In 1997 Spanish police foiled a plot by three terrorists to blow up Jeff
Koons’s giant Puppy floral sculpture outside the Guggen-heim museum in
Bilbao just before the building’s official inauguration. Disguised as
gardeners, the men planned to carry out their mission with exploding
flowerpots, designed to be triggered by remote control.
If matters had rested there, Koons’s many detractors might have applauded the
action, such are the emotions generated by the American superstar artist
whose first major British show has just opened in London. Back in Bilbao, a
policeman was shot dead before two of the flowerpot men hijacked a car at
gunpoint and fled, only to be arrested later.
Meanwhile, in London, Popeye Series, a riotous mixture of inflatable beach
toys, soft porn and images of the buoyant sailor-man strewn around the
Serpentine gallery in staid Kensington Gardens, has brought the usual shower
of invective on the head of the 54-year-old showman, who has been dubbed
“loony Koons” and “the Liberace of fine art”.
“It seems utterly preposterous . . . that anyone should take this stuff
seriously at all, or have the gall to stick the label of art on it,” Michael
Glover fulminated in The Independent last week. Adrian Searle inveighed in
The Guardian: “Jeff Koons leaves me empty. Or is he just reaffirming the
emptiness that’s already there?”
Critical apoplexy afflicts those who see Koons as a purveyor of tasteless
kitsch and a cynical self-publicist who exploited his marriage to Ilona
Staller, the Italian porn star known as La Cicciolina, to produce sexually
explicit images of the couple, Made in Heaven.
His prices, they claim, are as inflated as his work. In 2007 his metal
sculpture Hanging Heart – a shiny balloon in the shape of a love heart –
sold for $23.6m (then £11.7m), a record at the time for any living artist at
auction.
One of the most cutting indictments of Koons came from Robert Hughes, the
renowned critic, in The Guardian in 2004: “Koons really does think he’s
Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is there are
collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy
assurance . . . of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida.”
Koons’s art emerges from an assembly line at his large white studio in the
meat-packing district of Manhattan, where more than 100 assistants labour
painstakingly to replicate his computer designs. “I’m not physically
involved in the production,” he said once. “I lack the necessary abilities,
so I go to the top people.” In this sense, he is a bridge between Andy
Warhol in the 1960s and Damien Hirst, today’s enfant terrible.
However, critics are divided about Koons’s talents. Although “sniffy” in the
past, Waldemar Januszczak, the Sunday Times art critic, is willing to
overlook the American’s “slightly creepy, gospelly persona” and applaud his
latest show: “There are so many artists out there, churning stuff out
endlessly. My test in the end is: do I remember it or don’t I? And I realise
I can’t get Koons’s work out of my head. Some of it is really beautiful.”
Interviewers have found it hard to reconcile the steamy photos of Koons and
Cicciolina in Tantric bliss with the anodyne Boy Scout confronting them. “I
couldn’t believe it was the same person,” said one. “He was very meek, mild
and platitudinous, full of ad-speak.” Small and wiry, with short-cropped
hair and an eager smile, Koons confounds further by claiming that his work
contains no hidden meaning and should be taken at face value.
Yet at other times he explains that his inflatables represent the “optimism”
of breath: “In our lives, we are inflatables. We take a breath in, which is
a symbol of optimism, and take a breath out, which is a symbol of death.”
Sex is a recurring topic in his conversation. He loves it: “Sex for me
connects the past, present and future. If I think of the word beauty, I
think of the word vagina.” However, he considers Ilona’s Ass****, an
anatomical study of Cicciolina, to be his pièce de résistance.
If Koons’s art is designed for a world with deep pockets, the same could be
said of his marriage to Cicciolina. Koons met Staller in a nightclub during
the five-year period she served as an Italian MP. “She had a top on, a
bustier,” he recalled, “but she had no pants on. I enjoyed that.” (Staller
usually campaigned in dresses that bared one breast and offered to have sex
with Saddam Hussein in return for peace in the Gulf.)
Koons conceived the idea of making a porn film with her and hired Staller for
what turned out to be a series of paintings, photographs and sculptures. His
purported aim was to remove the “guilt and shame” of Adam and Eve’s nudity.
They married in 1991 but three years later, after their son Ludwig was born,
they had an acrimonious divorce. By then they had spent a reputed $8,000 a
month on a cuttings agency to keep abreast of their publicity.
Koons was awarded custody and a battle ensued when Staller took the child to
Italy. She later gained custody and in 1998 an Italian court ordered Koons
to pay $2,330 a month in child support.
From then on, by Koons’s account, his simplistic art became a way of reaching
out to the son he could not visit: “I was trying to make art that my son
could look on in the future and would realise I was thinking about him very
much during these times.” Last year Staller began a legal action against
Koons, claiming he had failed to pay about $2.3m.
Koons now has a second wife, Justine Wheeler, an artist, and six children,
including one from an early liaison.
In a sense he is still offering the gift wrapping paper, sweets and chocolate
that he sold door-to-door as a child in York, Pennsylvania, where he was
born on January 21, 1955. His studio has been compared to the furniture
store run by his father, Henry, who employed seamstresses to craft draperies
to his specifications. Koons’s predilection for monumental art, such as the
43ft-high Puppy, is an echo of the 25ft Christmas trees which Henry, a
former military policeman who also operated a successful interior decorating
business, enjoyed covering with glossy balls.
Art, Koons discovered, was a way of getting one up on Karen, his elder sister,
who surpassed him at everything else: “My parents gave me the sense it was
something I could do better than her. Art gave me a sense of self and
identity, which I used to remove anxiety.”
To encourage their son’s talent at sketching family and friends, Henry and
Gloria, Koons’s mother, paid for private tuition. Arriving at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, Koons confessed his limitations – “I didn’t
know about Braque and about Manet” – but knew what he liked. He revered
Salvador Dali, the surrealist artist, paying him court at the St Regis hotel
in New York when Koons was 17.
After a further stint at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he moved to
New York and worked as a Wall Street broker to give himself financial
independence while he developed his inflatables and encased vacuum cleaners.
Perhaps the example of Dali and Warhol convinced him that relentless
self-promotion was a vital ingredient of fame, for he was reported to have
hired an image consultant to burnish his public persona and began referring
to himself in the third person.
Koons disputes the charge that he is commercially motivated – “Making money is
not my intention. I want to make powerful work” – and is stung by the idea
that he is a brand. Some agree. David Segal, a Washington Post writer, noted
in 2007: “Nobody in it for the money would run a business the way Koons
does.” To make his Celebration series in 1994, Koons “didn’t just
drain his bank account to the point where he briefly had to close the studio
and couldn’t afford a ride on the subway. He also spent millions lent by a
consortium of galleries that were his financial backers”.
During this low period, critics rounded on Koons as a burnt-out talent, little
more than an opportunistic showman. His naff reputation did not improve when
he produced kitsch porcelain figures, such as a 6ft Michael Jackson with
Bubbles, the singer’s pet chimpanzee, which made him famous and sold for
£3.9m in 2001. If one of the other three in the Jackson series came up for
auction now, it would fetch an estimated $20m.
Although the works in his Serpentine show were conceived seven or eight years
ago, some were fabricated only this year. Koons began buying inflatable toys
when he was visiting his mother in Florida. That is where he found the giant
red lobster (a reference to Dali’s lobster-shaped telephone) and huge
caterpillars. The rubber-ring hippopotamus, turtles and monkeys were ordered
online. Typically he buys 100 to 200 of each toy, looking for “form,
graphics and colour”.
Curiously, Koons has never met Larry Gago-sian, the New York dealer who
represents him – although not for want of trying. Koons told The New York
Times last week: “Every time I would make a date with him, he’d stand me up.
Once we planned to meet at a recording studio in Los Angeles. When I knocked
on the door, someone came out and said he [Gago-sian] hadn’t been seen for
six months.” What, one wonders, is his dealer trying to tell him?
