Jeff Koons

Dan Cameron, NY Art Now: the Saatchi Collection, London 1987, p. 134, illustrated in color
Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne 1992, pl. no. 6, p. 43, illustrated in color
Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: a Continuing History, New York 2000, pl. 318, p. 220, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Bielefeld, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Jeff Koons: Pictures 1980 - 2002, 2002, p. 17, illustrated in color (installation in the window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980)

In many ways the 1980’s saw a slew of artists re-engage with the aesthetic and conceptual strategies devised and developed by the Pop Art movement, most notably the work of Andy Warhol but also the earlier ‘Pop’ vision of British artists, such as Richard Hamilton. The most conspicuous of these artists was a young man by the name of Jeff Koons. An ex-stock broker, turned Museum of Modern Art tour guide, turned artist, Koons could not have been a better candidate to continue the investigations previously undertaken by Warhol. If Warhol was an artist who essentially commodified celebrity – be that in the form of a famous screen actress or of a universally-adored cartoon character or of a much-consumed can of soup – then Koons celebrated the commodity. His financial background gave him a clear understanding for the dynamic of the commodity, and his subsequent oeuvre has examined the mechanics and nature of value and worth. Koons’ body of work in 1980 was made as a reaction to the (then) highly-celebrated Neo-Expressionist School of painting, which would act as a counterfoil to the more presentational dynamic of Koons’, Ashley Bickerton’s and Haim Steinbach’s form of Neo-Geo. Koons thus mirrors Warhol’s own reaction, in 1962, to the similarly autobiographical, macho posturing of the Abstract Expressionists.

Koon's debut solo exhibition in the United States was a window installation at the New Museum in New York which he titled, The New. Only three works were included in this important display in 1980, including the present work. Koons began to make this series of appliance assimilations by fixing household devices (in this case, two vacuum cleaners: a New Hoover Celebrity IV and a New Hoover Quickbroom) to upright supports, with fluorescent lighting from behind the structure giving the vacuum cleaners a somewhat eerie incandescence. This early example openly displays the two appliances; they are not covered with Plexiglas, so that all the elements are exposed to the viewer. Alan Schwartzman notes that “The irony [with the ‘Hoovers’] was twofold: these virginal, never-to-be-used machines for removing filth were concerned with our consumerist obsession with new products, with youth, with suburban purification.” (Alan Schwartzman, “The Yippie-Yuppie Artist”, Manhattan, Inc., December 1987, p. 139).

Indeed, the original display at the New Museum connects to many of the tributaries of meaning unearthed by Koons’ New Hoover Celebrity IV, New Hoover Quickbroom. As Mario Codognato notes, “The ambiguity between the rather circumscribed museum context and the exposition directly onto the street, as if a shop aiming at a wider, less expert public, is overcome by the carefully balanced and reciprocal translation of one context into the other”. (Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Jeff Koons, June – September 2003, p. 28). By showing an installation of vacuum cleaners as aesthetic objects in a museum display that looks like a shop window, Koons opened the very first page of a life-long journal concerned with the nexus and polarity of High and Low paradigms. No subject was too kitsch, too trite, too base for the artist; what mattered, above all else, was an extraordinary attention to detail, finish and presentation which, usually, was at odds with the degraded subjects such luxurious materials mimicked. Koons here takes an ordinarily utilitarian object and transforms it into a work of art. In so doing, he draws upon questions raised by Marcel Duchamp regarding the status of the object and the dynamics of originality. How can two vacuum cleaners be a work of art? In essence, as Duchamp declared, these are works of ‘art’ because the ‘artist’ declares it as such. Duchamp, however, employed the museum as his foundation for making such a claim, stating that his Ready-Made was a work of art because it was located in the necessary context. In 1980, Koons even transforms the explanatory context by changing that to a simple shop window. Furthermore, he assimilates a number of other artist’s voices into the present work. The fluorescent lighting speaks of Dan Flavin’s work; the accumulation of two vacuum cleaners connects with the ‘Assimilations’ of the Nouveau Réalistes; the perfect geometry evokes the regimented presentation of the Minimalists.

Both Duchamp and Koons, however, surround themselves and their work with a mystic aura. Koons’ New Hoover Celebrity IV, New Hoover Quickbroom resonates because of its “… resplendent … negation of [its] utilitarian scope” (Ibid., p. 29). Codognato writes of the vacuum cleaners at The New as being gnomic structures, suspended in time, immune to the vagaries of aging. Even the fluorescent lights behind them “… stand out like aureoles of modernity, sanctifying the object of consumption” (Ibid.) The present work has a strong anthropomorphic quality, indicated in the vacuums’ vertical extension being seen as corpora, together with a myriad of tubes representing anything from limbs to respiratory systems. The anthropomorphic references embrace and encircle the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine. Certainly, the New Hoover Celebrity IV on the left, with its singular phallic thrust, can be construed as being ‘male’ while the rounder, curvaceous forms of the New Hoover Quickbroom suggest the opposite. In this sense, in his presentation of the age-old binary opposites of man and woman, he has created a modern-day ‘Adam and Eve’. Their convergence, as in all depictions of the original man and woman, engenders both physical and metaphysical balance, which Koons translates into a faith in the essence of the eternal. As the artist has said of the ‘Hoovers’, “They are the ultimate states of being; it is about being new, eternally new. I confront the viewer with objects that are in a position to present themselves as being immortal.” (Op. Cit., p. 141). If Adam and Eve had to flee the Garden of Eden, then the two vacuum cleaners in New Hoover Celebrity IV, New Hoover Quick do not. As Koons says, “They will remain new forever” (Ibid).