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Lot Essay
Jeff Koons' Desert is an exquisite and mesmerizing tangle of discordant, yet beautiful imagery. In Desert, a favorite motif-- string bikinis--shimmer with a pearl-like opalescence as they circle and spiral around each other, creating a central vortex through which a rushing waterfall emerges from an Eden-like setting. Painted in 2001, Desert is an important painting that forms part of the Easyfun-Ethereal series.This series is a continuation of the Easyfun paintings that preceded them, in which Koons collaged photographs and magazine ads to produce complex, yet masterful paintings that evoked a childlike sense of fun and innocence. David Sylvester, in his much-cited conversation with the artist, described the Easyfun-Ethereal paintings as "much bigger, more complex and a great deal more intense" (D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, New York, 2001, p. 345).
The Easyfun-Ethereal paintings allowed Koons to work with canvases of a scale unprecedented in his previous work, the effect of which is billboard-like in intensity. In Desert, the viewer is engulfed by the swirling bikini forms as they are presented atop a strange, unknowable background, overwhelming and mesmerizing in their so carefully rendered, precise beauty. The term "Ethereal" seems to describe the gravity-defying characteristics of the series, and indeed there is a free-flowing, almost liquid, sense of energy that flows throughout the piece, calling to mind the allover energy of Jackson Pollock (another painting in the Easyfun-Ethereal series, titled Blue Poles, is a direct reference to Pollock). A spiral is produced as the delicate strings loop over and under each other, a visual motif that recurs within the series and illustrates Koons' continued fascination with the Baroque and Rococo, particularly those periods' use of spiritual ecstasy and sensual excess as a means of enlightenment. Indeed, Koons has commented that his art aims "to show the public that we are in the realm of the spiritual, the eternal" (J. Koons, quoted by R. Rosenblum (ed.), The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 106).
The visual tropes observable within Desert are some of the most powerful and important of the Easyfun-Ethereal series. A tumble of frozen vegetables, so expertly rendered as to appear hyper-real, emerges from a desert-like landscape, while bikini tops and bottoms intermingle, devoid of the flesh that produces their curves. There is a certain gaudy elegance that pervades the bikini, which Koons has used repeatedly throughout his career, beginning in 1988 with the Banality series, in which Koons depicted himself alongside two bikini-clad women in Art Ad Portfolio. As an item of clothing, the bikini is steeped in nostalgia, as it might recall the wholesome beachy fun of "Beach Blanket Bingo" or Gidget. The string bikini is a bit more risqué, and Koons most likely lifted the image from the pages of magazines like Sports Illustrated or Playboy. Because Koons has included only the bikini itself, without its accompanying flesh, the viewer is allowed to extrapolate and imagine, perhaps even fantasize, about the hips upon which the bikini would sit. The sloping strings of the bikini cutout indicate the full hips and breasts of a voluptuous figure. The effect is much more erotic and titillating because it only hints at what lies beneath. Perhaps this is a reminder of the forbidden, even taboo, nature of the original image in our culture, like a dirty magazine shoved under the bed.
Set against a lushly vegetated landscape, the bikini cutout in Desert might imply a biblical interpretation, in which Koons presents a contemporary Eden, his bikinis worn by an imagined, modern-day Eve. On the opposite register, Koons depicts a desert, which is so beautifully and evocatively rendered that it recalls the work of Salvador Dali. In fact, the line that separates the two images--of Eden and Desert--is deliberately blurred. Does Koons allude to the biblical garden, and through the depiction of the desert, imply the fall of man? Are we forced to consider, side by side, the glorious freedom of paradise against the decrepitude of humanity and original sin? In fact, Koons has described the bikini cutout as it first appeared in the Easyfun-Ethereal series, in the painting Mountain: "[this] is about the history of sex. That's what I think of when I look at it. I saw an image of a woman in a pair of bikini-type panties, and I thought it was such a beautiful image, I just dropped out the rest of the body and had it hovering in the center. And there's a scene of an ocean in the background, and the idea of human life developing out of the sea." (J. Koons, quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit.,, p. 354).
The painting's title implies a dual meaning, on the one hand as "desert," which implies a dry Saharan landscape, and on the other as "dessert," which implies a sweet treat following dinner. As such, it recalls the Surrealists' penchant for wordplay and illustrates the power that food, especially the wholesome foods of childhood, holds for the artist. Indeed, lima beans, peas, corn, carrots and green beans are rendered with crisp precision and recall the slick advertising of processed foods that Koons used as his source material. Placed alongside such salacious imagery, the wholesomeness of the frozen vegetables directly contrasts to the lurid sexuality of the cutout-bikinis. The effect is discordant, and produces a sort of emotional shudder, or chill, which speaks to the frisson that Surealist artists like Dali and Magritte exploited to great effect. As such, it also recalls the advertising ploy of using fake food to recreate real food in advertisements; as one critic so eloquently put it, "there are thousands of advertising creatives who are obsessed with making caramel melt like magma, or golf balls spin like the moon" (J. Heiser, "Jeff Koons," Frieze, Issue 57, March 2001). Combined with the fact that most pre-packaged food is several steps removed from its agrarian source, the vegetables in Koons' Desert read as just another sexed-up object.
In his analysis of the Easyfun-Ethereal series, the critic Richard Dorment noted, "Koons has put his finger on something that no one seems to have noticed before: the new-found importance of food in defining American-ness." (R. Dormen, "Edinburg Reviews: Finger Lickin' Good," The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2001). Indeed, the frozen vegetables Koons depicts in Desert remind one of the kind of pre-packaged, pre-fab food of a 1950s America, of TV dinners and fast food. Those ubiquitous foods of the 1950s childhood--cereal and milk, ice cream, canned and frozen vegetables--are used throughout Easyfun-Ethereal, and as such, they might recall the work of James Rosenquist. In contrast to Rosenquist, though, Koons seems to understand the idea of sex used to sell food and the pull of advertising on a young child (advertisers deliberately and aggressively market their product to children). Koons recalls: "One of the greatest pleasures I remember is looking at a cereal box...and visually you can't get tired of the box. I mean, you sit there, and you look at the front, and you look at the back. Then maybe the next day you pull out that box again, and you're just still amazed by it; you never tire of the amazement. It's just about being able to find amazement in things...Life is amazing, and visual experience is amazing" (J.Koons, quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., p. 334).
In a profound way, Koons' Desert functions as a mirror, revealing and reflecting the obsessions and desires that make up our cultural landscape. The prescient phrase "I'll be Your Mirror," which is taken from a Velvet Underground song from 1966, has been used to describe the work of Andy Warhol, but it might well serve to describe Koons' art too. His ability to record and reflect the passions, phobias and appetites of our society is paramount: "Well, I think that great work-- and I hope that my work does this--is a chameleon. That it's a chameleon for whatever cultures come after it. If it's going to sustain itself or be beneficial to people, it has to adapt somehow and have meaning for them. I've tried to put things of interest in my work for this cultural climate, this society, but I hope that somehow I can hit into archetypes that continue to have meaning for people. I think that the meanings change but there's something at the core of the archetype that remains very important to the survival of humankind" (J. Koons, ibid., p. 342).
The Easyfun-Ethereal paintings allowed Koons to work with canvases of a scale unprecedented in his previous work, the effect of which is billboard-like in intensity. In Desert, the viewer is engulfed by the swirling bikini forms as they are presented atop a strange, unknowable background, overwhelming and mesmerizing in their so carefully rendered, precise beauty. The term "Ethereal" seems to describe the gravity-defying characteristics of the series, and indeed there is a free-flowing, almost liquid, sense of energy that flows throughout the piece, calling to mind the allover energy of Jackson Pollock (another painting in the Easyfun-Ethereal series, titled Blue Poles, is a direct reference to Pollock). A spiral is produced as the delicate strings loop over and under each other, a visual motif that recurs within the series and illustrates Koons' continued fascination with the Baroque and Rococo, particularly those periods' use of spiritual ecstasy and sensual excess as a means of enlightenment. Indeed, Koons has commented that his art aims "to show the public that we are in the realm of the spiritual, the eternal" (J. Koons, quoted by R. Rosenblum (ed.), The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 106).
The visual tropes observable within Desert are some of the most powerful and important of the Easyfun-Ethereal series. A tumble of frozen vegetables, so expertly rendered as to appear hyper-real, emerges from a desert-like landscape, while bikini tops and bottoms intermingle, devoid of the flesh that produces their curves. There is a certain gaudy elegance that pervades the bikini, which Koons has used repeatedly throughout his career, beginning in 1988 with the Banality series, in which Koons depicted himself alongside two bikini-clad women in Art Ad Portfolio. As an item of clothing, the bikini is steeped in nostalgia, as it might recall the wholesome beachy fun of "Beach Blanket Bingo" or Gidget. The string bikini is a bit more risqué, and Koons most likely lifted the image from the pages of magazines like Sports Illustrated or Playboy. Because Koons has included only the bikini itself, without its accompanying flesh, the viewer is allowed to extrapolate and imagine, perhaps even fantasize, about the hips upon which the bikini would sit. The sloping strings of the bikini cutout indicate the full hips and breasts of a voluptuous figure. The effect is much more erotic and titillating because it only hints at what lies beneath. Perhaps this is a reminder of the forbidden, even taboo, nature of the original image in our culture, like a dirty magazine shoved under the bed.
Set against a lushly vegetated landscape, the bikini cutout in Desert might imply a biblical interpretation, in which Koons presents a contemporary Eden, his bikinis worn by an imagined, modern-day Eve. On the opposite register, Koons depicts a desert, which is so beautifully and evocatively rendered that it recalls the work of Salvador Dali. In fact, the line that separates the two images--of Eden and Desert--is deliberately blurred. Does Koons allude to the biblical garden, and through the depiction of the desert, imply the fall of man? Are we forced to consider, side by side, the glorious freedom of paradise against the decrepitude of humanity and original sin? In fact, Koons has described the bikini cutout as it first appeared in the Easyfun-Ethereal series, in the painting Mountain: "[this] is about the history of sex. That's what I think of when I look at it. I saw an image of a woman in a pair of bikini-type panties, and I thought it was such a beautiful image, I just dropped out the rest of the body and had it hovering in the center. And there's a scene of an ocean in the background, and the idea of human life developing out of the sea." (J. Koons, quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit.,, p. 354).
The painting's title implies a dual meaning, on the one hand as "desert," which implies a dry Saharan landscape, and on the other as "dessert," which implies a sweet treat following dinner. As such, it recalls the Surrealists' penchant for wordplay and illustrates the power that food, especially the wholesome foods of childhood, holds for the artist. Indeed, lima beans, peas, corn, carrots and green beans are rendered with crisp precision and recall the slick advertising of processed foods that Koons used as his source material. Placed alongside such salacious imagery, the wholesomeness of the frozen vegetables directly contrasts to the lurid sexuality of the cutout-bikinis. The effect is discordant, and produces a sort of emotional shudder, or chill, which speaks to the frisson that Surealist artists like Dali and Magritte exploited to great effect. As such, it also recalls the advertising ploy of using fake food to recreate real food in advertisements; as one critic so eloquently put it, "there are thousands of advertising creatives who are obsessed with making caramel melt like magma, or golf balls spin like the moon" (J. Heiser, "Jeff Koons," Frieze, Issue 57, March 2001). Combined with the fact that most pre-packaged food is several steps removed from its agrarian source, the vegetables in Koons' Desert read as just another sexed-up object.
In his analysis of the Easyfun-Ethereal series, the critic Richard Dorment noted, "Koons has put his finger on something that no one seems to have noticed before: the new-found importance of food in defining American-ness." (R. Dormen, "Edinburg Reviews: Finger Lickin' Good," The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2001). Indeed, the frozen vegetables Koons depicts in Desert remind one of the kind of pre-packaged, pre-fab food of a 1950s America, of TV dinners and fast food. Those ubiquitous foods of the 1950s childhood--cereal and milk, ice cream, canned and frozen vegetables--are used throughout Easyfun-Ethereal, and as such, they might recall the work of James Rosenquist. In contrast to Rosenquist, though, Koons seems to understand the idea of sex used to sell food and the pull of advertising on a young child (advertisers deliberately and aggressively market their product to children). Koons recalls: "One of the greatest pleasures I remember is looking at a cereal box...and visually you can't get tired of the box. I mean, you sit there, and you look at the front, and you look at the back. Then maybe the next day you pull out that box again, and you're just still amazed by it; you never tire of the amazement. It's just about being able to find amazement in things...Life is amazing, and visual experience is amazing" (J.Koons, quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., p. 334).
In a profound way, Koons' Desert functions as a mirror, revealing and reflecting the obsessions and desires that make up our cultural landscape. The prescient phrase "I'll be Your Mirror," which is taken from a Velvet Underground song from 1966, has been used to describe the work of Andy Warhol, but it might well serve to describe Koons' art too. His ability to record and reflect the passions, phobias and appetites of our society is paramount: "Well, I think that great work-- and I hope that my work does this--is a chameleon. That it's a chameleon for whatever cultures come after it. If it's going to sustain itself or be beneficial to people, it has to adapt somehow and have meaning for them. I've tried to put things of interest in my work for this cultural climate, this society, but I hope that somehow I can hit into archetypes that continue to have meaning for people. I think that the meanings change but there's something at the core of the archetype that remains very important to the survival of humankind" (J. Koons, ibid., p. 342).