Triumph of the will: the Jeff Koons Olympiad in Chicago.

Visiting Jeff Koons's retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art last year offered a bracing lesson in art history. It wasn't the collection of work itself, which was familiar and predictable, something I'd pretty much seen right from the beginning of his career. Chicago saw Koons's early life raft and aqualung--lightweight readymades cast in heavy bronze--in "A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media," a seminal show curated by Thomas Lawson in 1982 for The Renaissance Society. The beautiful Hoovers were on display then, along with Robert Gober's sinks and Haim Steinbach's color-coded stuff on minimalist shelves. Feature showed the bronzes with Koons's "equilibrium tanks" and appropriated Nike posters in 1985, contextualizing them with work by other New York appropriation artists, notably Sherrie Levine's Walker Evans photographs. Koons's stainless-steel bunny was already a postmodern icon by the time he had his first "retrospective" in 1988, also at Chicago's MCA, as its press agents and curators have been eager to remind us.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Twenty years on, Koons's 2008 retrospective sprawls across the museum's two large main galleries in the grand building. The works are scattered about, arranged neither chronologically nor thematically (although the terse catalogue gathers them into their obvious post-minimalist series). At the press preview, curator Francesco Bonami assured the audience that Koons himself had arranged his show, implying that this was an intuitive, aesthetic endeavor. Overall, the meandering whole fares better than many of its parts. The earliest light fixture and appliance pieces, Toaster (1979) and Hoover Celebrity III (1980), would have fallen flat without the surrounding vacuum cleaners in their big acrylic boxes and the splendidly reflective collections of statuesque liquor bottles. These later pieces confer prescient status on the earlier Flavinesque fluorescents harboring, without any protection, their rather ugly toaster and vacuum.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For those who already know the ropes, a walk through Koons's new retrospective becomes a game of identifying the pieces that still pack punch. The 1985 Nike poster of basketball star Moses and the 1986 Gordon's Gin ad surprisingly stand the test of time, effortlessly laying bare their marketing ploys. "Embrace your past," says the artist in Jeff Koons Handbook (1992), pull-quoted in the catalogue. But the basketballs floating in saline-filled aquariums didn't fare so well. To be frank, these nicked and fogged-up tanks are poorly conserved. The one with three basketballs was even listing to one side, and mysteriously disappeared halfway through the show's run.

Rabbit (1986) still retains its iconic appeal, its shiny surface literally reflecting the viewer's awe. It neatly embodies the collapse of high culture (Brancusi's organic shapes), petitbourgeois aspirations to wealth (the more affordable stainless steel), and the thrall of the everyday (the 99 cents plastic blow-up Easter bunny). From the later "Banality" group, the polychrome porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) has also stood the test of time. Made to order by Italian craftsmen from a publicity still of the pop star holding a pet monkey on his lap, this is pre-scandal Jackson, rendered slightly larger than life-size, his hands and feet weirdly intermingled with the monkey's. Both figures are glazed a puritanical white, their costumes a glistening gold leaf, their black eyes piercing but emotionless, like some Venetian ducal coffin adornment.

On the other hand, the passage of time has only made the "Made in Heaven" (1989-91) series featuring Koons's sexual union with porn star Cicciolina appear even more excruciating. A giant poster advertising a movie of the same name, which never got made, attempts to merge the artist's art making with his sex life, but the hardcore copulation, ostensibly hidden from the underaged behind a giant white wall, is clinical, off-putting, and devoid of gratification.

But the most unpalatable aspect of this show is its packaging, all of whose selections, omissions, groupings, isolations, and forced narratives betray a deliberate attempt to rewrite the artist's history. Looking down from the museum's fourth-floor atrium at Hanging Heart (Blue/Silver) (1994-2006), one might easily mistake it for an example of propaganda art from the 1930s and '40s. A giant heart made of fancy blue-tinted stainless steel, its two girded ribbons ending in an elaborate bow on top: we witness the transformation of a common symbol of compassion into a rigid sermon on the native benevolence of the status quo. Note, for instance, the enormous care taken to reproduce that festive curving bow. The effect of soft curly ribbons, normally produced by pulling them over scissor blades, is here transferred to wide, stiff-ribbed steel. By this dramatic shift in scale and medium, Koons presents a familiar jewelry charm denoting love, devotion, faith, and union, banking on every consumer of miniature hearts one day becoming rich enough to buy his giant celebratory versions.

In more down-to-earth terms, the substantial backing of Larry Gagosian lay behind these large-scale works, some of which were then bought back by the dealer when they came up for auction (thus upping their resale value). Koons's good fortune, however, mainly lies in his genius for self-promotion: the avid consumption of his art fosters, and by an ideological twist of fate even confirms, art as consumption. "The hanging heart," says Bonami, "is the best symbol of what art means for Koons: love as the ultimate goal for all of us." Yet this glorification of homespun values--whether those of collectors, museums, or souvenir hunters--is quite beside the point. There is no sharing of power or redistribution of wealth in this kind of propaganda, as the consumer is inevitably short-changed by an apparent but forever deferred fulfillment of desire. All of Koons's tokens of democracy--the sacred heart, faceted gem, cracked egg, and those cute balloon puppies--are giant temple deities worshipped in the bargain debasement of our freedoms. Never allowing his carefully planted smile to crumble, Koons proceeds as if his art was simply a biological necessity or force of will.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Still, none of that explains why Koon's reception has risen so dramatically of late. Right after his first MCA retrospective, the Swiss periodical Parkett featured the American artist alongside German bad boy, Martin Kippenberger. One contributor, critic Klaus Kertess, describes Koons's work as "bad" in the Michael Jackson sense, meaning excellent or stimulating. Kertess goes on to describe the work as a "tonic of pure tastelessness" that "gleefully push[es] slime into sublime, [letting] us know that the production and its promotion are inextricably bound; but their tongue-in-cheek-hand-on-wallet glitz might as readily be selling breath freshener as an art balm." In a Burke & Hare interview in the same issue, Koons admits that artists have handed over their seductive powers to the advertising industry and showbiz. "We were the great manipulators, and we have given up these intrinsic powers of art.... It's time we regain everything that we had--all our powers--and exploit that."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Koons's "Banality" series, for example, his Bear and Policeman (1988) offers a giant Sesame Street bear embracing an English bobby, its chunkily carved wood and plastic colors appealing only to the most regressively inclined. Yet when it first appeared, its large-scale, physically unified presence feigned a minimalist theatricality, which, combined with an eye-opening return to banality for its own sake, begged to be seen as conceptually based installation art. Koons's cuddly bear played on the viewers' pleasure in appearing gullible, a credulity also displayed by collectors given the subsequent sell-out shows at commercial galleries in Chicago, Cologne, and New York.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When at the recent press conference someone brought up the late-1980s reception of Koons's work as a form of cultural critique, Bonami quickly dismissed this account, explaining that the artist's early success had led to a confusion regarding his true intentions, implying that the critical establishment was jealous of his good fortune and unwilling to accept that there is no ironic distance between Koons and his own commodification. Moreover, Bonami insisted, Koons's work is nothing more than a collection of "beautiful, finely crafted unique objects ... made by a genius." Digging a little further, it is clearly not insignificant that the editioning of most of the work in the MCA show is never mentioned, leading the uninformed visitor to believe the objects are unique presences. Yet a week before the Chicago show was taken down, the nearly exact same collection of objects opened at Versailles in France. Koons had cleverly arranged for differently tinted versions of his late-1990s "Celebration" series, the blue heart with silver ribbon going to Chicago and the red and gold one to Versailles. Reproducibility is commonplace in contemporary society and art, so Koons's withdrawal of singularity relays a crafty reception of his work at the level of manipulation of perception itself.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One false lead begets another, and so we find Koons spoken about in the same breath as Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol. Bonami even compares Koons's adolescent self-study The New Jeff Koons (1980) to John Singleton Copley's 1765 Boy with a Squirrel (Henry Pelham). This specimen painting was submitted by the Boston painter to the 1766 exhibition of London's Society of Artists, becoming the first major non-commissioned work by an American artist and the first American picture to be exhibited overseas. It caught Sir Joshua Reynold's attention and eventually earned Copley a place in the Society. Koons, however, is far more blunt in his bid for recognition. In the sepia photograph of the young Koons we see him clutching a large crayon between his fingers, poised over an Ethelbert: The Tale of a Tiger coloring book.

Bonami's comparison is obscure, but Koon's belated attempt to legitimize his own legend certainly is not. Nor is Koons slow to seek fellow travelers in a variety of established art histories. Elvis (2003), a duo of buxom nudes lounging behind Koons's signature red lobster inflatable pool toy, loosely signposts Warhol's 1963 Double Elvis, a generation of Playboy pinups, and Dali's lobster telephone from 1936. Peeking out from behind these references are inverted copies of H.C. Westermann's third woodcut from The Connecticut Ballroom (1975-76) series, portentously titled The Dance of Death (San Pedro).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Emboldened by mismatches such as these, Koon now attempts to bolster a regional importance, inflating in turn his bogus ancestry. What could have happened over the intervening years since Kertess first described the early Koons as "extravagant convections [that] wallow in a sticky-fingered baseness and sentimentality endemic to disenfranchised craft and franchised pulp but seldom seen in high art since the Pre-Raphaelites and Bouguereau"? Today, the stakes are even lower. In Koons's workshop-produced paintings, Popeye, the Hulk, and the Liberty Bell roll around in bed with Courbet's L'Origin du monde, Japanese erotic prints, and mounds of colored Play-Doh like so many signs of cultural indifference, at once accommodating and demeaning. As Peter Schjeldahl once said of Koons's work, "it is as self-explanatory as a kick in the stomach."

As it turns out, the very Westermann print that appears in Elvis was on exhibit upstairs in an ancillary show pulled from MCA's permanent collection, "Everything's Here: Jeff Koons and his Experience of Chicago." A shameless attempt to turn Koons into a Chicago artist, we learn that Koons happened to see some Imagist work in Washington, DC during the 1970s, and not long afterwards enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. According to a wall text, Koons soon met Ed Paschke in a bar, becoming his studio assistant between 1975 and 1976. In a catalogue dialogue with the artist, MCA curator Lynne Warren tries to make the case that Koons learned about Day-Glo colors, low life, cartoon culture, and real human struggle from hanging out with the Hairy Who--a questionable thesis backed up by dusting off the works of Roger Brown, Robert Lostutter, Jim Nutt, Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Karl Wirsum, Westermann, and the outsider Joseph Yoakum.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With all due respect, "Everything's Here" and a small related Imagist show at the Art Institute were welcome additions to Chicago's understanding of its history. But the conflation of Koons's East Coast mix of Pop, surrealism, and kitsch art with the Imagists' lengthy engagement with the urban fabric of Chicago's cultural complexities is unconvincing. That Koons's brief apprenticeship in Chicago some two decades ago is only now being trotted out as a major, all-encompassing influence smacks of institutional collusion, to the clear benefit of all the parties involved. Just as the MCA crowned Koons with a second retrospective (which is not traveling to another venue in the U.S.), so has Koons glorified the MCA with his art-star status, each in turn hailing the Chicago Imagists as a major historical influence.

A passing similarity between Paschke's whores, Cicciolina, and Koons's Playgirls only makes this rewriting of history all the more insidious, driving up the cache of Chicago's homespun talent. The net result is a pandering to regionalist pride and the indemnification of local collections of Chicago work, all the while covering Koons with a folksy veil. A conscious attempt to increase his market value in the pretense of uncovering an important strand of art history, the funhouse appeal of Koons's spectacle is more precisely a rear-ending of consumerist gullibility with elitist self-interest. Moving from behind its flimsily drawn curtain, it reveals a master plan to bring art in line with the greater good, proving not only that institutions have our best interests at heart, but a triumph of the will for the artist and his curators.

Pink and Yellow Arrows Through My Heart

A Love Letter to Jeff Koons

Dear Mr. Koons,

I love you. I always have, and I always will.

You have spent a good portion of your career being lambasted by critics for what you've chosen to put into the world: puppies, Popples, piggies, and the Incredible Hulk; the Pink Panther, Michael Jackson, teddy bears, and cherubs. Vitrined vacuum cleaners and La Cicciolina. Pool toys, pornography, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Luxury and degradation.

We are aware that the American cultural psyche is loaded with garbage. Pop art, the aesthetic movement that chose to deal quite directly with the countenance of American entertainment culture and its consequences for the collective imagination, has never died. And quite likely it won't--at least for a good stretch of the foreseeable future. Of the many postmodern aesthetic ideologies that arose in the last half of the twentieth century, Pop continues to be the most attractive--not to mention the most LEGIBLE--art form to the general populace, who are unfamiliar with many of the structures and idioms of the contemporary art world. Pop art uses the vernacular of daily media culture for its commentary on modern life. Pop art is a form of contemporary folk art.

Now, it is important to make a distinction: I am not saying that Pop ART is Pop CULTURE. There are differences--though in some instances, admittedly, they can be virtually impossible to detect. Art demands a different kind of attention (GOOD art, to be more pointed; YOUR art, Mr. Koons). Art requires dialogue, and a real sort of emotional and intellectual work that entertainment (or Pop culture) rarely asks of the spectator. Art can take on the rubric of television and movies and video games and fashion magazines, but art's NOT television or movies or video games or fashion magazines. Entertainment, to put it colloquially, typically doesn't go too much out of its way to SERVICE you. Art, however, demands a little bit of foreplay.

This erotic engagement, Mr. Koons, doesn't simply manifest itself in your more outwardly sexual works. It is a connecting thread throughout everything you create. For you to take a drossy product of the American consumerist landscape and transmogrify it in the way you do, WRIT LARGE, with exceptional attention to detail and the sheer physical tonnage you bestow on so many of these throwaway psychic scraps--well, what you do takes on the framework of the legendary. You are an heir to Warhol's magical gestures, but you've picked up what he could only hint at within certain dimensions and pushed it to its most logical extremes. The perversity embedded in this sort of thinking is also the kind of perversity inherent in the blissful, stratospheric stages of romantic love: YOU ARE EVERYTHING TO ME--ENORMOUS, GLISTENING, AND ALL-CONSUMING. I WILL MAKE YOU EPIC AND INFINITE SO THAT I MAY CONSUME YOU FOR ETERNITY--AND HOPEFULLY, MY DARLING, THAT YOU MAY CONSUME ME. I have had the privilege of being confronted by roomfuls of your work in the past, and believe me, this energy is only TOO palpable. Jaws drop. You give back to the world what many of your detractors are quite likely terrified of, and in its most under-distilled form: the Great American Heart.

And what is the Great American Heart? Well, it's something that many have glimpsed--and for those of us who are American, live right in the center of. It is a heart like most hearts: contradictory, kind of blind, but somehow, still beautiful. It is oftentimes embraced, yet leaves so many hurt. It is Hollywood and new cars, industry and destruction, hypocrisy and boundless hope. It is the legacy of the cathode ray tube and the atom bomb; the promiscuous commingling of the nouveau riche and the abjectly impoverished; blatant stupidity and extraordinary brilliance; Horatio Alger, Mark Twain, and L. Frank Baum; hordes of horny boys gawping at sexy girls within the infinite mirror of pornography. It is sweetness and joy, World's Fairs and cotton candy, new toys, cheap toys and adult toys. Balloons. Backyards. Kittens. Bubble gum. Fast movies. Rage. Endless smiles.

It is YOU, Mr. Koons: the Greatest American Folk Artist of the Twentieth Century!

But it's me, too!

It's so many Americans with this problematic heart of ours, which we even struggle to just barely LIKE. But you give it to us--relentlessly, Brobdignanianly--all the time. You never pull punches. And why should you? You never ask us to take it for anything more than what it is--a walloping dose of everything entwined with an odd bunch of nothing.

How strange! How scary! How marvelous!

I love you.

Yours, Alex Jovanovich

KATHRYN HIXSON is an art critic, associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and former editor of New Art Examiner. "Jeff Koons" appeared at the MCA Chicago between May 31 and September 21, 2008. Quotations are from Parkett 19 (March 1989) and Jeff Koons, ed. Francesco Bonami (Chicago: MCA/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). ALEX JOVANOVICH is an artist based in New York.