A lack of historical
awareness can be a sure sign of impending doom: those who do not know the
past are condemned to repeat it. But is it not also possible to suffer
from a surfeit of historical awareness? Too keen a sense of history can
corrupt or perhaps undercut an action altogether, much as a moment of self-consciousness
can cause an actor to forget his lines. The anxiety of influence is a malady
of this genre, and another occurs when an artist considers not past greats
but future greatness. Does every artist not wonder how he will himself
be treated by history? Even the Greeks thought art emerged from a desire
for immortal glory, though today it takes on a new form: an actorâs "glory"
is to be hounded by photographers, while an artistâs is to be dogged by
exegetes. Was it not inevitable that an awareness of this situation would
enter into artworks themselves? James Joyce once remarked that Finnegans
Wake would "keep the professors busy." History had begun to peer over his
shoulder, and the consequence was to be a portrait of the artist as a self-conscious
man. In short, modernist art about art was poised to become something very
different: art about the interpretation of art.
It is
essentially a problem as old as Eden: once you eat the forbidden fruit,
how can you patch blissful ignorance together again and become a veritable
Frankenstein of innocence? Having been at the epicenter of an art media
frenzy, how can an artist such as Jeff Koons not have the din of exegeses
ringing in his ears every time he sets out to make a work? It is not a
personal matter, a question of conscience, or a probe into the creative
psyche, but rather a profound aesthetic issue: how can the artist think
for himself? That Koons has found a way is made plain by the unexpectedness
of the terms (trust, sincerity, archetypality, objectivity) in which he
speaks of his new work, Celebration. And yet, if itâs not surprising to
assert that a social contract lies at the foundation of society, must it
sound so weird to say that an aesthetic compactöpredicated precisely on
such values as trustölies at the foundation of art? The problem of the
counterfeit alone attests to its importance, not to mention the immense
institutional mechanisms (museums, catalogues raisonnés, scholars)
dedicated to determining whether artworks can be trusted. Are they real?
Are they good? Are they art at all?
A similar suspiciousness always haunted philosophyâs view of knowledge, to the point where Descartes finally raised it into a principle, universal doubt. Has Koons discovered a concordant phenomenon, a universal doubt that belongs to aesthetics and makes it impossible even to have faith in artworks anymore? Such mistrust would be a logical consequence of half a century of "art that questions the status of art," and also of the gradual dematerialization of the art object. Philosophy had always doubted of knowledge because sensory experience, it thought, is rife with errors which subsequently reason has to correct. Now as art legitimates increasingly abstract procedures of creation, such that a readymade, wordgame, or mere idea can be "art," is it not perhaps inevitable that it take up that old prejudice against the senses? Or perhaps the causal chain is the reverse: as the contemptus corporis endemic to western tradition infiltrates even its aesthetics, must art not decreasingly appeal to the senses? Conceptual artists produce no bodice-rippers, and to whatever extent Duchamp is the patron saint of post-modernism, he is most certainly its first célibataire, its first ascetic, as well. The essentially intellectual thrust of his achievementöin inventing the very idea of the readymade, he tilted the balance away from the material object and thereby forced aesthetics to take note of the pure conceptödid for art what Christianity did for religion: it made the body superfluous. An aesthetics of perception (the Greek root aesthenesthai means to perceive) gives way in Duchamp to an epicene one of conception.
A repudiation of this asceticism was latent in Koons long before the pornographic works of Made in Heaven. Certain early works such as BUNNY were able to turn the readymade on its head simply by no longer treating it puritanically, like a chess move. Instead, they approached it by means of affect and visceral response. BUNNY was pretty, happy, glossy, funny, even beautiful. Might not the simple certainty of a sensory experience revitalize the aesthetic compact? When an artwork inspires a sense of beauty, it is as difficult to doubt the reality of that affect as of a feeling of pain. Thus do the new works of Celebration strive to bedazzle, although beauty may still be too subjective an affect to rely on. An individual might not doubt his own reaction, but does he not hope that others will share it and perhaps therefore dub the work objectively beautiful in itself? The problem of beauty conjoins that of objectivity. It is not a matter of making the artist impartial but of making the work itself more objective. Koons accomplishes this by means of hard lines: the sculptures of Celebration are crisp as cookie-cutters, and the paintings as delineated as stained glass. This is no more epiphenomenal to Koons than the straight edge to Egypt or sinuosity to the Gothic. It is important because in art clean lines are the precondition of empiricism. They induce faith in the senses. In a gradient extending from black to white, there are myriad shades of grayöask someone where any one begins or ends, and the answer will plainly be subjective. But where black clearly abuts white, there the answer will approach objectivity.
While it would
be impossible to objectify beauty in this way, Celebration strives for
universality by depicting mass-produced goods. Must these not appeal to
mass audiences? It is in this respect that Koonsâ work functions as archetype:
itâs neither Platonic form nor Jungian symbol so much as good bet. However,
the aim is not literally to reach the widest audience possible but rather
to evoke familiarity in the widest possible portion of an actual audience.
Why? Because the unfamiliar, the mysterious, gives to think. Put paint
on a canvas with a severed moosehead and weâre forced to wonder why. But
the depiction of familiar things invokes a different system of response
altogether, one based less on reason than recollection. The perception
of the artwork, in this system, is immediately redoubled by its phantom
in memory, the two fitting snugly together like two hands in a handshake,
whereas in the other system reason, mutilated, goes looking for its other
half, "meaning." Koons chose to cast many of the Celebration sculptures
in polyethylene for precisely this effect. This plastic, common in toys,
is the material with which children learn how to become adults: oneâs first
hammer and gun are always polyethylene. However, in Koonsâ sculptures it
points not forward but backward: invoking cognition less than recognition,
it turns the focus away from the artist (why did he do that?) and toward
the viewer (I remember that!). The very transition from a question to an
assertion already indicates an increase in certainty.
Such
a shift of focus is also instigated by the highly reflective facture of
the Celebration sculpturesöones not made of polyethylene are composed of
a shiny high-chromium stainless steel. This reflectivity is no more incidental
to the work than its linearity, since even the paintings mostly depict
their subjects against mylar backgrounds, and though the resulting play
of light gives the work the appearance of being constantly "on," its import
is not purely visual. What does the viewer see as he circles one of the
sculptures? It, certainly, but also himself in its surface. It is virtually
impossible to see the artwork without seeing oneself. The artist, on the
other hand, literally drops out of the picture: toys come from Fisher-Price,
games from Mattel, and art from artists, but where do mirrors come from?
It is difficult to name a manufacturer because mirrors are designed to
elicit not brand-awareness but self-involvementöso too with Koonsâ sculptures.
The feedback loop of perception and recollection induced by the familiarity
of the subject matter is redoubled yet again by the interplay of appearances.
Celebrationâs maxim is not to know but to see thyself.
In philosophy,
universal doubt is a kind of feigned idiocy. The thinker pretends not to
know anything, then proceeds forward into knowledge by means of self-reflection
(I think therefore I am). In art, itâs the opposite: the proliferation
of increasingly self-conscious, cerebral work is accompanied by a crisis
of faith in art itself. If modernism asked "What is art?", postmodernism
responds with "I donât know, Iâm not sure anymore..." Might not the antidote
to such a situation be a healthy dose of blissful ignorance? Might not
art fall from the apostates to the innocentsöthose who, untroubled by the
nature or meaning of art, carry it on with a kind of blind faith? Koons
often speaks of his works as meaning no more or less to him than to anyone
else. He does not produce art about the interpretation of art, but rather
art about the non-interpretation of art. His strategies in Celebration
are to make art beautiful (to elicit a gut response), to strive for objectivity
(to encourage faith in the senses), to give back the familiar (to sideline
reason for memory), and to reflect the viewer (to discourage interpretation
of the work in favor of involvement with the self). And the principle behind
his strategies is this: if it was knowledge that led to paradise lost,
might not idiocy be the only means to regain it?
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