Jeff Koons: A Retrospective – Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

As most critics who have reviewed this exhibition have remarked, the Jeff Koons retrospective is a pretty good farewell to the Whitney’s current building on Madison Avenue.  This is the largest survey of one artist’s work staged by the museum, with works over five of six floors, and I would imagine also the most expensive to insure, given the kinds of auction prices his works achieved.

The exhibition is hung chronologically, taking the artist’s arrival in New York as a starting point (no tentative student work here, thank you very much), and grouped back into the works’ original series.  Starting with The New in 1980, with its still pristine yet now outdated appliances, and finishing with Celebration which, due to the cost and technical difficulty of producing some of the works is dated 1994-2014, the development of certain ideas around consumerism, culture and reality/illusion becomes apparent by the time one reaches the show’s climax in the form of an enormous mound of Play Doh.  Some of the in-between points are familiar to the viewer: the bear and policeman grouping from Banality (1988), the inflatable rabbit in stainless steel from Statuary (1986), or the mirrored cut outs of cartoon characters from Easyfun (1999), and a certain level of infamy is attached to others, notably the pictures of Koons and his ex porn star ex wife Ilona Staller from Made in Heaven 1989-91).

Other works were new to me, at least, and I enjoyed the level of information provided about the process of making them, from engaging artisans to work on the scaled-up versions of kitsch wooden and porcelain figurines, to finding techniques that are apparently at the forefront of science to achieve the level of verisimilitude Koons desires.  It did raise questions for me around simulation and illusion: if the exhibition label tells me that the inflatable beach toy before me is actually a work in bronze, but I am unable to distinguish it in any respect from a ‘real’ blow-up dolphin,  would my experience as a viewer be altered if in fact it was the genuine article before me and not the copy?  Is the purpose to have a touchstone to consider consumer culture vs. high art, or to see the evolution of Koons’s work from assembling dime store toys into sculptural groups to producing them in new materials, or to wonder at the technical skill involved in making the piece, and am I just overthinking this in an attempt to read meaning into something which is a bit of fun and thereby validate my cultural experience?  Probably.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, I have always enjoyed Koons’s work: it’s playful, colourful, and is often excellent for playing around with photographs of reflections.  The two dimensional works may as well not have been there from an interest point of view.  It was nice to see how they fitted in with each series, but they don’t have the same skill, innovation or evolution as the sculptures, and suffered in comparison.  I thought that the way the exhibition was hung in original series kept the focus on Koons’s own intentions, biography and critical reception to the detriment of any reflection on what his work says about our culture and the interesting times we live in, which for me was the main disappointment given the fertile source material.  Perhaps that is the role of cultural scholarship though more than big colourful blockbuster farewell exhibitions.