Jeff Koons

b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania, USA
lives and works in New York City

Hardly any other contemporary artist has succeeded in attracting as much attention around his own art and life as American born and bred Jeff Koons (b. 1955). He is the most prominent of what are termed the appropriation artists, who makes art by recycling mass-produced goods and images while, at the same time, appropriating social and aesthetic conventions. With his vacuum cleaners and basket balls, shining rabbits and bathing toys, Jeff Koons leads us into a wide-ranging artistic universe, based on a desire to rock our received notions and values. Jeff Koons's art is not characterised by any particular artistic ‘vernacular' or idiom, but by means of a unrelenting stream of fresh, conceptually based series, we are urged to ponder fundamental issues such as sexuality and immortality, along with class-related aesthetic judgements. He appropriates middle-class notions of taste and style and produces work based on an idea of popular taste. Few artists have contributed as much as Jeff Koons to the discussion and elucidation of the concept of aesthetics within the confines of the art establishment.

The Banality exhibition was a big step forward in Jeff Koons's career and his search for an artistic language which communicated as widely as possible. This series comprises large, radiantly coloured ceramic and painted wood items, accomplished to the point of perfectionism. No longer relying on readymades, trained craftsmen help Koons form sculptures based on a range of stylistic and decorative influences found in popular culture. Koons has studied mass culture's iconography and material usage; what fascinates him is the manner in which elements derived from baroque and rococo became receptacles for middle-class taste. Gilded ceramics, long the preserve of royalty and the aristocracy, are today entirely democratized, tended as bargain knick-knacks and mass produced gewgaws. Koons's take on the visual domain referred to as kitsch, which he ships into the haven of art, has tended to be discussed in terms of simple dualisms or binary oppositions: is he ironic and detached, or does he love and venerate his source materials? Koons himself replies: ‘Everybody grew up surrounded by this material. I try not to use it in any cynical manner. I use it to penetrate mass consciousness – to communicate to people.' Behind these ‘revolutionary' words lies a calculated approach to popular culture. The motifs he singles out are culturally encoded and it is this code he transplants onto materials which resonate with other powerful social connotations.

Anticipating a less than generous critical response to his 1988 Banality series exhibition, Koons devised the Art Magazine Ads series and got it published in the most reputable art magazines. For Flash Art, for instance, he was photographed together with a couple of pigs to spur speculation about his character. That photo was shot by one of the most celebrated Hollywood photographers and is a good example of Koons's strategic appropriation of traditional marketing techniques. Not since Andy Warhol had an artist so effectively turned the mass media to his own account, not only as raw materials for his own work, but to foster his own person and career.

Michael Jackson and Bubbles was made for the Banality exhibition and mounted by three important US and European galleries simultaneously! The sculpture, in white and gilded ceramic with hand-painted details, is larger than life and seems enormous given the sentimental genre it refers to. The work is based on a found photo of the pop star with Bubbles, his pet chimp, on his lap. The composition was first modelled in clay, a mould was taken and finally four ceramic copies of the sculpture were cast. To do the actual work, Koons looked for the most highly skilled craftsmen around; it was a move which took issue at the same time with a middle-class penchant to judge artistic merit on the basis of the craftsmanship. Koons himself actually undermined this point in part when he admitted that none of the work had been done by the master himself.

On a base strewn with gilded flowers, the two are rendered as pallid, not very dissimilar ceramic figures; witness the prominent black eyes and exaggerated red lips on both. The chimp's expression seems quite human and he does bear a resemblance with his master – or is it the other way round? Whatever, they are immortalized as cultic or sacred personalities in an idealized state. The size of the work accentuates its fragility. A monumental work like this should be viewed with respect, pondered and, perhaps, even venerated, like representations of beings populating a super-human realm. The hyper-realistic approach and the finely graded tints evoke magnificently the fragility of the biggest contemporary stars. The situation depicted in the work deals, of course, with society's idolatry and the ever-newsworthy and increasingly surreal media narrative of Michael Jackson's personal comings and goings. He is possibly the prime example of the type of glamorous, eccentric, tragic and, as Koons so elegantly evokes, equivocal lives of the glitterati, and invites several interpretative possibilities. Koons has made a portrait reflecting reality and fantasy. His immortalization of the superstar bears witness to a principled artist who applies an extremely materialized aesthetic to seductive ends, but also to challenge public prejudice and conceptions of art. The Banality series is possibly the least homogeneous series of all, but the work ties in with the other works of the series, as indeed with Koons's work overall, in the sense that they all seek a dialectic between ‘high' and ‘low', between the everyday and the fantastic, the banal and the sublime, the concrete and the conceptual.