The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago has been on a roll lately, with its fantastic Escultura Social exhibit of new Mexican art last summer, and Sympathy for the Devil, the much-talked about showcase of the intersection of rock and roll and art last fall, proving once and for all that it is one of the top platforms in the country for brave, unique, innovative contemporary arts programming. So I was really looking forward to its Jeff Koons exhibit, simply titled “Jeff Koons”, which opened May 31. For one, this exhibit was the first comprehensive survey of the work of this major contemporary artist, including not only his most well-known pieces but also a parallel exhibition of the works of the Chicago artists, such as Ed Paschke, who influenced him. For another, Koons himself had been very much involved in putting the show together, and had made available some pieces from his personal collection. Finally, it wasn’t a traveling show- it was an art show conceived in Chicago, which would only be seen in Chicago. Well, great expectations beget even greater disappointments, and the show, as well as the artist, Jeff Koons, has fallen with a thunderous thud, in my eyes.
I’d seen pictures of Koons’s works but had never viewed them in a museum or gallery setting. In the late 1980s and early 1990s (yikes, I’m dating myself, cough, cough), I knew of Jeff Koons primarily through his notorious romance with Ciccolina, real name Ilona Staller, the porn star who was elected to Italy’s parliament, which demonstrated that European politics was wackier than a clown in an Amsterdam coffee shop. Koons, and Ciccolina, rocked the art world with a series of soft-porn photos which were shown as part of the Venice Biennale, the leading modern art exhibition in the world, in 1990. Some of these works, as well as later, more sexually-explicit ones, are on view at the MCA as part of the Jeff Koons exhibit, and boy, do they suck (and that’s both literally and figuratively). I, for one, would rather do backstrokes in my own vomit than stare at a close-up of Ciccolina’s asshole. Yeah, that’s the kind of “art” that the Ciccolina/Jeff series, called “Made in Heaven” contains. I mean these photos look like they were taken with a Minolta Instamatic (oops, dating myself again!), and are not in the least bit artistic, erotic, provocative, or intriguing. Aside from the shock value of seeing the artist having sex or seeing his wife’s various appendages (which shouldn’t be so shocking anymore today with what you can download from the Internet), the “Made in Heaven” photographs are painfully ordinary.
But Jeff Koons’s most head-scratching, most it’s-unbelievable-that-people-paid-for-this works are not even those in the “Made in Heaven” series. The “New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10-Gallon Displaced Tripledecker” is made up of never-used, fresh-off-the-factory-floor vacuum cleaners and shampoo polishers in clear containers stacked on top of each other. And they look like vacuum cleaners and shampoo polishers stacked on top of each other. In his commentary on the audio tour, Koons says these new appliances evoke “virginity” and the “pristine nature” of things. So, should Sears be seen as a modern art gallery too, since a gazillion of these new, “pristine”, “virgin” vacuum cleaners cover the store floors? The “Baccarat Crystal Set” well, looks like a silver baccarat set that I could get at Pottery Barn. The “Dolphin” is an inflatable dolphin figure, with a collection of pots and pans looking like they’re straight out of Williams-Sonoma, hanging below it. Maybe Jeff Koons has, deep down in his sensitive, creative, expressive artist self, a no-nonsense, practical, department store buyer lurking underneath? Wow, interesting thought.
And so it goes on and on in the exhibition, works that make you stop in your tracks, aghast at the balls and guts of an artist for passing these off as art, as well as at the art collectors and art critics who hungrily lap them up and shower them with acclaim. Koons has the dubious achievement of having sold the most expensive art work ever from a living artist (his stainless steel sculpture “Hanging Heart” was sold for $23.6 million at auction in Sotheby’s New York last November). My main problem with the works in the exhibit is that most of them don’t really say or evoke anything. I get it that Koons likes to use existing, everyday objects such as basketballs, and do something different with them, such as half-submerge them in distilled water and encase them in an aquarium, to communicate, uhmmm, what? They come off really uninteresting, cold, blah, soulless, everyday objects which have not been transformed into something unique, not allowed to shed their everyday-ness. Which is so unlike the work of say, Andy Warhol, or even Richard Prince, who also deals in appropriated art. Prince’s similarly-comprehensive, but marvelously stunning, retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York which I saw last January, was full of art using everyday objects, magazine pictures, etc. which spoke powerfully to the audience, which had interesting insights about mass media, the depiction of women in art, unacknowledged homoeroticism, etc. While I’m looking at Koon’s famous “Rabbit”, I see a rabbit figure in stainless steel, not a “symbol for resurrection” as Koons’ unbelievably pretentious voiceover says in the audio tour.
I like some pieces, though. The almost room-sized “Cracked Egg (Magenta)” is awe-inspiring in scale, detail, and impact. I think the infamous “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” porcelain figure is witty, eccentric, and spot-on in ridiculing the craziness of celebritydom. But what I really like a lot is the companion exhibit, “Everything’s Here: Jeff Koons and his experience of Chicago”, where you could see Paschke’s wonderful “Red Sweeney” or Jim Nutt’s technically dazzling “Summer Salt”. These works, which were so ahead of their time in terms of technique, subject matter, and subversion of artistic conventions when they were created in the 1970s, still pack quite a punch today. Timelessness and relevance are the hallmarks of great art; unfortunately I don’t think many of the works in the main exhibition possess them.
Tags: Jeff Koons, MCA Chicago
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