with Koons’s often perplexing references to other artists in his work, having learned that, like many of the weird-sounding things he says, they usually have some basis in logic. (There is no room for individual initiative in this shop.) I’m also O.K. His first idea for a painting may be a photograph that he takes himself, scans into a computer, and manipulates or combines with other found images from there to the final sign-off, he controls every step in what is essentially an industrial process, prowling the studio with Argus-eyed attention to the exact carrying out of his most minute decisions. Koons himself rarely touches brush to canvas. There was an impersonal intensity to the work, a flat, in-yourface authority that was nevertheless unmistakably Koonsian it makes James Rosenquist, whose subject matter and collagist technique are somewhat similar, look by comparison like an intuitive artist of an earlier period. The colors were hard and bright, with many subtle gradations. While I tend to agree with the critics who say that Koons’s best work is in three dimensions, I liked the bursting energy and declarative precision of these paintings. I want to connect people to humanity, and hopefully the parameters of everyone’s life can become larger.”įine with me. “The Hulk represents for me both Western and Eastern culture, and the sense of a guardian, a protector, and at the same time this sense of power,” Koons said, quite seriously. And the lobster there”-a swimming-pool toy in the shape of a lobster-“that refers to Dali, and to Duchamp.” Several paintings were dominated by menacing images of the Incredible Hulk, all green skin and purple tights. “I liked Elvis,” he said, “and I liked using the reference to Andy Warhol’s Elvis paintings. “That’s a ‘Triple Elvis,’ ” he said, of a canvas with three nearly life-size images of a recent Playboy centerfold model, whose facial expression reminded Koons (somewhat miraculously, I thought) of Elvis Presley. It was hard to make out what was going on in some of them, and Koons’s running commentary, enthusiastic but disjointed, wasn’t much help. Most of the new paintings, which were very large, displayed a kaleidoscopic mixture of computer-based images-inflatable toys, cartoon monkey heads, a freight train, a horse-drawn carriage, landscapes, steam whistles, naked girls-interlaced with abstract passages, and presented in a rollicking collage style that included overlays of stencilled dots. They concentrated on very small areas at a time, copying from digital printouts in which the colors were marked and identified by number. Each canvas in progress had three people working on it. They would be shown in June at the Gagosian gallery in London, and the studio was on a tight schedule. In a large room behind the office, more than twenty new paintings were in various stages of completion. Koons, who is fifty-two, looks very much the same as he did at thirty-trim and boyish, with neatly barbered brown hair and the sort of unfinished features that seem to be peculiarly American. Six or seven of them sat before large-screen computers in the outer office when the artist met me there recently. In the Chelsea commercial building that he calls his studio, Koons currently employs more than eighty people. “Now I’m taking us out of the twentieth century.” “In this century, there was Picasso and Duchamp,” Koons announced in 1990. Jeff Koons? The artist whose industrial-scale replicas of balloon animals, gift-shop tchotchkes, and other commercial kitsch now sell for upward of two million dollars? If there is irony here, it is lost on the artist. If art is ever delivered from the grip of postmodern irony, a large share of the credit will go to Jeff Koons. Koons in his Chelsea studio, photographed by Robert Maxwell.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |