Jeff Koons: A Retrospective
June 27–Oct 19, 2014
Antiquity
13
While Koons’s previous art-historical references spanned decades or centuries, in Antiquity he looks across millennia to Paleolithic and classical precedents that evoke the themes of love, beauty, and desire. Yet even these ancient sources have been filtered through multiple lenses, as Koons’s newest works subtly acknowledge how the idea of classical sculpture has evolved and been re-created over time. His model for a work like Metallic Venus is not a Greek or Roman original, but a porcelain knickknack, itself likely based on a later copy. Koons marks his place in this chain of history by using CT scans and other forms of digital imaging to aid in translating his sources into stone or stainless steel, walking a fine line between high and low references, the original and the copy, the traditional and the startlingly new.
Antiquity 3, 2009–11
Jeff Koons, Antiquity 3, 2009–11. Oil on canvas; 102 x 138 in. (259.1 x 350.5 cm). Private collection; courtesy Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte. © Jeff Koons
The central image in Antiquity 3 is based on a photograph Koons shot of the actress Gretchen Mol posing as the 1950s pin-up star Bettie Page. Ringed by classical statues and straddling an inflatable dolphin, she represents a contemporary Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, whom the ancients often depicted astride the dolphin that delivered her from the sea. Here Koons playfully connects past and present and riffs on an enduring, if contested, ideal of female beauty, while suggesting that celebrities are the true gods of our time. Koons also addresses the very nature of art’s illusory powers in this series. All of the source images are themselves representations of other things—a photograph of an actress playing someone else, a toy in the shape of a dolphin, a marker drawing of a sailboat, and statues in the guise of women serving as goddesses.