The Rise of the "Crypto-Relic"

New Hoover Convertible (Jeff Koons, l980)

In a piece entitled “Traces of the Holy: The contemporary art work as ‘crypto-relic’” (TLS, 4/10/15), Matthew Bown makes the following comment, “The art market today is a market in crypto-relics, no more, no less. The dithyrambs of the experts—as when the director of the Tate art museums, Sir Nicholas Serota describes art objects as ‘symbols of optimism and renewal,’ as ‘objects of beauty and contemplation,’ or as ‘transgressive,’ 'raw and tender, brazen and subtle’—recreate the alluring discourse, the promise of miraculous potential, that sustained the original Christian relics in the public imagination.” How better to describe Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” the famed shark immersed in formaldehyde or Jeff Koons’ “New Hoover Convertibles” which might be subtitled “what you see is what you get.” Duchamp’s “Fountain,” with its R. Mutt signature, might as well have been a Kohler or Toto as it canonized the found object. But artists like Hirst and Koons have actually gone much further, in that the high demand almost requires an  iconography. Religiosity always had something in common with romanticism to the extent it was predicated on a belief in the unseen. What would the Shroud of Turin be without a higher love? The absence of value and/or meaning acts like a vacuum that creates the significance of Brown’s "crypto-relics." Everyone reads meaning into Chance, the main character of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There. But Chance is just an idiot savant, a tabula rasa on which others paint their wishes for transcendence. And “so it goes” as Vonnegut famously says in Slaughterhouse-Five. Those who don’t keep the faith will say that the public is being Tartuffed.

Pornosophy: The Postmodern Playboy of the Western World

John Millington Synge

How does the post-modern playboy pass his day? Back in the 50’s Hugh Hefner introduced the Playboy life style which had something in common with Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Fearlessness and savoir faire were combined in a gently sadomasochistic form of hedonism. The hero of Fifty Shades of Grey is perhaps the grandson or great grandson or a close relative of Bond’s just as the literary heritage of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus might be traced back to Hamlet. But surely today’s metrosexual is not mixing martinis in a silk bathrobe or looking for direction on sophistication from the Playboy advisor or anywhere else. For starters the postmodern playboy might literally be questioning whether he is in fact a boy. Perhaps he partakes of the sensibility of a woman who loves other woman or even of a woman who loves other men or simply a man who loves other men. But like a Connecticut Yankee, it would be fun to consider the possibility of  scenarios where our hero is sent back to the equivalent of King Arthur’s court. Give this creature a fast car, beautiful women and a cold war adversary and let’s see see what SSRI would enable him to weather the ensuing anxiety attack? Hugh Hefner is still living. Albert Broccoli who produced many James Bond films is dead. Perhaps our hero would be a sad boy with a book, a Hamlet  picking up his well-worn copy of Shakespeare’s play. J. M. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World. Someone should write The Postmodern Playboy of the Western World, perhaps modeled, not on spies like Wild Bill Donovan, but on the career of polymorphously perverse mega artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Thinking Retrospectively About the Jeff Koons Retrospective

Jeff Koons has two things in common with the great Renaissance painters like Rembrandt and Titian. He maintained a studio filled with helpers and he produced self-portraits. Where Koons differs from a Renaissance painter is in his use of the assembly line approach to both painting and sculpture in which individual artists are only involved in a small part of the final product. Marx wrote about alienation resulting from this kind of division of labor and it is hard to figure out of if many of Koons readymade sculptures can be classified as commodities of the type that are produced en masse in a factory or artistic works that are reflective of a brooding sensibility characterized by a singular vision of the world. This is, in fact, what separates them from Duchampian readymades which never quite seem to attain the status of commodities. However, just when you're about to dismiss Koons, you begin to realize this very dichotomy between commerce and art poses itself as one of the aims or dialectics of the work and you're somewhat calmed into an acceptance verging on pleasure. It’s easy to say that neither the early vacuum cleaners nor the famous "Play-Doh" sculpture are art, but then you become fascinated by the production of a piece which looks like plastic, but is actually heavy metal. One of the guards manning the recent Whitney retrospective of Koons’s work fenced off with a spectator who insisted on her right to touch and test one of the sculptures to make sure that indeed what she was seeing was not what it seemed to be. Koons elicits this kind of theater. “Made in Heaven” is the pornographic series featuring his former wife the Italian actress and politican La Cicciolina (aka Ilona Staller) and comprising paintings like “Exaltation,” (1991) where Koons comes on her face and another “Ilona’s Asshole,” which is self-explanatory. Koons says about the series, “It’s not porn. Made in Heaven dealt with the shame of masturbation in our society. It was a metaphor for cultural guilt. I wanted to reproduce the Garden of Eden, and sexual penetration like a hummingbird encounters a flower.” The series is introduced by poster for the film that Koons was originally going to make with his former wife. She’s in his arms, but he’s staring out at his audience. Again you are caught up short. Could it be that the artist is saying that he cares more about himself than his lover and that the imminence of a potential product trumps emotion? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Narcissism is a much bandied about word, but can we say that for good or bad Koons is caught in the narcissistic delusion that the world is indeed real?

Paris Journal VII: The Beauty of Animals

If you are an animal lover, you will want to see “Beaute Animale” at the Grand Palais. It’s a perfect segue way from the work of Helmut Newton, also being exhibited at the Grand Palais, who was a great lover of beaver. Jeff Koons, Muybridge, Calder and Henry Moore are all represented, along with cats by Goya and Bonnard, a miscegenistic painting of black and white cats by Manet, a Picasso toad, and bats from both Durer and Van Gogh. The curators recount the incidence of the Viceroy of Egypt giving Charles X a giraffe which was marched from Marseilles to Paris. Courbet's La Truite, which appears in the show would be the perfect accompaniment for the next collector who dares to acquire his notorious L'Origine du monde. An anonymous painting of great complexity called  Les Oiseaux precedes an Audubon water color in a show devoted to both the food chain and the great chain of being and its influence on our conceptions of beauty. One curiosity is that the work of Henri Rousseau, which was filled with amazed animals, is remarkably absent from the show. Is there an implicit critique in the omission--of the politically incorrect notion that animals are naïve?

Stonewalled II

Early feminists had railed against pornography and the objectification of women, but feminism was evolving and succeeding generations began to reevaluate the role of the women in the context of  Enlightenment notions of freedom and liberty. It would be hard to consider the famous Italian porn star and politician la Cicciolina, who was the wife of the sculptor Jeff Koons, to be an example of a woman who was exploited by men even though she might, in fact, be the object of their fantasies. Entrepreneurial personalities like la Cicciolina and Madonna marketed their own bodies without the need of exploitative male pimps and were in control of their own destinies. By the 1980's Vagina envy replaced penis envy as the manifestation of covetousness between the sexes. As Camille Paglia would point out in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nerfertiti to Emily Dickinson women had superior powers, both physically (genitally) and metaphysically, of which men were in awe. Men’s need to compensate with increasingly violent pornography centering around the notion of submission, in particular gagging (deep throating) and defiling (facials), were signs of male jealousy rather than male desire (and ultimately exemplified the higher regard in which females were held by their male counterparts). Within the short period of time from 1969, in which the Stonewall riots occurred and gays had begun to assert their rights, heterosexual men and women had begun a journey of their own, characterized by a new dialectic in which self-realization and self-expression challenged both classical feminist and male chauvinist ideals.