ARTS As the Toy Story films of John Lasseter remind us, a children’s toy with no child to give it life and purpose can be a persuasive image of deracination, loss, failed hope and even bereavement. Jeff Koons’ new show at the Serpentine Gallery in London abounds with such toys, or rather with trompe l’oeil representations of them, cast with fanatical perfectionism in aluminium, or represented in hyper-realist paint.
The toys are all variations on swimming pool buoyancy aids, taking the form of garish, primary-coloured and box-fresh cartoonish insects, fish and animals. Not one is presented as having been, or as ever being likely to be, played or swum with. Instead, they appear surplus to requirements, alienated and awkwardly misplaced in the household – a caterpillar jammed through the rungs of an aluminium stepladder, two seal-walruses stuffed into wire trashcans, a dolphin and lobster dangling belly-to-belly by a chain from the ceiling, a spotted dog float-boat filled with logs.
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| Jeff Koons’ installation ‘Monkeys (Chair)’ at London’s Serpentine Gallery |
It is peculiar to witness Koons unveiling his work – in this case the 12 sculptures and 11 large paintings that have been given ample space to impress both collectively and individually at the Serpentine Gallery. He is one of the world’s richest and most recognisable artists, yet last Monday he put himself across as a rather dim ingénu, given to pronouncements of almost lobotomised banality. “My interest in art is what art can be,” he says at one point and, at another, “you know, I love art history”, as if referring to a favourite cat.
Koons’ professed love for art history is by way of explanation for references to dead artists in his work. His paintings nod to Warhol and Lichtenstein and there are several works referring to the moustache Marcel Duchamp drew on the Mona Lisa. And throughout the whole show is an acknowledged debt to Salvador Dalí, most especially his lobster. Yet Koons’ use of these role models often looks gestural rather than felt. His work is generally free of the passion one associates with expressionism, dada or the surrealists.
If there is something of the Stepford android about Koons’ presentation of himself – the anonymous light grey suit, the guarded eyes and the uninflected elevator voice – this characterisation looks deliberately tailored to his professed aesthetic. “I don’t believe you can create art,” he says. “If you create, it becomes a process of design. All you should do is follow your instincts.” This is, in itself, a highly artificial, distancing and perverse idea of both creativity and instinct. Koons’ impulses have little to do with the reflex nerves or spontaneous desires of the body. His “instincts” are for hard, glossy, carefully calculated and beautifully constructed replication.
Koons suggests that this artistic outlook was induced in him by a comfortable high-consumption background in middle America. The well-to-do Koons parents seem to have had a canny awareness of market opportunities, which their son inherited in good measure, for even in these straitened times, his work can fetch an eight-figure sum. On the other hand, unlike the bling-fuelled fantasy of, say, Damien Hirst’s diamanté skull, Koons’ art is not about money as such. Its real subject, he would like to persuade us, is happiness, which he speaks about as if preaching to cult members. “Acceptance is the ultimate state of being,” he says. “It’s like being a sponge.”
The trouble with this passive, non-judgmental consumerism, in many people’s eyes, is that it leads straight into the kitsch cul-de-sac. Koons’ kitsch has been much discussed, but to criticise him on this score has rather tended to play into his own hands: the glossy everydayness of his imagery is designed to welcome and celebrate the kitsch as a token of acceptance of the world and the self for what they superficially are.
But there are indications that Koons’ commitment to bourgeois optimism, and the banality of good, is breaking down. The Popeye oil paintings adopt the cartoon character’s catchphrase “I am who I am”, as the mantra of a man who accepts life cheerfully, and without inner conflict. Popeye and his wife Olive Oyl are the subjects of five of the big paintings, but oddly the contexts in (or against) which they appear do not obviously bear out the idea of easy acquiescence to the flow of life. The plastic, spinach-wielding sailor poses, flexing his tattooed biceps, in front of a complex space of overlapping playroom motifs – stencilled trains and plastic toys. In some, however, mixed up in this are sections of bare perma-tanned female flesh, and the whole is confused with thick looping scribble-like lines. It is not an entirely untroubled vision.
There are other signs that Koons’ playroom has more than one kind of play in it. “Hook” and “Titi” feature disembodied hot-pants, G-strings and chains mixed up with the blow-up swimming pool toys, but the most explicitly sexual of the canvases is the mysteriously titled “Elvis”. It shows two poses of a centrefold nude on either side of a blow-up plastic lobster. Her skin tones are sheened, homogenised and plasticated, so that she herself becomes a blow-up toy. But, in the background, Koons has introduced elements from “Dance of Death”, a print by the American expressionist HC Westermann. This is work in a completely different register from Koons’, with its grungy couple dancing miserably in a decayed dockyard.
In Clement Greenberg’s famous formulation, “kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers but their money – not even their time”. But now, in this most recent work, Koons has begun to detain the viewer just a little longer than he used to. There are enough hints in this latest show of real emotion, and perhaps a few stains in the wall-to-wall carpet of happiness, to suggest that a new post-kitsch Koons may be emerging.
‘Jeff Koons: Popeye Series’, Serpentine Gallery, London, to September 13, tel: +44 (0)20 7402 6075
