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.
Ushering in Banality, 1988
Jeff Koons, Ushering in Banality, 1988. Polychromed wood; 38 × 62 × 30 in. (96.5 × 157.5 × 76.2 cm). Private Collection. © Jeff Koons
For Koons, the beribboned pig in this sculpture represents America’s glut of banal culture, while the attending angels suggest the moral dimension of the artist’s desire to liberate his viewers from the shame of bad taste. He sees himself in the work, too: “I’ve always thought of myself as the young boy in the back pushing the pig.” Koons was well aware that Banality’s unapologetic affirmation of mass culture had the potential for controversy, and he wholeheartedly assumed the role of provocateur by appearing in a series of glamorous advertisements that announced his new body of work. In one, he embraces a live pig in order, he later joked, to call himself a pig before anyone else could.