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Jeff Koons interview: in the studio with art's greatest showman
If Jeff Koons were a country, he’d be Switzerland: immaculate, very rich, controlled to the point of OCD, and beloved of the corporate classes. It’s hard not to be seduced by the dramatic landscape once you cross the border, while wondering what dark forces might be unleashed if you were to suddenly lob a custard pie.
Koons’s New York studio, an innocuous warehouse close to the High Line in West Chelsea, has the intense air of a medical research facility, despite the occasional sculpture of a schmaltzy porcelain ballerina or blow-up lobster. Inside, a dozen or so assistants are staring in rapt concentration at computer screens. I’m looking over the shoulder of the young man nearest me, pondering images resembling 3D molecular structures, when suddenly, quietly, Jeff is among us: a neat, compact, bright-eyed man, dressed top to toe in indigo. At 63, he has a full head of brown hair, perfect teeth and the calm charisma of an illusionist.
Koons is a practised shock jock. My closest connection to his work so far came when I curated two sales of erotic art for Sotheby’s. One featured a private room containing explicit photographs of the artist having sex with his then-wife, Ilona Staller, better known as the Italian porn star and political activist La Cicciolina. (The marriage ended in 1994 with a protracted custody battle over their son, Ludwig; in 2002 Koons married the artist Justine Wheeler and they went on to have six children.)
The photographs were part of his 1990-91 series Made in Heaven which combined pornographic tropes, religious iconography and a lurid Ken-and-Barbie vibe. I’ve been told that if I mention these works, Koons will almost certainly cite one particular X-rated picture, and he does: “There’s a painting called Ilona’s Asshole that has a nice correlation with [Courbet’s] Origin of the World,” he says. “It has that type of presence. I’m very proud of that painting.” Placing his own controversial work firmly in the orbit of an acknowledged masterpiece is a typical Koons manoeuvre. Not to mention his sly vengeful gesture of giving it a title that yokes his ex’s name to a term interchangeable with jerk.
I’ve been invited to Koons’s studio to discuss his forthcoming exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which will show 17 major works, of which 14 have never been exhibited in Britain before. The Ashmolean proposed the show after a little-known Oxford undergraduate body, the Edgar Wind Society for art history, gave Koons its inaugural award for contemporary art and he flew over to accept the accolade in person. “I mean, it was an absolute honour,” he tells me. “Just interacting with the students was so meaningful to me.”
I’m a bit baffled by this. It’s hard enough to persuade London-based luminaries to grace British students with their presence, let alone an art superstar from NYC. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact we Britons haven’t typically lauded Koons to the same degree as the French, who have given him vast shows at the Pompidou and Versailles and made him an Officier of the French Legion d’Honneur.
But then, Koons is the art world’s ultimate Mr Marmite. The art historian Norman Rosenthal is a vocal fan – and has co-curated the Ashmolean show – while the late art critic Robert Hughes memorably described Koons as “the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary”. My own sense of things is that the razzle-dazzle sometimes feels more resonant than the work itself. Nevertheless, there’s something mesmerising about an artist whose intentions are so hard to fathom: is he the Joker, or the Bruce Wayne of the art world? Can someone who in person seems so earnest really be the wily provocateur of legend?
Koons was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania by his seamstress mother, Gloria, and his father, Henry, who ran an interior decoration business. When he was three, his parents praised a picture he had made and he liked the glow that gave him. (They later sold some of his works in their shop.) Art was also the one thing he was better at than his older sister, so he kept at it, progressing to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on to Maryland’s College of Art, then to the membership desk of MOMA (New York’s Museum of Modern Art), where he was known for his outlandish outfits and – eventually – for his even more provocative art.
This precision-tailored, uplifting template of a narrative resembles Koons’s approach to sculpture, which has seen him perfect a technique of creating objects without any visible flaws or casting marks. He consults boffins at MIT on the physics of it. At one point, we enter a room with a long line of his infamous gazing balls – descendants of the mirrored globes popular in 13th-century Venice – and Koons says, with zeal, that for every one used, 350 others are rejected.
Around the time of his Versailles show in 2008, Koons talked about Louis XIV’s ability to have a garden replanted overnight, if he commanded it, and you can sense how much he relished that idea. When we step outside the studio, he apologises about the litter on the pavement. I half-expect him to send out a team with brushes.
This quest for an immaculate finish seems at odds with the more untrammelled forces in his work, such as eroticism. Sex is a mess for most of us. But Koons looks blank when I quote Robert Herrick’s Delight in Disorder, “A sweet disorder in the dress/ Kindles in clothes a wantonness”, then counters by referring to his sculpture Play-Doh, completed in 2014, which exactly resembles a 13ft mound of the children’s sculpting material: “[It’s] organic. And you look at it and you can feel the violence of creation, you can feel a thumb, you know, pulling against the Play-Doh, and at the same time you can feel that the Play-Doh has dried out a little bit and is starting to crack.”
It’s true Play-Doh has an disruptive vitality that’s rare in Koons’s work. Many of his sculptures feel stiflingly inert, like a pricey handbag in a shop display. You can observe a similar phenomenon in his explicitly sexual artworks, which, despite the X-rated content, often feel strangely neutered – as if, in showing us everything, all tension and intrigue has been stripped away.
The artist sets out to strip away mystique, telling me, “Sexuality and the way people perceive themselves can be the first thing that holds people back from really being able to become the individuals they can become and having the relationship with their community they could have.”
Seen in this light, Made in Heaven isn’t about sex, so much as dynamiting our inhibitions. “I believe I’m speaking about the guilt and shame that just everybody has in some form about the understanding of how biology works, how social systems work,” Koons says. “You know, why we wear clothes, what are we hiding? What do we hide just in our social behaviours?… It’s really dealing with trying to remove as much as possible, [to the point] where somebody can just accept who they are.”
Koons says that the alchemy is not within the work, but in the person looking at it. His mantra is that “art is happening inside the viewer”, releasing “the essence of their potential”. Indeed, there’s so much talk of this potential that at times I feel I’ve stumbled into a personal growth seminar rather than an artist’s studio.
The gazing ball spiel is another of his most familiar discourses. How they are “democratic”, because they’re largely beloved of blue-collar workers, and “generous” because they allow the viewer a kaleidoscopic panorama of the world about them. When Koons incorporates them into a reproduction of a historic masterpiece, such as the Farnese Hercules, they bring the reflected viewer right into the work, meaning there are no art outsiders.
I do admire this mission to trample the invisible picket fence that says “Keep off the art!” Koons works repeatedly with “ready-mades” (everyday objects, such as the cheap children’s inflatable toys he recreates in steel) because, he says, “it’s a way to remove judgment and hierarchy… and to remove guilt, shame and judgment.” It’s true: you don’t need a degree in art history to respond to the joie de vivre of his Balloon Dog or his Seated Ballerina, more Disneyland than Degas.
Even so, Koons seems to crave critical endorsement. Time and again, he aligns himself with such masters as Manet and Leonardo, whose works his studio reproduces. But that kinship seems forced and inauthentic, not helped by the fact that when you watch a clutch of his assistants (he has 120 in all) at work on these lifeless canvases, using grids and colour-codes, you can’t help but recall a “painting by numbers” kit.
This sense of Koons as a Barnum-like showman is explored in Nathaniel Kahn’s recent art-world documentary, The Price of Everything. At the time the film was made, Koons still held the record for the highest price paid at auction for an artwork by a living artist, earned when his sculpture Balloon Dog: Orange sold for $58.4 million in 2013. (That record was eventually smashed last November when David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist, Pool with Two Figures sold for $90 million). When Kahn remarks to Koons, “Let’s face it, you’re the most successful artist today in the world,” he responds, improbably, “If that would be the case, it’s really quite humbling.”
In the film, Kahn slyly juxtaposes Koons with his rhyme-alike Larry Poons, a caustic, largely forgotten 81-year-old painter, who’s mostly filmed brush-in-hand in his dishevelled upstate New York studio. By contrast, Koons is seen at shows and in his own pristine studio, explaining at one point why it doesn’t matter that he never physically touches his own artworks. The film nudges you to make judgments about skill, authenticity and true value. Poons says with scorn, “The best artist is the most expensive artist? How could that be true?”
In one particularly cutting moment, Koons’s work is dismissed as “lobby art”, but I think that’s unfair when you consider the genuine innovation and wit of his greatest pieces. I’d happily live with his Balloon Venus, which stunningly recreates the Paleolithic curves of the Venus of Willendorf in bright pink stainless steel. I also love his original, gleaming silver Rabbit sculpture: a chillingly comic hybrid of child’s snuggle bunny, Terminator and sex toy.
By the time I get Koons alone, I’m bamboozled by contradictions. He talks of sensuality, but his work radiates detachment. He embraces the lay viewer, yet speaks in a way calculated to alienate non-initiates. He works in Manhattan, yet seems to exist in a hermetically sealed Koons-land.
When I ask him about other cultural influences, he mentions Led Zeppelin and the rapper Lil Uzi Vert. Novels don’t seem to feature, and in his recent book Jeff Koons: Conversations with Norman Rosenthal, he admits that he rarely watches films. “I think the form of the narrative that I’m involved with in my own art I find more interesting,” he offers.
When I ask if he admires any female artists, he pauses, then responds: “I’m here in New York because of Patti Smith,” telling how he heard her Horses album on the radio in 1976 “and hitchhiked to New York the next day.” I resist saying I was thinking more along the lines of Frida Kahlo and Paula Rego. But then this is a man who once said that, if he could be anyone else, he’d choose to be “intrepid” Michael Jackson (still alive at the time), citing the “radical transformations he’s carried out on himself”.
Koons is arguably at his most insightful when I ask him what “the sensual” means to him. “The joy in life,” this father of seven replies at once. “The joy of procreation. The acceptance of procreation… how life energy actually leapfrogs and the embrace of that.” As I walk away from the interview, though, I find myself recalling Johnny Depp’s interpretation of Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: a beautifully mannered, ageless maverick in absolute control of his own glorious fantasia. I’d like to be guileless Charlie Bucket, but I fear I’m closer to Veruca Salt: not worthy of the insider’s golden ticket.
Jeff Koons is at the Ashmolean, Oxford, from Feb 7 until June 9. Tickets: 01865 278 000; ashmolean.org