Everything about the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art is over-the-top. That includes the press-conference-cum-love-in that opened Tuesday’s media preview, during which museum director Adam Weinberg whipped himself into a subdued but hyperbolic frenzy, rhapsodizing about how Koons’s artistic career had a partial genesis in a 1974 Jim Nutt exhibition Jeff saw, age 19, at the Whitney; calling Koons “one of the defining artists of our time”; and rattling off the many ways in which his career has been a “study in contradictions,” with work that ping-pongs from one polarity to the other (“accessible yet esoteric... innocent and erotic...”). Curator Scott Rothkopf was up next, delivering lines that, out of context, might cause any Martian visitors in the audience to wonder what the hell this peculiar human race was getting up to (we’d soon see, he explained, that “the balloon dog had company with the mermaid-troll.”) Koons himself took the podium among the click-clack of cameras, discussing his career in terms of a journey, explaining that art has “taught [him] how to feel” and enabled him to “become a better person.” He was enthusiastic and polite, as if he were dedicating a ship. The ship was Jeff. And then we were off, scattering through four floors of “the great Koonsian adventure,” in Weinberg’s summation.
But oh, throughout the press conference, how thickly the anticipation of eager hatred simmered! Weinberg cautioned the gathered throngs to “forget what you know and what you think you know,” but all I saw was a mob of journalists ready to one-up each other; it certainly wasn’t a matter of whether or not the Koons show would be garbage, but rather how to accurately render the degree of garbage-ness. Because, of course, within most critically minded art world circles, admitting that Koons is a decent artist is akin to wandering into an Occupy meeting and defending the meritocracy of capitalism. The difference in opinion tends to be whether you think he’s merely harmless shit, or dangerous shit, i.e. shit that symbolizes the impending apocalypse in which the market eats us and we all die, our corpses floating out to sea on a platoon of inflatable-monkey boats.
I approached these four Koonsian floors with as open of a mind as possible — not expecting to unveil some previously unheralded genius, but also not simply seeking ammunition for a predetermined this-guy-is-Satan-in-a-suit thesis. Overall, the retrospective — which is Koons’s first in New York, and will next travel to the Centre Pompidou and Guggenheim Bilbao — is brash, fairly entertaining, and as digestible as a pack of M&Ms. Much was made of how this show presents Koons’s career in narrative form, but that story is told in broad strokes, as if the wall texts themselves are really struggling to be taken seriously. The journey, as it were, goes from simple assemblages from the early ’80s — including some with lights that might be described as Flavin-with-a-toaster or Flavin-with-a-tea-kettle — through works of advertising appropriation; hyperrealist sculpture; the inevitable floating basketballs; porno-romantic kitsch; lots of mirrors and shiny things; and paintings produced by a legion of assistants and conceptualized using Photoshop. Many things are corny, probably intentionally so. Some are delightful on a surface level, though it’s mostly all surface. If the retrospective’s chronological narrative has something to teach us, it’s basically that Koons pushed the readymade in some interesting directions; that he was always striving to scramble the high with the low, as in a series of stainless steel sculptures presented here, with a tiny Bob Hope next to a bust of Louis XIV; and that he also was at the vanguard of really expensive, really high-tech fabrication methods, marshaling resources worthy of NASA to create enormous metal hearts and other baubles.
Does this make the show sound terrible? It’s not, really. It’s just that it’s impossible to get too excited about any of this. The title for this exhibition could have incorporated that over-used, awful phrase: “Jeff Koons: It Is What It Is.” How mad can you get at a giant sculpture of Play-Doh? The show might try to present Koons as someone with a critical eye on his surroundings, but the overall impression is more wide-eyed. Everything seems plucked from a bright, lobotomized America. (Is it any wonder that one Koons series, “Celebration,” shares its name with the planned Disney community in Florida?) It’s an America of shopping sprees, of kid’s toys, of crummy figurines; an America that sees dicks and boobs a lot of places where they are not; an America in which the only black people appear as basketball players, in appropriated Nike posters, or in Hennessy ads, or in the form of Michael Jackson, posing with his chimp.
Dropped like a bomb into the middle are the works from the early ’90s series “Made in Heaven,” which feature Koons with his later-wife, Italian porn star Ilona Staller. There are the requisite child-safety warnings on the walls. There is a side-room in which the non-pornographic “Wall Relief With Bird” is sandwiched between the self-explanatory “Ilona’s Asshole” and “Exaltation,” a poetic exploration of the money shot. After this it’s back to the family-friendly with the worst series in the show: “Easyfun,” a group of dumb animal-head-shaped colored mirror pieces that the wall text seems to infer were made by Koons as a form of therapy to deal with the fall-out with his marriage to Staller. Escape that room and you get to “Easyfun-Ethereal,” a series of actually interesting oil paintings whose compositions are made on the computer, jamming together all manner of imagery — corn kernels, moist lips, spurts of milk, olive-eyed lunchmeat faces — into flat, overloaded nightmares. One painting, “Bagel,” 2002, combines fishnet stockings with meat and slices of male and female bodies. There’s no real foreground or background, everything’s just tossed together, as if it’s trying to short-circuit the eye. Similar paintings elsewhere in the show play the same tricks, squishing cartoons and photographs together, reprising imagery from the sculptures in two dimensions, and layering Koonsian doodles on top of hyperrealist images of classical statues. The retrospective builds and climaxes on the fourth floor: Balloon dogs! That Play-Doh! A giant kitten hanging in a sock! All of them, per that wall text, “some of the most technologically demanding objects ever produced in the history of postwar art,” as if the measure of a work’s success might be how much it cost to make, and how big of a headache it gave the poor, put-upon fabricator.
During the introductory remarks, Koons spoke of how inspiring he’d found the Whitney as a younger man, and how it’s an institution that is especially open to young artists. It’s hard to determine what a young artist stumbling through his retrospective might be inspired to do: maybe retreat into the quiet cave of a tiny, unremarkable minimalism? There’d be no way to outdo this stuff, to make it bigger or brighter or more expensive. It’s cool, and fun, but it’s not deep, and any attempts to make it seem so are inevitably going to ring a little sad. At this point in time Koons is such a well-known quantity that he’s less of a person than a phenomena. There’s no reason to hate him for that. All you can do is go, and gawk — enjoy yourself, and try not to think too hard.
