Jeff Koons (b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania) takes objects designed to be dismissed, inflatable toys, porcelain figurines, cartoon imagery, and remakes them with a level of technical and material refinement more often reserved for old-master painting or luxury manufacture, a transformation he insists should be received without embarrassment about what the objects originally were.
Koons studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York, where he worked briefly as a Museum of Modern Art membership seller and a Wall Street commodities broker while developing his early work. His Equilibrium series (1985) suspended basketballs in tanks of precisely calibrated saline water, a feat of engineering disguised as a still life, before his Banality series brought him wide attention in the late 1980s, recasting kitsch and popular imagery in bronze and gold-leafed porcelain, epitomized by Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). Puppy (1992), a towering topiary West Highland terrier, and the stainless-steel Balloon Dog, part of the large-scale Celebration series begun in the early 1990s, extended his interest in inflatable, childlike forms built at monumental, industrial scale.
Unlike much postmodern art built on ironic distance, Koons has always insisted his relationship to popular taste is sincere: his mirror-polished surfaces, he has said, affirm the viewer, "right here, right now," folding whoever stands in front of them into the work. That claim sits uneasily alongside how the work is actually made: each sculpture is engineered and fabricated by teams of specialists to Koons's exacting specifications, a separation of conception from execution that raises, rather than resolves, the question of what authorship and originality mean once an object achieves industrial perfection. He extended the same tension into two dimensions in the Gazing Ball series (2013), where a hand-blown cobalt sphere, the kind he grew up seeing on suburban lawns in Pennsylvania, sits atop plaster casts of classical sculpture or reproductions of old-master paintings, an addition Koons calls "the concept of participating" in a shared act of looking, even as the sphere also reflects the viewer's own image back as one more borrowed object within the work.
Koons's significance lies less in any final verdict on whether his sincerity should be taken at face value than in how persistently the work forces the question: what happens to desire, status, and childhood innocence once they are reproduced at the highest possible level of technical perfection and put up for sale.
