Peter Aspden has lunch with Jeff Koons for the regular Friday feature in the newspaper ‘Lunch with the FT. ‘ Except Koons decides to stage a picnic meal on the roof of the Serpentine Gallery where he currently has a show. Having controlled the environment, the artist proceeds to steer the conversation toward some of his favorite topics:
Inflatables
Up on the roof, picking at our starters, I recount my observation to Koons. “You know, I enjoy real inflatables,” he says earnestly. “A lobster pool toy: it’s a wonderful thing, it has such a great optimism to it. But it won’t last. A real toy, within three months, would become soft. Its shape would be distorted, it would eventually lose its air. So the only way it can maintain its optimism and power is to transform it into a different material.” He makes it sound like he is performing a public service. […] This is narrated deadpan, and with evident sincerity. The child-like candour of Koons’s remarks does indeed feel like he is casting a spell. I feel, after listening to his analysis, that there is no disjunction whatsoever between the world of inflatable pool toys and the symptoms of psychic well-being. A fake lobster has become a signifier of mental resilience, suddenly invested with the moral seriousness of a Crucifixion scene.
Tate Modern show of his Made in Heaven series
[As a brief aside, what is remarkable about the Made in Heaven series is the way it anticipated the ubiquity of pornographic images in the post-internet culture. What were exotic images when they were first displayed in the early 1990s are now commonplace compositions that many viewers will feel are entirely familiar.]
The Serpentine show is not Koons’s only significant London presence this year. A forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, will feature the artist’s “Made in Heaven”, a series of sexually explicit photographs that he made with his ex-wife, which scandalised the Venice Biennale, and the rest of the world besides, in 1991. Most of us would feel a little sheepish to have those intimacies recalled; but Koons doesn’t do sheepish. “I feel very proud of that work.” he says. “It was about the removal of guilt and shame. I saw Masaccio’s ‘Expulsion [from the Garden of Eden]’ in Florence and I immediately thought I would like to make a body of work that was situated after the Fall, but without the guilt and the shame.”
Koons’s Interest in His Art vs. the Public’s Interest
But his art also made coded references that wouldn’t be understood by everyone, I say: even the seemingly innocent “Popeye” paintings were full of references to Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly. “But you don’t need any of that. That’s my fun and my interest, but it is not necessarily the viewer’s interest. The works are totally open to the viewer. They invite the viewer in. And whatever the viewer’s history is, it’s perfect. This is a subconscious dialogue that is taking place, and the art is happening inside them. Everything of value and importance is occurring inside them.”
The Puppy
“It has been embraced by the people of Bilbao. There are lots of weddings there. It has brought a lot of happiness to the place. And another interesting thing about it, Peter, is that it can’t be planted incorrectly. There are 60,000 decisions to be made and none of them is wrong.”
The Monetary Value of His Work
Seeing the beauty in everything has made a lot of money for Koons. His well-rehearsed reaction to his work fetching such staggering prices is that he is glad it will be looked after, “because people tend to protect what they pay a lot of money for”. Other than that, he says, economic values “are a reflection of how you serve your community. I take it as an honour. When there is a time when [my works] are not seen as significant, I am sure those values will change.”
At Lunch with the FT: Jeff Koons (Financial Times)
