery was so intoxicating to me visually that I had to have a drink,” he remembers. “I went to Slugger Ann’s, Jackie Curtis’s grandmother’s bar.”

The reference to Curtis ties Koons to the last true avant-gardeâ€"a pedigree the artist likes. Curtis, who refused to be called a drag queen, was a pioneer of the L.G.B.T. movement and, like Candy Darling, was made famous by Warhol. Koons clearly relishes the fact that he and Warhol are often discussed in the same breath these days, but in fact, as artists and personalities, they couldn’t be more different. Warhol had a double whammy of an outsider perspective: the American son of Slovak immigrants, he was gay at a time when it was a very different proposition from what it is today. Koons, on the other hand, grew up in the embrace of community, with a secure sense of belonging. Warhol liked to have young folks around him at the Factory, but he didn’t want to actually spawn any. Koons has enough kids of his own (eight) to start a touring company of The Sound of Music. Warhol was almost Zen in his grasp of the light touch in making his artworks and getting them out into the world. Koons goes through a ring of fire for each work, so much so that his finished output is actually quite slim. “We average 6.75 paintings and 15 to 20 sculptures a year,” he told me. (He i s always very exact.) Warhol was practically monosyllabic with art critics, dealers, and collectors. Koons is the opposite.

Actually, if there is anyone the artist seems to be inspired by at this point in his life, it is Picasso, whom Koons refers to a lot. Koons, at 59, has already begun a strict exercise-and-diet regimen so that he will have a shot at working undiminished into his 80s, as Picasso did. He hits his upstairs gym every day at around noon when he is in the studio, then eats a lean lunch. For the rest of the afternoon he dips into an assortment of nuts, cereals, fresh vegetables, and Zone bars. Once in a while he’ll apologize for an odor if he’s eating broccoli.

What Warhol and Koons do have in common, though, is an uncanny ability to nail an image or an object so that it catches the Zeitgeist. The first time Koons landed on such an idea was in 1979, around the time he left MoMA. He had been experimenting with kitchen appliances, such as toasters, refrigerators, and deep fryers, attaching them to fluorescent-light tubes. These gave way to the artist’s first fully realized series, “The New,” which included never used vacuum cleaners and rug shampooers, often presented in clear Plexiglas vitrines and illuminated by fluorescent lights. “I thought of them as eternal-virgin-type situations,” says Koons.

By then he was selling mutual funds to get by. The artworks got some buzz in the downtown art community, and for a minute Koons was taken on by the dealer of the moment, Mary Boone. As he whispered to trusted fellow artists, he was excited to become a “Booney,” but it didn’t work out in the end. Another dealer returned a vacuum-cleaner piece. Broke and heartbroken, Koons called a time-out and spent six months or so with his parents, who had moved to Florida, where he saved money from a job as a political canvasser.

What came next, upon his return to New York, was the game changer: his “Equilibrium” series. He was working once again in the high-pressure world of finance, this time trading commodities, but by night he was cooking up what would turn out to be his first coup. Involving a dark, Nietzschean worldview, it was almost the opposite of the cheerful Koonsian iconography people have grown accustomed to. Take two works from 1985: a cast-bronze scuba apparatus, which he called Aqualung, and a bronze Lifeboat. It’s immediately obvious they aren’t going to save anyone. Instead they’ll take you down.

The “Equilibrium” works were exhibited in 1985 in Koons’s first solo show, at International with Monument, a short-lived, artist-run gallery in the East Village. Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector, who would become an important champion of the artist’s, was stunned when he saw the show. “I was so intrigued with the basketball piece, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank,” he remembers. “I wa nted to buy that piece.” The now iconic works of single or multiple basketballs in fishtanks had taken countless experiments and many phone calls to scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard P. Feynman, who encouraged Koons to work out the right proportion of distilled and saline water so that the basketballs would neither rise nor sink. Joannou asked to meet the artist. “He was serious,” says Joannou. “He had depth. He had vision. He had an enormous world of his own that he had not even started exploring yet.” (Joannou scooped up the work for $2,700.)

The Whitney exhibition will have prime examples from the Koons hit parade, from his earliest works to his most recent, including stainless-steel objects from both the “Luxury and Degradation” series (a Travel Bar, the Jim Beam-J.B. Turner Train, etc.) and the “Statuary” series, which featured Koons’s most critically admired work, Rabbit, 1986. This mirror-polished, eni gmatic, silver stainless-steel bunny is the piece that won over previously unconvinced curators, art historians, and critics, who saw it as a dazzling contemporary update of a broad range of iconography, from Playboy bunnies to Brancusi’s soaring forms.

But Koons aspires to appeal not just to the cognoscenti. Nowhere was this more obvious than in his “Banality” series, created mostly in traditional porcelain and wood in workshops in Italy and Germany in the late 80s. The works are a virtual populist paradise that runs the gamut from St. John the Baptist to an all-gold-and-white Michael Jackson, cradling his pet monkey. The springboard for the work was found common objects and popular souvenirs, to which Koons then brought his art wand. Plenty of people checked out these artworks at the Sonnabend Gallery, where the artist had finally found a home. Soon there would be even more signs that he might one day reach his goal, which he once described rather immodestly a s wanting to create the art equivalent of what the Beatles had done.

Heaven Couldn’t Wait

Koons always captures the Zeitgeist, for better or for worse, so there is a perfect logic to the “Made in Heaven” series, which he exhibited at Sonnabend in the fall of 1991, a period in which sex went from under the counter to center stage because of AIDS. What Koons did was the heterosexual equivalent of Robert Mapplethorpe’s taboo-busting images of men having sex togetherâ€"in fact, Koons’s paintings and sculptures, created out of wood, marble, glass, and canvases photomechanically printed with oil inks, include some of the most graphic sexual imagery ever produced in Western art that went public. It’s impossible to imagine this work without its leading lady, Ilona Staller, better known as La Cicciolina (translated as the “little dumpling”), an only-in-Italy personage, whom Koons met after he saw her picture in a mag azine as a model. Almost immediately they got up close and personal. The Hungarian-born Stallerâ€"a former porn star/erotic-video icon/politicianâ€"has so far been Koons’s only human readymade, and, being human, she had issues.

The paintings Koons created of the two of them feature penetration, both anal and vaginal, and liberal amounts of semen. Discussing one of the most no-holes-barred pictures, Koons says, “What I really like about it are the pimples on Ilona’s ass. The confidence to reveal one’s ass like that. That’s like my reference to Courbet’s The Origin of the World.” And he’s not kidding.

For a while their life imitated art, and vice versa. The couple fell in love and, after a wedding in Budapest and about a year in Munich, where Koons oversaw production of his “Made in Heaven” project, they came back to New York. “My dad said that he thought it was crazy, but he was very accepting,” recalls Koons. Dad wasn’t the only one who thought it was loony.