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Lot Essay
Jeff Koons’s Gorilla is a hulking colossus that instills awe and fear in equal measure. Milled from a solid block of black granite and polished to produce a glistening surface, the work forms part of the artist’s important Hulk Elvis series, which he described as “a very high-testosterone body of work” (J. Koons, quoted in A. Sooke, “Face to Face with the Incredible Hulk of American Contemporary Art,” Daily Telegraph, June 9, 2007). Included in Koons’s recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the inspiration for this sculpture came from a souvenir toy gorilla that the artist purchased from an antiquated “Mold-A-Rama” machine at the Los Angeles Zoo. Replicating the gleaming, wax-like surface and rough, uneven edging, Koons perfectly recreates the original souvenir toy so that no detail has been spared in its painstaking execution. This exactitude is a hallmark of Koons’s work; it endeavors to return the viewer to an immaculate and pure state of openness once experienced in childhood, so that we might become liberated from what one sees as the oppressive and narrowing constraints of perceived taste that are learned in adulthood.
However, in Koons’s work nothing is only as it seems on the surface, and through the artist’s hand the original found object undergoes a profound metamorphosis. Enlarged to giant proportions, Gorilla becomes a leviathan, a monster like King Kong, so that a powerful set of opposing forces comes into play. On the one hand, Gorilla represents childhood nostalgia. Yet on the other, it becomes a powerful creature of colossal proportions, calling forth suppressed fears. Koons transforms Gorilla from a fragile, hollow toy into a gigantic totem, an immense monument, composed of one of the most long-lasting materials in the known world—black granite—the material of public monuments and ancient civilizations. As such, Gorilla represents a transformation: it is an ephemeral object made permanent, a tiny, hollow toy writ large as a solid, imposing sculptural work.
With Gorilla, Koons taps into a rich source of cultural associations which date back to Victorian times. They reached a peak in the 1930s with the release of the RKO Pictures’ King Kong, which depicted a colossal “prehistoric type of ape” that attacked the people of New York, culminating in his now famous climb up the Empire State Building. The film was released “pre-code” and some scenes were later cut because they were deemed either too risqué or too violent. Koons’s Gorilla, with its fists to chest, legs wide and teeth bared, presents this same kind of Kong-like beast. It also speaks to the perceived brutality that pervaded the pseudo-scientific notion of the gorilla that was prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Koons himself has compared his Gorilla to a little-known 19th century sculpture, entitled Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman by the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet from 1887. The piece depicts a ferocious, hulking beast of a gorilla, in whose arms a nude woman struggles to free herself. The brutal aggressive nature of the piece illustrates the notion of the creature as the embodiment of pure, savage virility.
This edition of Gorilla was included in Koons’s retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first major exhibition of its type to be held in New York. Described by Roberta Smith of the New York Times as a “lucid, challenging, brilliantly installed exhibition,” it did much to encourage a reassessment of the scope of Koons’s career (R. Smith, “Shapes of an Extroverted Life: ‘Jeff Koons: A Retrospective’ Opens at the Whitney,” New York Times, June 26, 2014). Installed alongside some of Koons’s most iconic works, including those from his Equilibrium, Banality, and Celebration series, Gorilla stands as a supreme example of Koons’s range and ingenuity.
Gorilla is part of Koons’s ongoing exploration into the idea of the readymade. Since the early 1980s, the artist has used everyday objects to comment on the commericialism that dominates our contemporary world. He has built on the Duchampian idea of the readymade and elevated familiar objects from the mundane to the exceptional, providing a powerful commentary on society, culture and art’s place within that culture. Here, he elevates a ubiquitous “Mold-A-Rama” toy gorilla—a throwaway childhood souvenir from a trip to the zoo—into a grand sculpture of monumental proportions. Through the artistic gesture of rendering everyday objects in such a meticulous and monumental way, Koons challenges the importance of aesthetics, questions what art can be, and pushes the concept of the readymade to new limits.
However, in Koons’s work nothing is only as it seems on the surface, and through the artist’s hand the original found object undergoes a profound metamorphosis. Enlarged to giant proportions, Gorilla becomes a leviathan, a monster like King Kong, so that a powerful set of opposing forces comes into play. On the one hand, Gorilla represents childhood nostalgia. Yet on the other, it becomes a powerful creature of colossal proportions, calling forth suppressed fears. Koons transforms Gorilla from a fragile, hollow toy into a gigantic totem, an immense monument, composed of one of the most long-lasting materials in the known world—black granite—the material of public monuments and ancient civilizations. As such, Gorilla represents a transformation: it is an ephemeral object made permanent, a tiny, hollow toy writ large as a solid, imposing sculptural work.
With Gorilla, Koons taps into a rich source of cultural associations which date back to Victorian times. They reached a peak in the 1930s with the release of the RKO Pictures’ King Kong, which depicted a colossal “prehistoric type of ape” that attacked the people of New York, culminating in his now famous climb up the Empire State Building. The film was released “pre-code” and some scenes were later cut because they were deemed either too risqué or too violent. Koons’s Gorilla, with its fists to chest, legs wide and teeth bared, presents this same kind of Kong-like beast. It also speaks to the perceived brutality that pervaded the pseudo-scientific notion of the gorilla that was prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Koons himself has compared his Gorilla to a little-known 19th century sculpture, entitled Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman by the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet from 1887. The piece depicts a ferocious, hulking beast of a gorilla, in whose arms a nude woman struggles to free herself. The brutal aggressive nature of the piece illustrates the notion of the creature as the embodiment of pure, savage virility.
This edition of Gorilla was included in Koons’s retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first major exhibition of its type to be held in New York. Described by Roberta Smith of the New York Times as a “lucid, challenging, brilliantly installed exhibition,” it did much to encourage a reassessment of the scope of Koons’s career (R. Smith, “Shapes of an Extroverted Life: ‘Jeff Koons: A Retrospective’ Opens at the Whitney,” New York Times, June 26, 2014). Installed alongside some of Koons’s most iconic works, including those from his Equilibrium, Banality, and Celebration series, Gorilla stands as a supreme example of Koons’s range and ingenuity.
Gorilla is part of Koons’s ongoing exploration into the idea of the readymade. Since the early 1980s, the artist has used everyday objects to comment on the commericialism that dominates our contemporary world. He has built on the Duchampian idea of the readymade and elevated familiar objects from the mundane to the exceptional, providing a powerful commentary on society, culture and art’s place within that culture. Here, he elevates a ubiquitous “Mold-A-Rama” toy gorilla—a throwaway childhood souvenir from a trip to the zoo—into a grand sculpture of monumental proportions. Through the artistic gesture of rendering everyday objects in such a meticulous and monumental way, Koons challenges the importance of aesthetics, questions what art can be, and pushes the concept of the readymade to new limits.