Jeff Koons: a studio visit: it's my party.

As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.

- Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1846"

My ideal movie of the '80s art world wouldn't be Basquiat, it would be Jeff Koons. To make a film about that period from the vantage point of Neo-Expressionism means making a certain kind of movie, one that for all its wit and local color essentially confirms the general public's perceptions about artists and their lives. To be poor and beautiful, living in a cardboard box; to be possessed by "primitivist" poetic afflatus; to become rich and dissolute and careless; to die prematurely, and in sordid circumstances: we've heard it all before, it doesn't matter that certain details may correspond to the historical record. For me, the real '80s story would track the ascent of a young artist who, rather than wait tables or assist a more established artist, chose to work on Wall Street as a commodities salesman in order to finance his art; someone brilliantly attuned to the machinations of advertising and PR; someone who married a notorious porn star who is the mother of his child, all in the name of Art, and then professed astonishment that this same woman, from whom he is now divorced, was a notorious porn star and as such an unfit mother to their son; a man whose persona as well as his oeuvre distills that particular variation on the bizarre, the normal-as-bizarre. Maybe Adrian Lyne, the auteur behind such emblematic '80s vehicles as Flashdance and 9 1/2 Weeks, could direct; maybe David Lynch.

One morning, I'm riding in a livery car with Jeff Koons to a fabricator in a desolate-seeming neighborhood of Brooklyn. We're on our way to see Elephant, the first of the sculptures in Koons' new "Celebration" series to near completion. (Elephant will be shown at the Venice Biennale this summer; another huge work, the eighteen-and-a-half-foot, polychrome Piglet, will be featured at the Munster Sculpture Project.) The sculpture would need to be photographed to meet our deadline, and the artist is concerned that the factory environment might not lend itself to a good picture, a good representation of his intentions. Maybe we could move it outside, use a backdrop, etc., to exploit the work's reflective sheen? He envisions better, perhaps ideal circumstances: a parklike public setting, possibly near a body of water. The play of reflections of sun, sky, sea. Maybe the image of young children cavorting in front of this enlarged and abstracted toy. The associations traipse into the realm of candy-box-cover Impressionism. I imagine the scene of Elephant in situ as if painted by Mary Cassatt or Renoir. Jeff Koons at Argenteuil.

Koons' 1989-91 "Made in Heaven" could be read as an '80s coda. The first works from "Celebration" - twenty sculptures and sixteen paintings that, eventually, will be shown together at the Guggenheim SoHo - make their debut in the late '90s. Anything Koons does is bound to excite curiosity, but there is a sense that the artist is a little dated, possibly too thoroughly immured in the money-money era that was over by the time "Made in Heaven" appeared. When I mentioned the much-anticipated and much-delayed "Celebration" over lunch one day to some non-art-magazine editors, they seemed skeptical: Koons? Do people still take him seriously? In the art world, the saga of his twice-canceled Guggenheim show, originally slated to open eight months ago, has already become lore. His obsessive perfectionism in the fabrication of the "Celebration" sculptures is a matter of speculation as well: reportedly, millions of dollars have already been spent, and nearly finished pieces scrapped in the eleventh hour because of flaws in the finish. The fate of "Celebration" is also tied to another art-world behemoth, Thomas Krens' off-criticized, famously leveraged, international Guggenheim. A group from the series will now first meet the public not in New York but at the Guggenheim's new satellite in Bilbao, Spain, this fall - that is, if there are no more hitches in the production schedule. A worst-case scenario: Jeff Koons' "Celebration" turns out as the art-world equivalent of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, the movie whose colossal commercial and artistic failure spelled the end of an era of massive projects wholly commandeered by megalomaniacal directors.

There are four versions of Elephant, and the one we're seeing today is the "blue" one, though its mirrored, high-chromium stainless-steel surface is now uncolored. One version will remain in this state; the other two will be mirrored violet and mirrored yellow. "There's no specific reason for those choices," Koons says. "I just thought they'd be pleasant colors to look at." The sculpture is twelve and a half by ten feet and just over a half foot thick. Head on, it looks like a cutout, enormous but without evident bulk or density. Koons is right about the oddity of seeing it at its place of production; in the half-lit, gloomy emptiness of the fabricator it's more foreboding than festive, quite removed from the fantasia of sun-dappled Impressionist leisure/kitsch. Think of toys in horror movies that mysteriously come to life, menacing the flesh-and-blood living, especially the kids whose rooms they adorn. The works of "Celebration" all come from the playroom: a balloon dog, a mound of Play-Doh, party favors, etc. Their consistently gargantuan proportions encourage this sense of potential menace. Imagining two tons of gleaming toy elephant craned into an exhibition site, one can't help but think Richard-Serra-Meets-Toys-'R'-Us.

"Celebration" contains paintings as well as sculptures. Unlike the images in "Luxury and Degradation," 1986, and "Made in Heaven," these are actually painted by hand; the style is '70s photorealist a la Audrey Flack. Elephant is fabricated, consisting of welded sheets of stainless steel, a process that sounds easier than the more delicate and accident-prone casting procedure Koons is employing to make the chromium Balloon Dog or the rotational molding technique used to create the heavy-plastic pieces in the series. He also turns to computer manipulation to ensure that Elephant will come out symmetrically. "initially, I did an outline drawing of the elephant from my inflatable, just taking a flat-on silhouette of it, and then I transferred that drawing to a computer to equalize it." The corrected computer image also allows emendations (tucking or expanding the ear, etc.). "So in most of the work that I'm doing now there are ways I use technology to help create the best result," he continues. "But also, I always want to maintain aspects of the hand, and a personal, physical involvement that goes into creating works. And in the case of Elephant that all comes through, especially in the type of finish that takes place."

Ever the adept spin artist, Koons insists on a "personal touch" in works that in their relentlessly corporate and industrial methods of production explicitly militate against the notion of touch. He plays both sides of the argument (seemingly now exhausted) between those who believe art is all about the artist's hand and those who are content to draft plans that others will carry out. The hand, that synecdoche for the old-fashioned artisanal approach to painting and sculpture, remains important to Koons, even though it isn't necessarily his hand doing the work of execution. All his work maintains the tension between a Romantic conception of the solitary artist-visionary - recall the rhapsodic image of the artist in his marble Self-Portrait, 1991, his visage transfigured by mystic no less than sensual ecstasy as he emerges from an explosion of crystalline stalagmites, a weirdo contemporary variant of the type exemplified by Bernini's St. Theresa of Avila - and the impersonal techniques that are a legacy of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Warhol's Factory.

On the way to Brooklyn, Koons had remarked that he often feels a kind of jet lag when he travels to and from the fabricator. The contiguous geographies of Manhattan and Brooklyn notwithstanding, they're different worlds; one's sense of time alters. On our way back to SoHo, I get a sense of what he meant; only two hours have passed, and I'm exhausted. We make small talk in the car. He tells me he lives on the Upper East Side. He likes it there. After working all day in his downtown studio, he says he feels that going up there is sort of like going home to the suburbs. Commuting. Ordinary life.

Back in Manhattan, some twenty assistants are hard at work on the paintings and scale models for the sculptures that will be cast elsewhere. At one point in the mania of production, there were around seventy. L'atelier Koons is enormous. The first room, a kind of office, provides a lot of piquant detail: a vast accumulation of kids' toys, games, videos. The artist's desk is littered with family photos. There is also a postcard reproduction of his flowered Puppy, installed in 1992 at the Schloss Arolsen, not far from Documenta IX, in which he was not invited to participate. And there is a Bible, with a postcard reproduction of an Old Master religious painting affixed to its cover. As we sit down for a more formal interview, Koons expresses little interest in process; for him it's a means to an end. "I get no satisfaction from the actual manipulation of the object, so I would say I derive a purely intellectual pleasure until the object reaches its finished state," he once said. "Then it becomes a security support system."

Security support system: phrases like this recur when Koons talks about the meaning of his work, phrases speaking the vaporous yet hortatory language of self-help and self-improvement. "I think the work tries to gain support from the confidence of the gesture, to be kind of in the moment, and to have confidence within the self, and to, you know, embrace yourself wherever you can find meaning in life." The artist struggles for articulation even as his concepts seem deliberately inarticulate. For a moment I feel as if I'm talking to self-help guru Tony Robbins, one of whose goals is apparently self-transformation via transformation of one's language. Don't say, This art is difficult; say, This art is challenging. Koons is aware of this dimension of his work and his own rap about it: "I think the work is based on and tries to function in the form of religion - not as religion itself, but within what religion tries to do for individuals, so that they can flourish in life. That's the vocabulary the work is based in." Koons describes his obsessive attention to the details of facture and finish as a means of ensuring that one can trust in the objects he creates; they will have integrity. The idea of trust is one that he returns to often: "The object isn't demanding to be trusted. The object isn't saying to the viewer: You know, you should trust me. It's just laying the framework for the viewers to trust themselves to have an intimate experience with this object."

In contemporary art, works typically function either as critical commentaries or as expressions of personal psychology and experience. What they do not generally do is function as icons intended for the broadest possible public, icons that will incarnate an archetypal consciousness even as they provide the critical diagnosticians of our culture with multifarious symptoms to interpret but not to treat. But iconic resonance is exactly what Koons expects for his "Celebration" series. In an aside, he refers to Piglet and Elephant as the "Alzheimer's works." Recalling the late paintings of Willem de Kooning, he says that the effect of his reflective, simplified, apparently two-dimensional works is similar, that a "mental mind wipe" occurs in the viewer. Looking at a study for the polychrome Piglet in Koons' studio, one notices that the bands of color do not remain confined by the outline of the drawing but instead extend beyond it - as if in this study, at least, he consciously imitated the linear blocks of color so characteristic of de Kooning's final paintings. As Koons sees it, then, Elephant is a kind of two-way regression, traversing the antipodes of human experience, from the consciousness of the young child, preserved in a few iconic memories, to that of the elderly and enfeebled, for whom mental awareness is gradually slipping away, and for whom, presumably, only a residue of words and images remains.

Koons' conceit of artist-as-child, child-as-artist is delivered up in "Celebration" perhaps more directly than in any other work to date but with the same poker-faced sincerity. He locates the series' images in what he regards as a primary repertoire: "When I was about four and a half, five years old, I would go after school to this little building, like a little shelter. In the afternoons we'd make things out of Popsicle sticks. We'd work with Play-Doh. And this experience gave me my foundation. That's what I hold on to in the world. And whatever I made at that time I know is equivalent to what I'm doing now. And that was, for me, really, art."

David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Artforum.