Jeff Koons: Antiquity 2 (2009-2011)
Oil on canvas (102 x 138 inches)
Oil on canvas (102 x 138 inches)
I.
Inhabiting as they do all the world's oceans, it's not surprising that dolphins have long played a role within human culture and appear in the stories of many sea-faring peoples, including the ancient Greeks, who regarded them as benevolent beings and symbols of good fortune.
Indeed, the modern name, dolphin, derives from the Greek δελφίς (delphís) and is related to the word δελφύς (delphus), meaning uterus. It might therefore be interpreted as meaning a fish born of a womb. For many Greeks, the deliberate killing of a dolphin was an immoral act that rendered the perpetrator unclean before the gods.
This isn't surprising, as the Greeks not only regarded these intelligent and friendly marine mammals as messengers of Poseidon, but associated them with several other deities, including Apollo and Aphrodite; the latter of whom was often depicted riding on the back of a dolphin - which brings us to the painting by Jeff Koons shown above ...
Indeed, the modern name, dolphin, derives from the Greek δελφίς (delphís) and is related to the word δελφύς (delphus), meaning uterus. It might therefore be interpreted as meaning a fish born of a womb. For many Greeks, the deliberate killing of a dolphin was an immoral act that rendered the perpetrator unclean before the gods.
This isn't surprising, as the Greeks not only regarded these intelligent and friendly marine mammals as messengers of Poseidon, but associated them with several other deities, including Apollo and Aphrodite; the latter of whom was often depicted riding on the back of a dolphin - which brings us to the painting by Jeff Koons shown above ...
II.
I've been interested in Jeff Koons and his work ever since Malcolm McLaren told me about him (and Julian Schnabel) in the mid-1980s and one of my happiest memories is of seeing his monumental sculpture Puppy (1992) at the Guggenheim Bilbao (I don't like dogs, but I do love flowers).
Thus, I was naturally excited to learn that the Ashmolean - the world's oldest university museum of art and archaeology - was putting on an exhibition of his work, curated by the artist himself (in collaboration with Norman Rosenthal).
The show features seventeen pieces - fourteen of which have never been exhibited in the UK before - spanning his entire career and selecting from some of Koons's most important series of works, including Antiquity, in which, via a clever use of montage, he blurs the distinction between popular contemporary culture and the art of the classical world - always a fun thing to do.
For Koons, ultimately, there is nothing different between what he does now and what the artists of the past were doing then: honouring those who have gone before and extending an aesthetic tradition that reaches back to prehistory.
But, it seems to me, he's also interested in what turned the ancients on; to see how modern ideas of sexuality compare and contrast with those from the Graeco-Roman world. Thus Gretchen Mol (in full Bettie Page mode) is transformed into Aphrodite, riding an inflatable dolphin, and holding tight to a toy simian incarnation of Eros.*
Now, before the usual objections are raised, it's worth remembering that Aphrodite was continually being reimagined by Greek artists themselves; each vision of loveliness "drawing on subjective compositional fantasies", as Norman Rosenthal puts it. Art, no matter how hard some may pretend otherwise, has always been a bit pervy.
Indeed, according to D. H. Lawrence, half the great artworks of the entire world "are great by virtue of the beauty of their sex appeal" and we should be grateful for this fact. For sex is "a very powerful, beneficial and necessary stimulus in human life". Only the grey Puritan finds this objectionable. The rest of us "rather like a moderate rousing of our sex" by visual imagery, music, and literature.
Notes
Norman Rosenthal, 'Jeff Koons and the Shine and Sheen of Time', essay in the exhibition catalogue, (Ashmolean Museum / University of Oxford, 2019), p. 26.
D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 239-240. I very much doubt that Lawrence would like the work of Jeff Koons. I suspect, rather, that he would brand it as pornography; an attempt, according to his definition of the term, to insult sex and degrade human nudity.
*Interestingly, it was only some time after Koons had photographed the actress in 2006 that he discovered images of Aphrodite astride a dolphin and made the mytho-aesthetic - or what some would term archetypal - connection that inspired the Antiquity series.
For more information on the exhibition Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean (7 Feb - 9 June 2019), click here.
Thanks to Maria Thanassa for her help with this post.
