The inventive art world of Jeff Koons

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Craig Raine5 April 2012

Outside Frank Gehry's quilted, titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, there is a West Highland terrier puppy, a "Westie".

You know it's a puppy because its tilted head is larger in proportion to its body than normal: it has that cute caricature quality so endearing in the very young. It is 43 feet high, made out of 7,000 flowers and is a masterpiece by Jeff Koons. I'm looking now at a photographic reproduction, which differs slightly from my 10-year-old memory of it.

The photograph is largely green with a frosting of flowers — a greenness that assimilates Koons's art to classic topiary and therefore slightly diminishes its shock value and its originality. When I saw it, the 7,000 flowers were largely white and pink and pale blue — emulating the Westie's precious peroxide coat and embodying the irresistible sentimental allure we feel for puppies. Koons was fusing two undeniable emotional categorical imperatives — puppies and fresh flowers in pale pastel shades.

There were Japanese tourists at its base having their photographs taken. It sat, winningly, in a permanent pool of "urine" — actually, the sprinkler system that watered the 7,000 flowers.

In Pasolini's 1968 film Theorem, Terence Stamp represented an ideal of beauty — a profile, a face, wrapped in a pale cream cashmere overcoat. Immaculate. Impeccable. The ultimate aspirational love object. Until, that is, a tiny bruise of oil appeared on the overcoat in the latter part of the movie and the perfection evaporated, suddenly volatile, maculate. In his first incarnation, Terence Stamp represents the transfigured flesh that we fall in love with — the heart's hyperbole.

Then experience marks the complications of reality, the symbolic soiling of the cashmere overcoat. In the old quad of my college, there is a magnolia tree that suddenly switches on in early May and blazes for a week before depositing a detritus of petals like used toilet paper.

Koons is true to the coruscating wattage of flowers and will not, apparently, admit the obverse — those same petals anointed with rust and decay. We are used to the ironies of modernism, its sceptical interrogation of romantic feelings, but Koons is part of a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, back to Michelangelo's drawings of "ideal heads", a tradition that admits selection and improvement, a poetic treatment of reality.

To this tradition, however, Koons adds humour. Vladimir Nabokov said in an interview that most people who complained about sentimentality didn't know what sentiment was. In other words, they are dangerously allied. One man's sentiment is another man's sentimentality. This is Jeff Koons's special territory. His Puppy tells us two things, both of them true. First, human beings are hard-wired to love small animals.

It isn't affection we feel for Rottweiler puppies: it is love. They are irresistible. Second, this vivid feeling, this genuine sentiment, is also sentimental because it overrides the ambient facts — the faeces, the ferocity of the mature dog. Koons acknowledges both the improbable emotional purity and the dogged downside by constructing his tribute entirely of flowers. In this way, the floral untruth says it with flowers — and unsays it with flowers. It is at once an expression of sentiment and an acknowledgement of sentimentality.

In August 2006, François Pinault's art collection was shown at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Koons's Balloon Dog glittered cerise on a pontoon moored outside the palazzo. Inside, there were several examples of Koons's work including a pale violet Hanging Heart — a huge stainless steel sculpture that dominated the ground floor. What kind of a heart? A Valentine heart, a symmetrical heart, a Christmas tree decoration with golden bows, a Walt Disney heart with the promise of amorous, aerobatic bluebirds. It was too good to be true. It was ideal. It was enormous. It was also genuinely beautiful — as well as unbelievably beautiful.

It wasn't just a Disney animation. It was a fully realised film star in person, so to speak. You could see its aura, touch its tangible charisma, take in and be taken in by its nimbus. It was both intrinsically vulgar and vertiginously numinous. The essence of Jeff Koons, in fact — a heart all hyperbole, all advertising hype, and helpless hyperventilating surrender to beauty. The man who doesn't know much about art, but knows what he likes, also "knows" that nudity in classical art isn't really nudity at all. It is a branch of geometry, a question of form, of abstract shapes, a world from which pubic hair has been banished like the unkempt rough-work of calculation in progress.

We can look at classical nudity without the slightest danger of arousal. This is not a pornographic experience. It is an aesthetic experience.

In his pictorial and sculptural series Made in Heaven, Jeff Koons engages with this view of art. In 1991, he married the porn star and Italian politician Ilona Staller and photographed his wife and himself as Adam and Eve in various sexual situations (the marriage broke up in 1992).

As in the classical tradition, Mrs Koons is without pubic hair: in this case, though, the aim isn't euphemistic and modest, but explicit and exposed, a full Brazilian. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The series is, above all, a series. The bland refusal to register nudity is there in the marble Bourgeois Bust (1991) of Jeff and Ilona, where her upper arm is amputated like the Venus de Milo.

The photographs are transmitted like stills from a movie: Made in Heaven, starring Jeff Koons and Cicciolina. (Cicciolina was the then Mrs Koons's nom de guerre.) On occasion, the pose is far enough away for the sexual act in question to be distanced, if not discreet. On other occasions, though, we can see the artist's penis in the act of penetration (Ilona's Asshole 1991) as well as the working wife's full complement of orifices.

Jeff Koons has remarked, counter-intuitively, that what he likes about these photographs are the pimples on his wife's backside. Which are visible — if you look for them. This is a little like saying that classical nudity owes much of its impact to Euclid.

Koons is the Laurence Sterne of the art world — apparently enamelled with innocence ("I think life is simple"), but actually smart as the smart of a whip, witty, yet poker-faced as Buster Keaton (whom he has sculpted). In interviews, he has nothing but praise for his fellow artists; he is assiduously complimentary to anyone who could be described as a mentor. There is, as it were, a perpetual smile on his conventionally handsome face so unvarying that it is impossible not to detect the imp of intelligence, the innuendo of laughter.

For example. Andy Warhol did a famous series of Elvis silk-screen prints — iconic Elvis, holster tied to his trousers, revolver in his hand. Koons's contribution to this artistic topos is a woman, duplicated: nude but for a vinyl thong; completely nude but for a scrap of black material that conceals nothing of importance. Between these two images is an inflatable lobster. The picture, an oil, is called Elvis (2003).

There are other versions with a trio of identical women, in different states of nudity, but always with the inflatable lobster. It takes only a moment's thought to work out what the lobster signifies — a real cooked lobster, though red and hard, would serve Koons's purpose less accurately because the real thing isn't inflatable. The actual crustacean is one size fits all, whereas the toy inflatable version mimics the expansiveness and the retractable capacities of the penis in action.

In interview, Koons blandly explains the lobster as a reference to the acrobat-artist H C Westermann — the claws as an allusion to Westermann's handstands. I think we are looking at the original double entendre that nicknamed Presley Elvis the Pelvis. That, I take it, is the thrust of the Elvis series.

Koons is so various, so inventive, that it is no surprise that not everything works as well as the best work. And just occasionally you can detect him playing the art game: in an interview with Peter-Klaus Schuster, when there was a Koons installation in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2008, he claimed there was a dark side to his art: "Even though the outside could be joyous, the inside was a little dark. It's like the Balloon Dog having this very joyous outside, but at the same time an equestrian, Trojan-horse quality. You could feel the presence of the inside."

Excuse me. Balloon Dog is charming because it is as light as the helium inside the fairground original — and if you inhale it, you will emit a tinny giggle. Balloon Dog is actually a guard dog — guarding us against taking art too ponderously. It is immensely, monumentally lightweight. It is self-consciously lightweight.

And like all of Jeff Koons's art it is aware of previous art. Aqualung (1985), to take one little example, is a breathing kit done into bronze — bronze with all its museum connotations — but is in fact a spoof sculpture, a "found" pastiche abstract-futurist sculpture of the kind so prevalent in the Forties. The innocence displayed by Koons is very knowing.

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