Lighten Up

"Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)," 1994–2007

Jeff Koons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Oct. 26)
Jeff Koons at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) (-Sept. 21)

Jeff Koons is a bit of guilty pleasure. Shiny candy-colored balloons, kitsch, cartoons, porn -- it's the kind of thing that normally would give you a stomach ache, or that you'd hide under your bed.

Happily the artist has a unique talent for imbuing surfaces with depth, and giving lightness weight. As such, the Met's roof garden is an ideal setting for a trio of his large-scale sculptures -- standing on museum's stolid seriousness, but exposed to the air, floating free over the green canopy of Central Park.

Here we see "Balloon Dog (Yellow)" (1994–2000), a horse-size blow-up of the twisty type made by child entertainers. Flawlessly fabricated in highly reflective stainless steel down to its creases, it is a yellow-gold-tinted instant icon and mirror to our desires. "Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)" (1994–2007), an oversized red-foil-wrapped chocolate heart, has Christian associations that contrast with the pooch's pagan feel. "Coloring Book," (1997–2005), a tall flat monolith, takes us back to kindergarten with a barely discernible crayon color scribble depicting Winnie the Pooh's Piglet.

For more Koons, we head to Chicago, whose Museum of Contemporary Art is showing a career survey, with two largish galleries with a non-chronological grouping of sculpture and paintings emphasizing common themes from his break-out works of the 1980s to the present day.

Lightness and Weight

Entering the museum, we are greeted with "'Hanging Heart (Blue/Silver)" (1994-2006) in reflective ice-blue. It hangs dramatically by what appears to be thin ribbed silver ribbon, a talisman of the artist’s heavenly cool love.

His early series of basketballs in fish tanks -- submerged they appear to float like a three-pointer on its way to swish. In another half-full tank is the visual pun of a ball literally floating on water. "Aqualung" and "Lifeboat" (both 1985) are a scuba outfit and boat cast in bronze; what keeps us from drowning are made heavy enough to sink.

The illusion of weightlessness can also be seen with Koons balloon sculpture, first with smallish silver bunny ("Rabbit," 1986), and more recently with the balloon dogs and a series of works involving blow-up floating pool toys. They are detailed and realistic, appearing pliable and lightweight, made of mylar, rubber or plastic, while they are in fact solid and heavy stainless steel. Koons reveals this magic trick with "Dolphin" (2002), which has a pool-toy porpoise supporting a kitchen rack with an extensive array of heavy pots and pans.

Kitsch

Illusion and transmutation are also at work in Koons use of kitsch. He out-Warhols Andy Warhol, tapping into the tackiest of popular imagery. Here we see tacky collectible tchotchkes -- a big-head Bob Hope figurine, a Hummel-esque ensemble with cherubs -- grouped along side what appears to be high art -- a 16th Century Italian woman, a rococo mirror (the latter recently seen at the Cooper-Hewitt). There are the stunning larger-than-life wood sculptures showing an interaction between a cartoon animal character with a human figure: in one a bowtie-wearing grizzly bear stares down a policeman; in another the Pink Panther is held by a busty blonde (innocence triumphs over authority and sex). All of these objects are made to the highest standards by highly trained craftspeople, and many are even signed by their makers, not by Koons. What’s rarified is reproduced, and what’s commonplace is refined. Koons wants his art to be accessible to everyone, no art history degree required. It's irreverent and antiestablishment, but also open and embracing.

Witness the masterpiece "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" (1988), a larger-than-life baroque gold-leafed porcelain sculpture of the King of Pop posing with his identically outfitted pet monkey. It’s quintessentially Koons, a startling fusion of pop culture, kitsch and art history. MJ is the perfect subject for Koons — a tacky and ambiguously sexual Peter Pan.

(Speaking of pop stars, we ran into Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips at the show, who told us how much he wanted to touch the art works. We wonder, did he want to touch Michael Jackson?)

Childhood

Youth and innocence is everywhere in Koons work. In black & white photo light box ("The New Jeff Koons," 1980), we see the artist as a child posing with a set of crayons, an oddly self-confident smile and impish twinkle in his eyes (look at a contemporary photo -- that slick trickster look is still there). His tinted stainless steel "Cracked Egg (Magenta)" (1994-2006) is an symbol of birth and newness. And, a prelapsarian notion of sexual innocence is depicted in the halfway creepy "Naked" (1988) a porcelain sculpture of naked boy showing a naked girl a bright red heart-shaped flower with prominent phallic stamen.

Sex

Sizzling below the surface in much of his work, sex is made explicit in his "Made in Heaven" series, which includes photorealist paintings of the artist having sex with his then-wife, Ilona Staller, the Hungarian-born Italian porn star and politician better known as Cicciolina. The best of these is "Manet" (1991), which has Koons paying homage to the French Impressionist’s famous luncheon by showing cunnilingus en plein air. Perhaps he was also anticipating scandal -- "Dejeuner sur l’herbe" had caused a stir when it was first exhibited.

The series is interlaced with a stain of arch vanity -- such as in the exquisitely lifelike and comically vain white marble "Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona" (1991), capturing the couple in the midst of a corny softcore romantic embrace, and "Self Portrait" from the same year, which has the artist eyes-closed, basking in a kind of irony-infused religious self-regard.

Sex is also forefront in a series of paintings that collage his blow-up toys with images of eros. The most memorable of these is "Elvis" (2003), which juxtaposes an inflated lobster and a double image of a centerfold model with pneumatic breasts (the title may reference Warhol's famous double image of Presley). While it treads a bit too close to Richard Prince territory, the work announces that sex is everywhere, even lending adjacent works like "Balloon Dog (Orange)" (1994-2000) a fleshiness and erotic charge.

Chicago

In a fairly weak sidebar exhibition, the MCA features work by Chicago artists of the 1970s that Koons has said were an influence. He briefly studied at the Art Institute, and worked as a studio assistant for Ed Paschke. And it’s Paschke whose vivid colors and sexually charged images come closest to the Koons aesthetic; the half dozen or so other artists exhibited, considerably less so.

This isn’t Koons first return to Chicago; in 1988 the MCA hosted his first solo museum show, something they are rightly proud of.

Consumerism

Like Richard Prince, Koons has a very 1980s interest in consumerism and advertising imagery, although the latter's is more cheeky and celebratory than dark and detached. He appropriated Nike posters of NBA stars like Moses Malone as part of the basketballs-in-fishtanks series, as well a commercial images for cigarettes and liquor.

Another series of transparent tanks contains brand-new Hoover vacuum cleaners. While the tactic and presentation owes much to Marcel Duchamp's readymades and prefigures Damien Hirst's shark and sheep, the work is a paean to cleanliness and newness. It also offers a clue to the fastidiousness perfection that pervades all his work.

Like the tschochkes, he is drawn towards objects like the homely Hover, the epitome of mundane, functional consumerism. Elsewhere can be seen a toaster, a ladder, kitchenware, a cyclone fence.

Consumer cultures power to degrade is the subject of "Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Train" (1986), a beautiful recreated promotional train that the artist had filled with alcohol by the whiskey maker and sealed with a paper alcohol tax stamp. The train appears to be silver, but is actually stainless steel -- a material that Koons calls "fake luxury." He also plays with the idea of value in "Diamond (Yellow)," (1994-2005) a giant color-tinted stainless steel gem and setting that looks more like a big cartoon, or the kind of diamond you might get in a gumball machine.

Color

The Jeff Koons experience is giddy and pleasurable, tickling our inner child. One reason are the seductively sumptuous surfaces. Another is the cheeky (and sometimes creepy) superficiality of the subject matter. Then there is the artist's A-1 color sense -- arrestingly bright purples, greens, blues, oranges that just sing.