33 Artists in 3 Acts (14 page)

I request permission to take her picture as an aide-mémoire. She quickly grabs her midsized digital Canon camera and poses with it. I’ve seen many photos of her online with a camera in hand. It’s an appealing old-school feminist gesture—an assertion that she is an active image-maker, not a passive model, the subject of her own gaze even when she is the object of mine.

As we get up to leave, I return to the problem of defining artists. How do you think the American public perceives artists?

“They are interested in artists as celebrities,” she replies, stopping in her front hall to savor the question. “So you have to ask yourself: what are the characteristics that produce a celebrity? Somebody who has some kind of special mojo?” Well-recognized artists are often said to have a special charm or a secret power, an overwhelming confidence. “An artist-celebrity is like a fetish object. You love them and hate them,” declares Rosler. “You want to abuse them but you also worship them.”

Jeff Koons

Metallic Venus

2010–12

SCENE 16

Jeff Koons

J
eff Koons is frowning, with three fingers pressed lightly to his forehead. The lighting on
Metallic Venus
(2010–12) is distressing. The eight-foot-high, ultra-shiny stainless steel beauty lifts her dress to reveal childbearing hips. It’s the sculpture whose prototype I glimpsed on a computer screen when in his studio almost four years ago. Derived from a three-dimensional scan of a nineteenth-century porcelain figurine acquired online, the statue includes a planter containing living white petunias. The flowers are an odd touch, suggesting a Pygmalionesque desire to bring her to life. Venus is the Roman goddess of prosperity and victory as well as of love. More than any other Koons work,
Metallic Venus
feels like a trophy that will be coveted by members of the global elite who believe in the trinity of sex, art, and money. She is an exceedingly clever distillation of desire.

Weary anxiety marks the faces of the staff of Frankfurt’s Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, a small, erudite museum containing a concise history of sculpture from ancient Egypt to the Rococo period. It’s 5
P.M
. on the last day of a two-and-a-half-week installation. Ladders and electrical extension cords linger. A conservator with a minuscule paintbrush covers up a scratch on one sculpture, while a workman wearing white gloves dusts another. Vinzenz Brinkmann, the classical scholar who has curated this forty-three-piece Koons sculpture retrospective,
explains to me that the artist has an astonishing appetite for precise modifications. “He is very kind to us but he is strict toward his own vision,” he says. “Nothing is neglectable.”

Justine Koons is in the next room. Pregnant with her sixth and his eighth child, she walks past
Balloon Venus,
another new sculpture, giving it a cursory glance. Although this work looks like a “Celebration” sculpture,
Balloon Venus
is actually the first work in the artist’s new “Antiquity” series. The work is inspired by one of the earliest known representations of a woman, the Venus of Willendorf, a four-inch-high handheld fertility goddess found in Austria in the early twentieth century but dating from around 25,000
BC
. Koons’s sculpture proposes a new kind of idol—a high-tech grande dame whose cool, untouchable surfaces reflect the viewer. The sight of the artist’s expectant spouse between two Venuses evokes one of Koons’s more contentious mantras (which is sexy or sexist, depending on your point of view): “The only true narrative is the biological narrative.”

I meander through the Liebieghaus, noting how Koons and Brinkmann have created entertaining juxtapositions between Koons’s sculptures and the permanent collection. Koons’s gold and white porcelain rendition of
Michael Jackson and Bubbles
(1988) sits in front of a row of Egyptian mummies, while a
Total Equilibrium Tank
(1985), containing one basketball, is positioned in the spiritual center of a chapel-like early medieval room. Gary McCraw, Koons’s studio manager with the long gray beard, is pouring a saltwater mixture into the tank so that the ball floats exactly in the middle.

In a section of the museum devoted to Asian sculpture, I discover
Hulk (Friends)
(2004–12), which I recognize from a 2-D model that I saw in the studio. The completed work is a six-foot-high painted bronze version of an inflatable toy Hulk with six baby inflatables sitting on his shoulders. The piece looks as light as air and has a finish that resembles plastic.
Hulk (Friends)
took ten years to realize. It “got trapped” in what Koons describes as a spiral of “reverse engineering, endless scanning and redetailing” because the technology was initially not good enough to do what he wanted it to.

In an early Renaissance room full of painted wooden statues of saints, a stainless steel sculpture of
Popeye
makes its debut. Presiding over the space like a latter-day messiah, the cartoon character with bulging muscles holds a silver tin of emerald green spinach. It is intriguing that Koons, a slender artist with an aptitude for management, creates artworks that portray brawny characters with absurd amounts of physical power.

The next morning, I head over to the Schirn Kunsthalle, which is showing forty-five Koons paintings. Together the two exhibitions—titled “The Sculptor” and “The Painter”—form the largest showing of Koons’s work to date. Koons is an honorary local. He owns a house in Frankfurt and many of his sculptures are made just out of town at Arnold AG, a top-of-the-line fabricator whose tagline is “Please let us inspire you with our passion for metal!”

The Schirn’s vast white hall is a cacophony of Koonses. With the exception of six “Made in Heaven” canvases that have their own “adult” room, paintings from different series are mixed together such that only connoisseurs are likely to catch the conversations between them. My favorite canvases are the ones that I saw in the studio with the dots and the silver sketches meant to evoke Gustave Courbet’s erotic
L’Origine du Monde
. I often have a soft spot for works I’ve seen in progress.

At exactly 9:30
A.M.
, a PR woman waves me into a nondescript side room for my interview with the artist. As we sit down, Koons gives me a warm smile and says, “Let’s do a nice interview.” He pours us glasses of water while I tell him as politely as I can that I am familiar with his favorite adages and anecdotes so it would be great if he could resist his penchant for reiterating them and answer my questions as directly as possible.

After a number of questions about the production process and technology behind the new works, I invite the artist to reflect on his verbal strategies. Multiple meanings drive positive judgment of artworks, so it makes sense for an artist to avoid saying anything that might close down debate. The catalogue for this double retrospective contains a conversation between Koons and Isabelle Graw, a Marxist art historian,
which happily departs from the subservient apologetics often found in such books. In it, the artist says, “to keep everything in play is the most stimulating thing you can do.” I urge him to elaborate.

Koons tells me that he really enjoys speaking about his work. “The artist is living it, sleeping it . . . there is a commitment you have to this dialogue,” he says. When I press him about refusing to be pinned down, he replies: “I wish I could have better lighting on the
Metallic Venus
. It is so sexy. I am very pleased about the location of the
Balloon Venus,
next to a beautiful head of Apollo
. Balloon Venus
is a symbol of fertility. It is profound to connect through time and imagine what it felt like to be human in the past.
Balloon Venus
is feminine but, if you look long enough, its breasts become testicles and it can procreate on its own. It is like one person having sex with themselves.” Koons wins this round by countering the accusation of vagueness with over-the-top graphic detail.

I move on to a different topic, that of politics. I skip the preamble and plunge in. Are you an aesthetic radical and a political conservative? I ask. Koons proceeds slowly, explaining that he has always been attracted to the concept of the avant-garde and that he likes “the idea that we can create our own reality.” Just when I am beginning to conclude that he is like a politician who doesn’t want to say anything too specific for fear of losing votes, he offers an uncharacteristically straight answer: “I don’t believe I am a conservative. As an artist, I believe in the sense of communal responsibility.”

I suggest that his advocacy of cultural acceptance could be seen as an incitement to accept the status quo, a conservative stance. “When I am talking about acceptance,” he replies, “it is about the acceptance of everything.” Befuddled, I wonder what he means by “everything.” Does it include Marxist art historians and Nazi skinheads, Occupy Wall Street protesters and Republican anti-evolutionists? “I know you’ve heard this story before,” says Koons, and then he treats me to a childhood anecdote about self-acceptance, then one about accepting others. I try to interrupt but there is no stopping him. The PR pops her head around the door. My half hour is up.

Outside, in the main exhibition hall, the press pack has swelled to
150 people. A herd of burly photographers charge into position to shoot Koons in front of three different paintings. Dressed in a dapper gray suit, the artist goes through a succession of poses—hands in pockets, finger to chin contemplating the work, a series of squats, and then a position with his arms outstretched as if he were a kid pretending to be an airplane. At the back of the press pack, an American curator tells me, “Koons is one of those artists that whatever he thinks he is doing, it is not what makes him great.”

After the photo call and interviews with six TV crews comes the press conference, which is conducted almost entirely in German. Koons and the local culture minister share the middle, flanked by museum directors and curators. This country has more believers in contemporary art than any other. Keen to turn its back on its nationalist past after World War II, Germany embraced international, forward-looking art with fervor. Nowadays, every small town seems to have a Kunstmuseum, Kunsthaus, Kunsthalle, or Kunstverein.

As the conference progresses, the speakers pay increasingly hyperbolic homage to this Künstler. Joachim Pissarro, an art historian and curator who contributed an essay to the catalogue, delivers the final speech and ends up asserting that the “superhuman” precision of Koons’s production ties him to “the divine.” The practice of isolating geniuses, then bestowing them with saintly status, is as old as art history. Nowadays, the maneuver feels more like a marketing strategy than a credible intellectual position.

As I walk out of the Schirn museum, I think about how Koons has created his “own reality,” as he put it in our interview earlier. Curators often argue that artists need to be considered on their own terms. But I don’t think it does Koons any harm to be considered on mine.

Ai Weiwei

Hanging Man: Homage to Duchamp

1983

SCENE 17

Ai Weiwei

A
i Weiwei cannot attend his solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC because Chinese officials have not returned his passport. Having referred to himself as a readymade and his ongoing battle with the Chinese government as a kind of performance art, Ai is clear that the opening will be incomplete without him. When asked about his favorite work of art, Ai replies that he doesn’t have one, announcing, “I am more interested in the artist than in the work.”

A week after the opening of the Hirshhorn show, I am sitting at my desk, waiting to call Ai on Skype. It’s 1
A.M.
in London, 8
A.M.
in Beijing. On the wall behind me is a poster that quotes Ai. In white lettering on a black background, it states, “Say what you need to say plainly and then take responsibility for it.” I’ve adopted it as one of my mottos. In the center of my computer screen is Ai’s Skype profile picture, a black-and-white photograph of the artist as a two-year-old boy, perched on a wooden stool with one arm in midair as if he were just about to hail the world’s attention. I click on the green “Call” icon and listen to the old-school ring. An assistant answers and fetches the artist who, ten seconds later, looms into frame. He settles into a head-and-shoulders shot with a cropped forehead. His image is pixilated and his voice is occasionally garbled, but Ai seems to be receiving a clear picture and
good sound from me. I wonder if his Big Brothers have degraded the outgoing signal.