Jeff Koons: A Retrospective | Art & Artists

This porcelain sculpture depicts a Cabbage Patch Kid dressed in a bear costume to which Koons has added a heart sticker, a pot of jam, and other decorative elements. Such dolls were popular in the 1980s among children and adult collectors but in Koons’s hands the soft and loveable plush toy becomes a cold and hard statue. “Everything here is a metaphor for the viewer’s guilt and shame,” he commented. “Art can be a horrible discriminator. It can be used either to be uplifting and to give self-empowerment or to debase people and disempower them. And on the tightrope in between, there’s one’s cultural history. These images are aspects from my own, but everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is—absolute perfection. <i>Banality</i> was the embracement of that.”

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.

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.