Jeff Koons

Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1988

New York, Sonnabend Gallery; Cologne, Galerie Max Hetzler; Chicago, Donald Young Gallery, Banality, November 1988 – January 1989
Newport Harbor, California, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Objectives: the New Sculpture, April - June 1990, p. 84, another example illustrated in color (Jeff Koons essay by Peter Schjeldahl)
Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Metropolis, April – July 1991, p. 175, another example illustrated in color
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Jeff Koons, December 1992 - October 1993, cat. no. 46, pl. no. 47, another example illustrated in color
London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Jeff Koons: A Survey 1981 - 1994, June - July 1994, another example illustrated in color
Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Family Values: American Art in the Eighties and Nineties: the Scharpff Collection at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1996, p. 49 illustrated in color with Mr. and Mrs. Scharpff; p. 50, illustration of detail; p. 51, illustrated in color and illustrated in color on the poster

Peter Carlsen, ``Jeff Koons'', Contemporarnea, Vol. I, no. 3, September/October 1988, p. 40, illustration of the original stuffed Popples toy
Alan Jones, ``Thriller'', Contemporanea, Vol. I, no. 3, September/October 1988, p. 45, illustrated in color
``Big Fun: Four Reactions to the new Jeff Koons: Stuart Morgan, Jutta Koether, David Salle and Sherrie Levine’’, Artscribe International, March/April 1989, p. 49, illustrated (at the Max Hetzler Gallery, 1988)
Klaus Kertess, ``Bad’’, Parkett 19, Zurich, 1989, p. 41, illustrated in color
Daniel Pinchbeck, ``Jeff Koons’’, Splash, April 1989, n.p., illustrated in color
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ``Who’s Bad? Accounting for Taste’’, ArtForum, November 1991, p. 123, illustrated in color
Robert Rosenblum, Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 99, illustrated in color
Robert Rosenblum, Das Jeff Koons Handbuck, Munich, 1993, illustrated in color
Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, pl. no. 10, p. 108, illustrated in color
Jan Avgikos, ``All That Heaven Allows’’, Flash Art, September 1993, p. 83, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Jeff Koons, 1993, p. 70, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Jeff Koons, 1993, p. 70, illustrated
Art, December 1994, illustrated in color
Hal Foster, et. al., ``Violence: Representations of Violence – Return of Shock and Trauma’’, Trans, vol. 1-2, issue 3-4, 1997, p. 43, illustrated
``The World’s Top 200 Collectors’’, Art News, Vol. 100, no. 7, Summer 2001, p.146, illustrated in color

Popples is a masterpiece from Koons’ ground-breaking series of works, grouped under the title of Banality and executed in 1988. These sculptures, executed in porcelain, ceramic or polychromed wood, present a potpourri of images and pop-culture icons, ranging from the Pink Panther to Michael Jackson to Popples, often encompassing animals and humans within an ambiguous relationship. Popples, which is a stuffed toy used as a marketing tool for a popular cartoon show, is a culmination of the many layers in Koons’ work and his ability to subvert the nature of art, appropriations, perceptions and the interplay between `high’ and `low’ in post-Modernist art.  As seemingly deadpan quotations of common-day objects, the statues and rococo mirrors of the Banality shows of 1988 were a revelation to the art world. As Adam Gopnik wrote in 1989, ``The most shocking art in America is being made by the young New Yorker Jeff Koons. His exhibition this winter at the Sonnabend Gallery shocked people who claimed not to have been shocked by anything since the early sixties, and caused a scandal of a sort that was (especially in the year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armory show) almost touching in its re-creation of an earlier and more embattled era in the history of modern art.’’ (``The Art World: Lost and Found’’, The New Yorker, February 20, 1989, p. 107)

Produced in editions of three (with one artist’s proof), so they could be exhibited simultaneously in the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, the Max Hetzler Gallery in Cologne and the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, the Banality sculptures proclaimed Koons as the artist of the 1980s. As his most outstanding body of work to date, the Banality series was the apotheosis of his earlier works and series. Koons began with The New series, which presented store-bought items such as Hoover vacuums, tea kettles, and inflatable flowers in an encased format. As Koons has stated, ``The objects ...had an integrity because of their newness. As soon as an object would start to be used it would lose its integrity. That was the opposite of the human condition where the individual has to participate in order to gain integrity.’’ (Interview with Thomas Kellein in 2002, Exh. Cat., Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Pictures: Jeff Koons, 1980-2002, New York, 2002, p. 17)  In the Equilibrium series, Koons’ basketballs float in an embryonic state, juxtaposed with the weighty bronze castings of snorkels and aqua lungs, both in permanent states of preservation whether in fluid or static form. In 1986, Koons worked on two series, Luxury and Degradation and Statuary. In Luxury and Degradation, Koons appropriated images related to the consumption of alcohol, which he then cast in the highly polished and refined material of stainless steel. The most powerful works in this stainless steel group are the Jim Beam toy trains and the Model A Ford Pick-up Truck which point out the perversity of advertisers who promoted adult liquor consumption in the form of children’s toys. Koons also chose to cast luxury goods such as crystal Baccarat sets. By choosing stainless steel as his material, Koons goes one step further, transforming these luxury items and subversive toys into sculpture to be displayed in homes as fine art.  The Statuary series focused on kitsch, ranging from ordinary chotchkes of today’s popular culture, such as Bob Hope, to the 19th century copy of a 16th century bust of the Italian Woman which was reproduced for a broader audience. Again, using stainless steel as his material, the viewer is mesmerized by the beauty of these objects, in contrast to their sources, forcing us to confront the dichotomy between `High’ and `Low’. Also, since Koons now directed artisans to produce his sculptures, he also openly questioned the status of the role of `artist’ in the Post-Modern era.

This trajectory reveals a number of polar opposites that fuel the creative vision of Koons and reached their apogee in works such as Popples. His is an art anchored on the power of usurping a given image from a variety of cultural media, from various social or economic strata, manipulated and reinvigorated into an entirely different realm. Aesthetic and concept come together seamlessly in the most polished – in every sense of the word – and ironic form of Post-Modern expression. This slightly aloof and amusing stance in the Banality sculptures is also often perversely multi-layered, particularly with the porcelain works. As Jean-Christophe Ammann observed, ``Koons works by systematically appropriating areas in which there is a high degree of fictionality. He uses the same methods that are already at work in such fiction, be it wood carving, porcelain manufacture [or] the pornography industry. ..He uses the means, the experience and above all the peculiar features of each of these approaches to fictional production to give his own ideas concrete form. ….’’. In regard to porcelain objects such as Popples, Ammann further elaborates that Koons ``transposes the affectation of porcelain. …he encodes prettifications of the vulgar and obscene. It is a popularization strategy that puts an end to the marginal status of the fictional; everything is now accessible to everyone.’’ (Jean-Christophe Ammann, ``Jeff Koons, Triumph out of Failure’’ in A. Muthesius, Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, p. 7-10)

The Banality series addresses many of these themes in Koons’ art, including the kitsch and the everyday, sex and desire, and innocence and subversion.  The doll Popples is a common object of easy affection, an inanimate receptacle for our most innocent and childlike impulses. ``The world of peluche animals – peluche means soft in French – is for me a dialogue, a negotiation between the animate and the inanimate. They take on the stance of receiving love. A peluche doesn’t desire to be loved. It doesn’t look `Love me!’ but teases `Love me’. For if it did not automatically receive love, you would throw it away.’’ (A. Muthesius, Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, p. 25)  But Popples and other stuffed toys are an overly sentimental surrogate for real human affection, just as pornography is an inadequate erotic substitute for real love or intimacy. When planning the Banality show, Koons saw a photograph of the porn-star Cicciolina in the German magazine Der Stern, which was the basis for one of the porcelains, Fait d’Hiver. Cicciolina, whose image continued to influence Koons’ work in the Banality and erotic Made in Heaven series, mixed child-like gestures and speech with hard-core sexuality in her fictional persona, and stuffed animals were a common prop in her publicity photos. The irony of a living figure of desire and fantasy embracing an artificial object of the same nature was not lost on Koons. Just as Duchamp and Warhol delighted in fabricated identities and celebrity, Koons understands the inherent artificiality and role-playing in art.

In Popples, Koons introduces himself into the role-playing of his art in a metaphorical fashion that would later become explicit in the more pornographic Made In Heaven series. In speaking of the bird that appears in the polychromed wooden sculptures Buster Keaton and Stacked and in the porcelain Popples, Koons has stated, ``the little bird is really a symbol of me.’’ (A. Muthesius, p. 25) In the wood sculptures, the bird perches on Keaton’s shoulder or atop the head of a dog, but in Popples, the surrogate bird is much more an integral part of Koons’ creation. Popple’s tail, snaking sinuously from the rear of the figure toward the front and ending in a pompom, can be seen as having a sexual connotation, which culminates in the pert figure of the bird that appears almost an extension of the suggestive tail.   

Koons adored artificiality that subverted reality, a quality never more apparent in the pristinely beautiful surfaces of the Banality sculptures. That Popples is made from porcelain heightens its unreality – as a copy from nature, it is overtly a fake. Handmade by renowned Italian craftsmen, Popples is flawlessly executed in bright and childlike pastels and yellows, with a heightened sense of reality. Yet, the soft and pliant nature of Popple’s original material is here rendered in the cool, hard surfaces of porcelain, with a highly polished sheen. The brightly colored yellow hair, which should be soft to the touch, is in fact rendered in stiffly pointed porcelain spikes. The soft and blurred pile of the white, pink and blue `fur’ of the doll is now sharply detailed and textured porcelain. Perversely, the eyes, which are the most `plastic’ and artificial part of the original doll, are now the most lively and animated part of Popples as they sparkle with the sunny disposition of a cartoon character, now imprisoned in the unpliable medium of porcelain. The vaguely disturbing nature of the frozen stare and stance were noted by Adam Gopnik in his 1989 profile of Koons and the Banality series. ``Koons’ sculptures shock not because of their intellectual message but because of their physical presence. The contours of each piece are as chubby as Disney drawings, but their execution seems glacially slow, and they are, above all, hard.’’ (The New Yorker, February 20, 1989, p. 107)

The craftsmanship entailed in creating such a large-scale porcelain object also contradicted the more pedestrian, mass-produced nature of toy dolls such as Popples. In a departure from his use of ready-made objects, such as vacuums and basketballs in his earlier sculptures, Koons sought a means of `high’ craft to portray his more complex and creative appropriations of pop-culture source material. Koons searched for the most gifted and professional artisans with traditions dating back several centuries for his Banality porcelains, while the Popples dolls were machine-sewn and made from pedestrian materials. In this last interplay of opposites, Popples captures a social subversiveness that Koons delights in. Porcelain has an historical association as the rarest of materials, requiring a refined skill and craftsmanship, which was reserved only for the aristocracy. But in the later half of the 20th century, porcelain becomes more commonplace and the techniques of production are more commercial and far less skillful. The quality of exquisite porcelain is mostly lost – with the exception of the rare modern-day craftsmen sought out by Koons - and it has become a cheaper and more affordable material used to produce ordinary objects of mass consumption, such as Hummel figurines. In its history, porcelain therefore embraces both the rococo and the kitsch, and in discussing his kitschy Banality porcelains, Koons has stated ``When I work with porcelain it is to meet people’s social and economic needs, so that they can feel that they can be kings and queens for the day.’’ (A. Muthesius, p. 26) In its nature as an object of `high’ exquisite craftsmanship portraying a subject of  `low’ popular culture, Popples therefore becomes an object of desire for today’s `nobility’.

In a broader sense, Koons’ aggrandizement of the ordinary – his sumptuous degradation of porcelain into a commodity - mirrors the nature of art as a commodity. In both cases, Koons celebrates a proudly conscious acknowledgement of art and mass-produced luxury goods on equal terms as commodities. Because of Koons’ art, his chotchkes of kitsch and common culture are the commodity of choice for wealthy and social classes, and works such as Popples are now placed in elegant homes in the same manner as the porcelain of earlier kings and queens.