Frankenstein
in Paradise
(Parkett,
December 1997)
A
lack of historical awareness can be a sure sign of impending doom: those
who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. But is it not also
possible to suffer from a surfeit of historical awareness? Too keen a sense
of history can corrupt or perhaps undercut an action altogether, much as
a moment of self-consciousness can cause an actor to forget his lines.
The anxiety of influence is a malady of this genre, and another occurs
when an artist considers not past greats but future greatness. Does every
artist not wonder how he will himself be treated by history? Even the Greeks
thought art emerged from a desire for immortal glory, though today it takes
on a new form: an actor’s "glory" is to be hounded by photographers, while
an artist’s is to be dogged by exegetes. Was it not inevitable that an
awareness of this situation would enter into artworks themselves? James
Joyce once remarked that Finnegans Wake would "keep the professors busy."
History had begun to peer over his shoulder, and the consequence was to
be a portrait of the artist as a self-conscious man. In short, modernist
art about art was poised to become something very different: art about
the interpretation of art.
It
is essentially a problem as old as Eden: once you eat the forbidden fruit,
how can you patch blissful ignorance together again and become a veritable
Frankenstein of innocence? Having been at the epicenter of an art media
frenzy, how can an artist such as Jeff Koons not have the din of exegeses
ringing in his ears every time he sets out to make a work? It is not a
personal matter, a question of conscience, or a probe into the creative
psyche, but rather a profound aesthetic issue: how can the artist think
for himself? That Koons has found a way is made plain by the unexpectedness
of the terms (trust, sincerity, archetypality, objectivity) in which he
speaks of his new work, Celebration. And yet, if it’s not surprising to
assert that a social contract lies at the foundation of society, must it
sound so weird to say that an aesthetic compact–predicated precisely on
such values as trust–lies at the foundation of art? The problem of the
counterfeit alone attests to its importance, not to mention the immense
institutional mechanisms (museums, catalogues raisonnés, scholars)
dedicated to determining whether artworks can be trusted. Are they real?
Are they good? Are they art at all?
A
similar suspiciousness always haunted philosophy’s view of knowledge, to
the point where Descartes finally raised it into a principle, universal
doubt. Has Koons discovered a concordant phenomenon, a universal doubt
that belongs to aesthetics and makes it impossible even to have faith in
artworks anymore? Such mistrust would be a logical consequence of half
a century of "art that questions the status of art," and also of the gradual
dematerialization of the art object. Philosophy had always doubted of knowledge
because sensory experience, it thought, is rife with errors which subsequently
reason has to correct. Now as art legitimates increasingly abstract procedures
of creation, such that a readymade, wordgame, or mere idea can be "art,"
is it not perhaps inevitable that it take up that old prejudice against
the senses? Or perhaps the causal chain is the reverse: as the contemptus
corporis endemic to western tradition infiltrates even its aesthetics,
must art not decreasingly appeal to the senses? Conceptual artists produce
no bodice-rippers, and to whatever extent Duchamp is the patron saint of
post-modernism, he is most certainly its first célibataire, its
first ascetic, as well. The essentially intellectual thrust of his achievement–in
inventing the very idea of the readymade, he tilted the balance away from
the material object and thereby forced aesthetics to take note of the pure
concept–did for art what Christianity did for religion: it made the body
superfluous. An aesthetics of perception (the Greek root aesthenesthai
means to perceive) gives way in Duchamp to an epicene one of conception.
A
repudiation of this asceticism was latent in Koons long before the pornographic
works of Made in Heaven. Certain early works such as BUNNY were able to
turn the readymade on its head simply by no longer treating it puritanically,
like a chess move. Instead, they approached it by means of affect and visceral
response. BUNNY was pretty, happy, glossy, funny, even beautiful. Might
not the simple certainty of a sensory experience revitalize the aesthetic
compact? When an artwork inspires a sense of beauty, it is as difficult
to doubt the reality of that affect as of a feeling of pain. Thus do the
new works of Celebration strive to bedazzle, although beauty may still
be too subjective an affect to rely on. An individual might not doubt his
own reaction, but does he not hope that others will share it and perhaps
therefore dub the work objectively beautiful in itself? The problem of
beauty conjoins that of objectivity. It is not a matter of making the artist
impartial but of making the work itself more objective. Koons accomplishes
this by means of hard lines: the sculptures of Celebration are crisp as
cookie-cutters, and the paintings as delineated as stained glass. This
is no more epiphenomenal to Koons than the straight edge to Egypt or sinuosity
to the Gothic. It is important because in art clean lines are the precondition
of empiricism. They induce faith in the senses. In a gradient extending
from black to white, there are myriad shades of gray–ask someone where
any one begins or ends, and the answer will plainly be subjective. But
where black clearly abuts white, there the answer will approach objectivity.
While
it would be impossible to objectify beauty in this way, Celebration strives
for universality by depicting mass-produced goods. Must these not appeal
to mass audiences? It is in this respect that Koons’ work functions as
archetype: it’s neither Platonic form nor Jungian symbol so much as good
bet. However, the aim is not literally to reach the widest audience possible
but rather to evoke familiarity in the widest possible portion of an actual
audience. Why? Because the unfamiliar, the mysterious, gives to think.
Put paint on a canvas with a severed moosehead and we’re forced to wonder
why. But the depiction of familiar things invokes a different system of
response altogether, one based less on reason than recollection. The perception
of the artwork, in this system, is immediately redoubled by its phantom
in memory, the two fitting snugly together like two hands in a handshake,
whereas in the other system reason, mutilated, goes looking for its other
half, "meaning." Koons chose to cast many of the Celebration sculptures
in polyethylene for precisely this effect. This plastic, common in toys,
is the material with which children learn how to become adults: one’s first
hammer and gun are always polyethylene. However, in Koons’ sculptures it
points not forward but backward: invoking cognition less than recognition,
it turns the focus away from the artist (why did he do that?) and toward
the viewer (I remember that!). The very transition from a question to an
assertion already indicates an increase in certainty.
Such
a shift of focus is also instigated by the highly reflective facture of
the Celebration sculptures–ones not made of polyethylene are composed of
a shiny high-chromium stainless steel. This reflectivity is no more incidental
to the work than its linearity, since even the paintings mostly depict
their subjects against mylar backgrounds, and though the resulting play
of light gives the work the appearance of being constantly "on," its import
is not purely visual. What does the viewer see as he circles one of the
sculptures? It, certainly, but also himself in its surface. It is virtually
impossible to see the artwork without seeing oneself. The artist, on the
other hand, literally drops out of the picture: toys come from Fisher-Price,
games from Mattel, and art from artists, but where do mirrors come from?
It is difficult to name a manufacturer because mirrors are designed to
elicit not brand-awareness but self-involvement–so too with Koons’ sculptures.
The feedback loop of perception and recollection induced by the familiarity
of the subject matter is redoubled yet again by the interplay of appearances.
Celebration’s maxim is not to know but to see thyself.
In
philosophy, universal doubt is a kind of feigned idiocy. The thinker pretends
not to know anything, then proceeds forward into knowledge by means of
self-reflection (I think therefore I am). In art, it’s the opposite: the
proliferation of increasingly self-conscious, cerebral work is accompanied
by a crisis of faith in art itself. If modernism asked "What is art?",
postmodernism responds with "I don’t know, I’m not sure anymore..." Might
not the antidote to such a situation be a healthy dose of blissful ignorance?
Might not art fall from the apostates to the innocents–those who, untroubled
by the nature or meaning of art, carry it on with a kind of blind faith?
Koons often speaks of his works as meaning no more or less to him than
to anyone else. He does not produce art about the interpretation of art,
but rather art about the non-interpretation of art. His strategies in Celebration
are to make art beautiful (to elicit a gut response), to strive for objectivity
(to encourage faith in the senses), to give back the familiar (to sideline
reason for memory), and to reflect the viewer (to discourage interpretation
of the work in favor of involvement with the self). And the principle behind
his strategies is this: if it was knowledge that led to paradise lost,
might not idiocy be the only means to regain it? |