Jeff Koons

International With Monument Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1985

New York, International With Monument Gallery, Equilibrium, 1985

Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, cat. no. 6, p. 58, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Jeff Koons. Pictures 1980-2002, September - November 2002, p. 41, illustrated in color
Hans Werner Holzwarth, eds., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2009, p. 177, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition overall. The sheet is hinged verso to the matte intermittently along the edges. Framed under Plexiglas.
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 “I was trying to show people that just as it is almost a cliché in America that certain ethnic groups use basketball for social mobility that white middle-class artists were using art for social mobility. We were all front men, anybody being there and representing themselves as a star, that they’ve made this achievement, is a great deceiver, because it’s unachievable to reach a finished state of being, an ultimate state of being. There is no ultimate state.” Jeff Koons

Executed in 1985, Jeff Koons’s work The Williams was first exhibited at his debut solo exhibition at Meyer Vaisman’s International With Monument Gallery, New York. The exhibition established his powerful artistic vision, including some of the artist’s iconic early works from his Equilibrium series. Expanding on the notion of the ready-made, first championed by Marcel Duchamp, Koons’s artistic gesture in The Williams is the very act of selecting the popular Nike poster, thus designating it as a fine-art object and a work of insightful social commentary. The original object was first printed as part of a series of commercial posters created by Nike to promote their athletic shoes, depicting major-league basketball stars assuming various roles and personas in traditional, formally staged portraits.

Presented alongside the posters were sculptural works from Koons’s Equilibrium series, the same series of The Williams, including aquarium-like glass tanks with basketballs floating weightlessly within the liquid-filled vitrines. Contrasting with these ethereal sculptures were weighty bronze casts of a range of inflatable objects, including life rafts, underwater breathing apparatuses, basketballs and soccer balls. Through the act of recontextualising familiar and functional objects, Koons prompts us to reexamine these items.

Capturing the aspirational qualities of the poster and the dream of being an athletic star that Nike sells to aspiring youth, Koons presents a potent critique of contemporary American society and race, class and social realities. The allure and illusion promoted by consumer brands like Nike celebrated athletic achievement and idolized these athletic stars. As Roberta Smith writes, “The posters testified to successfully lived lives – equilibrium regained – reminding one of the multi-level social function of basketball, not only a form of entertainment but also the black kid’s ticket out of the ghetto. But there was more: the posters also implied a kind of sellout – basketball stars as products themselves.” (Roberta Smith, "Rituals of Consumption," Art in America, May 1988, p. 167)

The Williams portrays major-league basketball stars Ray and Gus Williams in a formal style reminiscent of classical portraiture flanking a seated woman embroidering ‘Gus & Ray.’  The characters wear formal attire in an odd juxtaposition with their Nike athletic shoes and basketballs. Koons evokes a heightened sense of awareness in the viewer – playing on the seductive, deceptive qualities of advertising. A subtle tension pervades each of the posters, alluring the consumer with false promises of wealth and fame through consumption.