Jeff Koons: A Retrospective
June 27–Oct 19, 2014
Banality
6
Expanding on the lowbrow subjects of Statuary, Koons’s next series, Banality, ventured further into the realm of kitsch. Unlike his earlier sculptures based on readymade sources, those in Banality are mash-ups of stuffed animals, gift shop figurines, and images taken from magazines, product packaging, films, and even Leonardo da Vinci. Nothing was too corny, too cloying, or too cute. Working with traditional German and Italian craftsmen who made decorative and religious objects, Koons enlarged his subjects and rendered them in gilt porcelain and polychromed wood, materials more associated with housewares and tchotchkes than contemporary art. As with his previous series, he conceived of Banality as an elaborate allegory, this one aimed at freeing us to embrace without embarrassment our childhood affection for toys or the trinkets lining our grandparents’ shelves.
Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988
Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988. Porcelain; 42 x 70 1/2 x 32 1/2 in. (106.7 x 179.1 x 82.6 cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons
Rendered larger than life in gilded porcelain, this sculpture depicts the late pop superstar Michael Jackson and his beloved pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. Koons admired Jackson as the epitome of mainstream appeal, and praised him as someone willing to do “absolutely anything that was necessary to be able to communicate with people.” In Koons’s eyes this included plastic surgery and skin-lightening procedures that he claimed Jackson undertook to reach more middle-class white audiences. “That’s radicality. That’s abstraction,” Koons said. With his ivory skin tone and rosy cheeks, the sculpted Jackson hints at this transformation as well as at the fraught entanglement of celebrity, money, and race in the United States. The work’s composition is indebted to Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–99), in which Christ lies on the lap of Mary after his crucifixion, an association that suggests the extent to which Pop stars sacrifice themselves for fans who shower them with an almost religious adoration.