Culture Jeff Koons interview
Rencontre avec le trublion de l’art contemporain.
Chiens et lapins géants sculptés à partir de ballons, tulipes en acier, statue nue de Lady Gaga... Les sculptures kitsch de l’artiste américain Jeff Koons ont été exposées dans le monde entier, non sans certaines polémiques, et se vendent pour des dizaines de millions d’euros. L’Ashmolean Museum d’Oxford propose, jusqu’en juin, une grande rétrospective Jeff Koons. À cette occasion, une journaliste du Guardian a rencontré le trublion de l’art contemporain.
To get great clarity in the balls, you really need to blow them a lot,” says Jeff Koons, with all the solemnity of a man explaining his tax returns. He gazes lovingly at his balls, which in this particular case are a row of stainless steel spheres suitably blown up to bear an astonishing resemblance to his most famous artistic muse: inflatable rubber toys. But given that Koons shot to notoriety with his 1991 series Made in Heaven – in which he photographed himself and his then girlfriend Ilona Staller in pretty much every sexual position legal in the state of New York – this ball chat really could have gone another way.
2. Koons, who looks like Pee Wee Herman and talks like Mister Rogers, is taking me around his 10,000 square foot studio in Chelsea, New York. While Koons strolls around in a quietly chic outfit of dark blue patterned shirt and blue trousers, young people in white coats skitter around doing what looks to me like most of the work: painting, sculpting, blowtorching. “Maybe I’m not on each piece labouring over it,” he says, “but I’m overseeing each one tremendously.” Without help, he explains, he “would be able to make only one sculpture every few years. It’s about the gesture, that’s where the art is.”
MONEY
3. Koons, until very recently the world’s most expensive living artist, has the calm, unruffled air that, in New York, is generally only found in the heavily medicated. But in him, it seems more like the zen of a
man who has all but the licence to print money. His works sell for multimillions. Art collector Peter Brant bought one of my favourite pieces by Koons – Puppy, a 40ft west highland terrier made out of flowers – and spends $75,000 a year just maintaining it. “Koons,” read one recent, and typical, critical assessment, “has made his name manufacturing toys for rich old boys.”
4. Of course, Koons hates this kind of chat. “The rest of the world talks so much about money,” he says, “and one of the reasons is I think they feel uncomfortable talking about art. So if they’re writing about art, and they don’t really want to talk about art, then they talk about money.” This was Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) which in 2013 fetched what was then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. But the day after our interview, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) was sold for $90m and Koons lost his title.
INFLATABLE PIECES
5. We’re meeting because Koons is preparing for his first big show in the UK since his 2009 exhibition at the Serpentine in London. I loved that show, with its re-creations of giant inflatable toys made from stainless steel and ludicrous Popeye paintings. But was it fun? No question – and it’s even more fun seeing those pieces and many more closeup in his studio.
6. His famous inflatable pieces are so realistic that when I reach out to squeeze what looks like a blowup plastic seal and find myself touching cold hard steel instead, the sensory confusion makes me burst out laughing. Scattered through the maze-like rooms in the studio are re-creations of his giant “porcelain” figures, also made from stainless steel. One, an especially kitschy image of two deer rubbing their noses together, looks like the kind of thing a little girl would pick out for herself in an airport giftshop in the 1980s, because that’s exactly what it is. “I had that figurine when I was a child!” I say in astonishment.
7. Koons nods, as if he expected as much. “That’s what I’m going for, that sense of familiarity, and you are open to it. The reason I work with readymades” – meaning already existing objects – “is to remove judgment and hierarchy. Every object is a metaphor for yourself.” In what way? “I try to make work to make you think everything is perfect in itself. It’s all a metaphor.”
ART AS A SPECTACLE
8. The new show will be at the Ashmolean in Oxford, and it’s all thanks to some Oxford students who voted him their favourite contemporary artist. Koons came to give a talk, one thing led to another, and now he’s on display at the world’s oldest university museum. Like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, it is often said that Koons’s art is best experienced in person – to get a sense of its genuine spectacle, although I’m not sure I’d recommend asking Koons about this.
9. “I hope people who view the exhibition feel a sense of wow, but realise that wow is about their own being, and what gives them that wow is their own potential in the areas they’re most interested in, not in the areas I’m interested in.” Despite Koons’s emphasis on accessibility in his work –what he calls “removal of hierarchy” – it often feels like you need either a PhD or a lobotomy to understand his explanations.