33 Artists in 3 Acts (2 page)

“I thought I would start by speaking about my history,” says Koons as he begins his slideshow.
Dolphin
(2002), a sculpture of what appears to be an inflatable pool toy hanging from yellow chains above a rack of stainless steel pots and pans, appears on the large screen. The sea mammal is a meticulous painted-aluminum replica of the plastic original, but the chains and kitchenware are “readymades”—in other words, store-bought mass-manufactured goods that have been integrated into the work. After mentioning his Pennsylvanian birth in 1955, he gestures toward the rear of the Victorian theater at his mother, Gloria, who attends many of his art events. Moments later, he describes
Dolphin
as a “maternal Venus” whose blow-up valves are like “two little nipples.”

Koons has no notes. He tells us that his father, Henry, was an interior decorator who owned a furniture store, so he grew up with “a sense of aesthetics.” He understood from a young age that gold and turquoise “made you feel different” than brown and black. His older sister, Karen, was better at everything. One day, Koons made a drawing that his parents thought revealed some talent. “The praise gave me a sense of self,” he explains. It’s often said that a true artist is good for nothing but making art. Koons’s variation on this chestnut is that art was the only domain in which he could compete.

The artist goes on to identify other formative epiphanies. Shortly after arriving at art school, his class went to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he was unfamiliar with most of the artists on view. “I realized that I knew nothing about art,” he says, “but I survived that moment.” Koons explains that he likes to make art that requires “no prerequisites.” He never wants people to feel small. “I want the viewer to feel that their cultural history is absolutely perfect,” he says, smiling blissfully, then invokes “Banality,” his seventh series, which he started in 1988. These painted wood and porcelain sculptures of teddy bears, stacked farm animals, the Pink Panther and Michael Jackson took Pop art into the sickly sweet waters of suburban decoration. The kitsch figures were made in editions of three, so they could appear in simultaneous, identical shows in New York, Chicago, and Cologne.

With “Banality,” Koons departed from art-world norms in another way. He put himself in advertisements promoting the exhibitions, which
effectively launched his public persona, initiating a subcultural notoriety that would eventually turn into widespread fame. Koons devised four separate ads tailored to the most important art magazines of the time. For
Artforum
, the most academic of the publications, he depicted himself as a primary-school teacher with slogans like “Exploit the masses” and “Banality as savior” on the chalkboard behind him. For
Art in America
, he posed as a slightly effete sexual stud, standing next to two voluptuous bikini-clad girls, while for
ARTnews
he was a triumphant playboy in a bathrobe surrounded by floral wreaths. Finally, for the European magazine
Flash Art,
he appeared in a self-debasing closeup with a gargantuan sow and piglet. Koons’s foray into advertising was audacious but not unprecedented. The ads were reminiscent of a campaign made by General Idea, a gay conceptual art trio, who depicted themselves as fresh-faced babes in bed together and as black-eyed poodles. Both General Idea and Koons were playing on the expectation that artists are exemplars of honesty while advertising is a bastion of dodgy spin. They were questioning the art world’s official position that the work is more important than the artist and flirting with the potential for blatant self-promotion to kill credibility.

The auditorium is so hot that people are fanning themselves with newspapers, notebooks, even flip-flops. Koons, who hasn’t loosened his tie and glistens rather than sweats, clicks to another slide, a picture of himself lying naked with Ilona Staller, a.k.a. La Cicciolina, a porn actress to whom he was briefly married. Koons made the work for a show called “Image World: Art and Media Culture” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989. Originally installed as a billboard on Madison Avenue, the work is an ad for a fictional movie called
Made in Heaven
starring Jeff Koons and La Cicciolina. It was the first in a series of the same name, which includes sculptures such as
Dirty
—
Jeff on Top
(1991) and paintings like
Ilona’s Asshole
(1991). While artists’ mistresses have long appeared as reclining nudes, Koons’s representation of himself on top of his wife was novel. “The easiest way to become a movie star is to make a porn film,” Koons would later tell me. “It was my idea of how to participate in American popular culture.”

As Koons clicks through slides of a number of “Made in Heaven”
works, he doesn’t discuss their exhibitionism or speculate about their impact on his career. Instead, he returns to one of his favorite themes—acceptance. “My ex-wife Ilona had a background in pornography but everything about her was absolutely perfect. It was a wonderful platform for transcendence,” he says, running his index finger over his lips. “I wanted to try to communicate how important it is to embrace your own sexuality and to remove guilt and shame.”

Koons goes on to address the “Popeye” series, on which he has been working since 2002 and whose Serpentine outing is the occasion for this talk. He sees the “Popeye” works as domestic—“something a little more intimate” for the home. They often feature forms that look like blow-up toys. When Koons was a child, his parents gave him a Styrofoam float that enabled him to swim independently. He loved its “liberating effect” and admires inflatables as lifesaving devices that bring “a sense of equilibrium.” For Koons, they are also anthropomorphic. “We are inflatables,” he says with an evangelical gleam. “We take a breath and it’s a symbol of optimism. We exhale and it’s a symbol of death.” He also suggests an erotic angle on engorgement that makes the audience titter. “There is a huge sexual fetish thing on the Web for pool toys.” It is always a bit of a tragedy, he jokes, if they go “soft due to a leak.”

For each work in the series, Koons itemizes the things that entertain him. The amusements fall into two main categories: art-historical references to major modern artists and sexual allusions to a variety of private parts and positions. With the modest caveat that he doesn’t expect the “viewer to get lost in all my personal references,” Koons identifies connections between his works and those of Salvador Dalí, Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. Koons also makes special mention of Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke, with whom he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Ed would take me to tattoo parlors and stripper bars,” he says, “exposing me to his source materials.”

Running parallel to this chronicle of artistic affiliations is a recital of Freudian interpretations. The artist’s favorite adjectives are “feminine” and “masculine,” “erect” and “soft,” “wet” and “dry.” When he makes a
work in two versions, he says it comes in “two positions.” The forms of his sculptures and paintings remind him of “vaginal lips,” “intercourse,” “spread legs,” “castration,” “a hole,” “a womb,” and “the pelvic area.” Needless to say, a lot of the inflatables are “penetrated.” Miraculously, the artist says all this so matter-of-factly and with such a wide-eyed, apple-pie virtuousness that he doesn’t seem lewd.

Koons’s discourse is so pat that you feel you are in the presence of an actor playing the role of the artist. The artist’s lack of spontaneity comes across as synthetic and earnest rather than natural and honest. Andy Warhol was famed for his artifice. He cultivated a vacuous public image, talked in cool sound bites and liked to give the impression that there was no “real” Andy. “I’m sure I’m going to look in the mirror and see nothing,” he wrote in
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
. “People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” Few artists have mastered the Warholian paradox of persona as convincingly as Koons.

Stabbing his remote control toward the screen, Koons presents his final slides, which include
Sling Hook
(2007–09), an aluminum sculpture of an inflatable dolphin and lobster strung upside down together by a chain—either slaughtered or having some bondage fun. “I always imagine that in that last moment of life, all becomes clear,” says Koons in an extremely even-toned, almost soothing voice. “Anxiety is removed and replaced with vision and mission.” The artist often invokes performance anxiety. Sometimes he seems to be referring to artistic achievement, other times to sexual function. “Acceptance is what removes anxiety and brings everything into play,” says Koons. “My complete understanding of art is about acceptance.”

Ai Weiwei

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn

1995

SCENE 2

Ai Weiwei

A
i Weiwei refuses to accept the status quo. At the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, a few weeks after Koons’s talk, Ai demonstrates his contempt for acceptance. Where Koons is polite, Ai is rude. Where the American focuses resolutely on his artwork and steers clear of politics, the Chinese artist consistently diverts attention away from his work toward its ethical context. Born in 1957, Ai is almost the same age as Koons. Although the two artists share a love of Duchamp and a penchant for exploiting mass media, they have disparate responses to power.

Ai is sitting on an elevated platform behind a desk. A pink T-shirt covers his substantial paunch, while a loose-fitting black jacket and blue cotton trousers frame it. His shaggy graying beard gives him the air of a wise man. Beards are not common in China, where they tend to be associated with either Confucius or Fidel Castro.

“Ai Weiwei has made many art works,” says Ackbar Abbas, a professor at University of California, Irvine, who is convening this session of a conference titled “Designing China.” The audience is about half Chinese. It includes quite a few European academics and a contingent of American graduate students. “Weiwei was a consultant on the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics and has built an artistic compound in Caochangdi, an area near Beijing where he welcomes his friends and sometimes the police,” he adds by way of introduction. Ai
takes a few photos of Abbas and the audience assembled before him. “I have no idea what he will talk about today,” says the professor. “But we do hope that he will talk about Ai Weiwei.”

The artist looks to the man seated by his side, Philip Tinari, a curator who will act as his translator. The Harvard-educated hipster with thick-rimmed glasses has his fingers poised on the keyboard of his MacBook Air, where he will note what the artist says then relay it in English. “Good morning everyone,” Ai says in Chinese. “I didn’t prepare a speech because when I saw the topic ‘Designing China,’ I didn’t know what it meant. I thought that you could just as easily call it ‘Fucking China.’” The audience giggles nervously. Ai is well known for his diatribes against the inhumanity of urban planning in China. When Ai finishes his statement, he leans back and crosses his arms, waiting for his message to be relayed in English. “Every time I come to Shanghai, I remember why I hate it so much,” continues the artist who is based in Beijing. The seemingly gratuitous insult hangs in the air. “Shanghai believes itself to be open and international but, in fact, it is still operating with a very feudal mentality.”

Ai cites a local human rights violation about which he has written more than seventy blog posts, then mentions his own mistreatment at the hands of the Sichuan police. A week ago, Ai went to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in an attempt to testify at the trial of activist Tan Zuoren, who was accused of inciting the subversion of state power. At 3
A.M.
on the morning of the trial, says Ai, “the cops opened the door to my hotel room. When I asked to see their badges, I was violently attacked.” The officers then took the artist into custody and prevented him from giving evidence at the hearing. “We have a totalitarian government that uses monopolistic means to achieve its goals,” says Ai. “While China might look bright and shining, it is actually wild and dark.”

Ai has a giant welt on the side of his head from the beating, and doesn’t yet realize that it has given him a brain hemorrhage that will require surgery. I wonder if the physical discomfort combined with the police brutality has made him more cantankerous than usual. Tinari, who frequently translates for the artist and knows him well, would later explain to me that being in an official Chinese educational institution is
contributing greatly to his foul mood. “The only thing Weiwei dislikes more than officialdom,” he says, “is academia.”

The artist reads something on his Nokia phone, then raises his head. “If we are talking about designing China,” he announces, “I think we need to start with questions of basic fairness, human rights, and freedoms. These are concepts about which China, for all its economic success, still has no basic understanding.” Ai stops short, having spoken for a total of ten minutes, and says, “I think it would be best to open it up and take your questions.” The artist, who relishes interaction, leans over the desk as if daring the crowd to a showdown. A long, stunned silence follows, then a round of cautious applause.