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拍品专文
Over four decades, Jeff Koons has combined the visual pleasure gained from the simple act of looking with a serious interest in, and love for, art history. Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) brings Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of the Infanta María Teresa of Spain (1653, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) into the present. Koons has always worked to make the long arc of time more intimate, perhaps mirroring the princess’s watches draped upon the curve of her dress. Standing before the reflective surface of the sapphire blue ball, the viewer finds themselves reflected directly in the work, reminding us that all of human creativity is coextensive. Larger than Velázquez’s painting at about six feet by four-and-a-half feet, Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) is also sculptural, with a platform of a little over one foot emerging from the canvas to hold the eponymous glass ball. In the Warholian tradition, it is not an exact copy. Unlike Velázquez’s impasto, Koons achieves a seamless, flat surface. Each painting in the series also varies in size from the so-called original. Writer and curator Joachim Pissarro informs us that “each painting is comprised of more than 3,000 colors, all of which are mixed and tubed by hand…” (J. Pissarro, Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball Paintings, New York, 2015, n.p.). This precision is especially important given the loving details in Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa), such as the red accents on the princess’s dress.
Koons notes that the Gazing Ball paintings forge a special relationship to time and form because of their combination of painting and sculpture, “With the paintings, you have a more ancient dialogue. You think of going through the Lascaux caves, where a bison painted on the contour of a rock formation emphasizes the three-dimensional quality of the drawing. Or if you think about antique sculpture—everything was painted, so the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional were brought together” (J. Koons, quoted in B. Powers, “‘Some People Think What I’ve Done Is Almost Sacrilege’: A Talk with Jeff Koons,” ARTnews, March 6, 2016, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/some-people-think-what-ive-done-is-almost-sacrilege-a-talk-with-jeff-koons-5958/). Koons’s choice of this particular painting by Velázquez evinces his intentionality. The oscillation between two- and three-dimensionality is amplified by the interplay of the futuristic blue with the princess’s painstakingly rendered cream-colored gown. The source material is likewise a layered object. Interestingly, Velázquez and his assistants were commissioned to paint three portraits of the Infanta so that one could be sent to each of her suitors. In this way, as with Koons’s work generally, one painting represents an interconnected web of imagery, archetypes, and desires. Perhaps coincidentally, Koons monumentalized the Infanta Maria Theresa’s future husband in his earlier sculpture Louis XIV (1986).
Every element of Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) has a history and a purpose. Koons is well-known for his use of kitschy, decadent, or aspirational objects and imagery, and yet he always argues that those materials and discourses have a sophisticated place within culture. King Ludwig II of Bavaria displayed gazing balls, also called yard globes, on the lawn of his palace, Herrenchiemsee, whose landscaping was based on Versailles. Versailles has become an important site for Koons as well. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of gazing balls declined. However, there was a resurgence in interest after the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, which featured an exhibition of a modernist garden with a mechanical, illuminated gazing ball. The International Exhibition was central to ushering in Art Deco, which would become the style of modernity. The gazing ball resonated visually with the curves and lines of 1930s and 1940s Streamline Moderne, which would also influence the rigorous, yet sensual, forms of Koons’s Baccarat Crystal Set (1986) or the legendary Rabbit (1986).
Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) looks further back in time to the complex aesthetics of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Baroque period, of which Velázquez’s paintings are foundational, is characterized by reflections, opulence, theatricality, the intersection of religious and secular imagery, and, finally, an emerging self-referentiality. We might compare Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) to another definitive work of the era, Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1597-1599). The reflection gazed upon by the handsome, doomed youth creates a loop with his body, not unlike the spherical unity of Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa). Koons has celebrated the unabashed excess of the Baroque with his own maximalist process. In one of his early essays on Koons, Scott Rothkopf, curator of the influential exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2014), writes, “Koons does not simply ‘stack’ one image on top of another like the floors of a skyscraper…This essential structural fact accounts for the distinctive temporality within his paintings, their sense of endless animation, which has nothing to do with the illusion of movement and everything to do with our glance ricocheting off the picture’s elements in a futile attempt to fix them in time and place” (S. Rothkopf, “Screen Test: Jeff Koons’s Olive Oyl,” Artforum, Vol. 43, No. 2, October 2004, https://www.artforum.com/print/200408/screen-test-jeff-koon-s-olive-oyl-7665).
This assessment holds true in Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa), in which our glances are reflected inward and outward by the blue glass’s gleaming surface and by the princess’s own steely gaze. The Gazing Ball paintings are spectacular to behold in person exactly because of their interpolation of the viewer into the picture, not unlike Andy Warhol’s transcendent Silver Clouds (1966) or Frida Kahlo’s found mirror in the diptych Fulang-Chang and I (1937, assembled after 1939). In fact, Koons has often incorporated mirrors into his work from the very beginning, such as Sponges with Single Double-Sided Floor Mirror (1978). Velázquez’s iconic Las Meninas (1656), which also contains a portrait of the Infanta, is an important comparison to Koons’s use of mise en abyme. In his foundational book The Order of Things, theorist Michele Foucault writes of Velázquez’s use of mirrors and self-aware gazes, “As soon as they place the spectator within the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, [and] assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable” (M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York and London, 1989, p. 6). Similarly, Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) incorporates us into the painting via our reflections, but he does so not to entrap us, but rather to forge a community with us.
It has often been said that Koons reflects society, but this implies a certain passivity. As epitomized by Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa), his reflections are instead as active as wielding a paintbrush. The present work sets in motion a complex interplay of sight and textures, just as it engenders a similar relay between epochs. Returning to Pissarro, in the Gazing Ball paintings, “What you see is definitely not what you see” (J. Pissarro, Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball Paintings, New York, 2015, n.p.). In Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa), we see ourselves, even as we see a portrait of the future queen of France and a mainstay of middle-class decoration affixed to a meticulous appropriation. For Koons, we are all a part of history, and that assertion is an empowering one. For once we believe that our lives, stories, and images are connected to those of the past, we can consider how we might gaze upon others with empathy and respect.
Koons notes that the Gazing Ball paintings forge a special relationship to time and form because of their combination of painting and sculpture, “With the paintings, you have a more ancient dialogue. You think of going through the Lascaux caves, where a bison painted on the contour of a rock formation emphasizes the three-dimensional quality of the drawing. Or if you think about antique sculpture—everything was painted, so the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional were brought together” (J. Koons, quoted in B. Powers, “‘Some People Think What I’ve Done Is Almost Sacrilege’: A Talk with Jeff Koons,” ARTnews, March 6, 2016, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/some-people-think-what-ive-done-is-almost-sacrilege-a-talk-with-jeff-koons-5958/). Koons’s choice of this particular painting by Velázquez evinces his intentionality. The oscillation between two- and three-dimensionality is amplified by the interplay of the futuristic blue with the princess’s painstakingly rendered cream-colored gown. The source material is likewise a layered object. Interestingly, Velázquez and his assistants were commissioned to paint three portraits of the Infanta so that one could be sent to each of her suitors. In this way, as with Koons’s work generally, one painting represents an interconnected web of imagery, archetypes, and desires. Perhaps coincidentally, Koons monumentalized the Infanta Maria Theresa’s future husband in his earlier sculpture Louis XIV (1986).
Every element of Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) has a history and a purpose. Koons is well-known for his use of kitschy, decadent, or aspirational objects and imagery, and yet he always argues that those materials and discourses have a sophisticated place within culture. King Ludwig II of Bavaria displayed gazing balls, also called yard globes, on the lawn of his palace, Herrenchiemsee, whose landscaping was based on Versailles. Versailles has become an important site for Koons as well. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of gazing balls declined. However, there was a resurgence in interest after the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, which featured an exhibition of a modernist garden with a mechanical, illuminated gazing ball. The International Exhibition was central to ushering in Art Deco, which would become the style of modernity. The gazing ball resonated visually with the curves and lines of 1930s and 1940s Streamline Moderne, which would also influence the rigorous, yet sensual, forms of Koons’s Baccarat Crystal Set (1986) or the legendary Rabbit (1986).
Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) looks further back in time to the complex aesthetics of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Baroque period, of which Velázquez’s paintings are foundational, is characterized by reflections, opulence, theatricality, the intersection of religious and secular imagery, and, finally, an emerging self-referentiality. We might compare Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) to another definitive work of the era, Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1597-1599). The reflection gazed upon by the handsome, doomed youth creates a loop with his body, not unlike the spherical unity of Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa). Koons has celebrated the unabashed excess of the Baroque with his own maximalist process. In one of his early essays on Koons, Scott Rothkopf, curator of the influential exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2014), writes, “Koons does not simply ‘stack’ one image on top of another like the floors of a skyscraper…This essential structural fact accounts for the distinctive temporality within his paintings, their sense of endless animation, which has nothing to do with the illusion of movement and everything to do with our glance ricocheting off the picture’s elements in a futile attempt to fix them in time and place” (S. Rothkopf, “Screen Test: Jeff Koons’s Olive Oyl,” Artforum, Vol. 43, No. 2, October 2004, https://www.artforum.com/print/200408/screen-test-jeff-koon-s-olive-oyl-7665).
This assessment holds true in Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa), in which our glances are reflected inward and outward by the blue glass’s gleaming surface and by the princess’s own steely gaze. The Gazing Ball paintings are spectacular to behold in person exactly because of their interpolation of the viewer into the picture, not unlike Andy Warhol’s transcendent Silver Clouds (1966) or Frida Kahlo’s found mirror in the diptych Fulang-Chang and I (1937, assembled after 1939). In fact, Koons has often incorporated mirrors into his work from the very beginning, such as Sponges with Single Double-Sided Floor Mirror (1978). Velázquez’s iconic Las Meninas (1656), which also contains a portrait of the Infanta, is an important comparison to Koons’s use of mise en abyme. In his foundational book The Order of Things, theorist Michele Foucault writes of Velázquez’s use of mirrors and self-aware gazes, “As soon as they place the spectator within the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, [and] assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable” (M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York and London, 1989, p. 6). Similarly, Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa) incorporates us into the painting via our reflections, but he does so not to entrap us, but rather to forge a community with us.
It has often been said that Koons reflects society, but this implies a certain passivity. As epitomized by Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa), his reflections are instead as active as wielding a paintbrush. The present work sets in motion a complex interplay of sight and textures, just as it engenders a similar relay between epochs. Returning to Pissarro, in the Gazing Ball paintings, “What you see is definitely not what you see” (J. Pissarro, Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball Paintings, New York, 2015, n.p.). In Gazing Ball (Velázquez Infanta María Teresa), we see ourselves, even as we see a portrait of the future queen of France and a mainstay of middle-class decoration affixed to a meticulous appropriation. For Koons, we are all a part of history, and that assertion is an empowering one. For once we believe that our lives, stories, and images are connected to those of the past, we can consider how we might gaze upon others with empathy and respect.