拍品專文
Executed in 1988, Wishing Well forms part of one of Jeff Koons' best-known series, Banality. It was with that group of works that he not only consolidated his own artistic manifesto, but also that he launched himself onto the world art stage. Looking at the large, Rococo Wishing Well, its place within the Banality series makes perfect sense: Koons saw those works as comprising a sort of contemporary, alternative Garden of Eden, complete with cartoon serpents and infant Adam and Eve. The wishing well can be some sort of centrepiece of such a skewed scene, combining fairytale, make-believe, wish-fulfilment and, in its style of presentation, church ornamentation. Its scale and incredible craftsmanship allow Wishing Well to lay claim to a sort of art-historical authority that is at deliberate odds with its children's illustration content.
Koons had already been exploring the boundaries of taste and shame in previous series, not least Luxury and Degradation, and these themes have clearly come to the fore in Wishing Well and its sister pieces. This is an assault on received notions of taste and culture, which Koons sees as a form of imposed snobbery, a means of dividing the populace.
This was a radical break from Koons' previously-preferred use of appropriated objects, of readymades: now he was creating three-dimensional collage-like objects, merging the visual language of one artistic reference point with motifs plundered from the popular culture around us all. In a break with their tradition, the fabricants were asked to create works such as Wishing Well, which were designed to celebrate life, to celebrate innocence, to remove the taint of indoctrinated taste against which Koons was railing. By presenting his wishing well in the form of a mirror in which the viewer sees him or herself, dripping with gilt, Koons combines a sense of pseudo-religious aspiration, of yearning for a better place, with these notions of social mobility in order to help us feel at one with ourselves, to shed some self-consciousness. "When you go to church and you see the gold and the Rococo, it's there, they say, for the glory of God," Koons has said in words that relate to Wishing Well. "But I believe that it's there just to soothe the masses for the moment; to make them feel economically secure; to let something else-- a spiritual experience, a manipulation-- come into their lives" (J. Koons quoted in S. Coles & R. Violette, ed., The Jeff Koons Handbook, London, 1992, p. 110).
Koons had already been exploring the boundaries of taste and shame in previous series, not least Luxury and Degradation, and these themes have clearly come to the fore in Wishing Well and its sister pieces. This is an assault on received notions of taste and culture, which Koons sees as a form of imposed snobbery, a means of dividing the populace.
This was a radical break from Koons' previously-preferred use of appropriated objects, of readymades: now he was creating three-dimensional collage-like objects, merging the visual language of one artistic reference point with motifs plundered from the popular culture around us all. In a break with their tradition, the fabricants were asked to create works such as Wishing Well, which were designed to celebrate life, to celebrate innocence, to remove the taint of indoctrinated taste against which Koons was railing. By presenting his wishing well in the form of a mirror in which the viewer sees him or herself, dripping with gilt, Koons combines a sense of pseudo-religious aspiration, of yearning for a better place, with these notions of social mobility in order to help us feel at one with ourselves, to shed some self-consciousness. "When you go to church and you see the gold and the Rococo, it's there, they say, for the glory of God," Koons has said in words that relate to Wishing Well. "But I believe that it's there just to soothe the masses for the moment; to make them feel economically secure; to let something else-- a spiritual experience, a manipulation-- come into their lives" (J. Koons quoted in S. Coles & R. Violette, ed., The Jeff Koons Handbook, London, 1992, p. 110).