Jeff Koons: Apollo (The Golden Boy of American Art Meets the Golden God of the Greeks)

Jeff Koons: Apollo Kithara (2019-22) [1]  

Jeff Koons on Instagram

I. 

 

Apollo is the golden boy of ancient Greek mythology: the god of sunlight, music, poetry, and healing; the perfect embodiment of the Hellenic ideal of καλοκαγαθίᾱ [kalokagathia], that is to say, of reason, beauty, and virtue. 

 

Almost too good to be true, it's no wonder Nietzsche seemed to hate him and to privilege the more mysterious (and more troubling) son of Zeus, Dionysus; the god of wine and dance, irrationality and chaos, representing the emotional-instinctive forces. 

 

Only, of course, that's not quite true and the Apollonian/Dionsyian distinction is not so black and white, even in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where Nietzsche develops (but does not invent) these philosophical and literary concepts [2]. 

 

Placing the two gods in dialectical opposition, Nietzsche advances the argument that tragic art is the result of a fusion (or synthesis) of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. But he does not wish for one to be valued more than the other (although in his later writings he will proudly declare himself as a disciple of the latter).

 

For Nietzsche, the tragic hero or thinker is one who struggles (ultimately in vain) to impose order and meaning upon a chaotic world of fate. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks form and structure, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. And thus, for Nietzsche, the attempt to make art and philosophy an optimistic affair of moral reason, i.e., exclusively Apollonian in nature, was profoundly mistaken [3].

 

 

II.

 

But I digress: this post was simply intended to notify readers to the fact that Jeff Koons has a new exhibition on the Greek island of Hydra, honouring Apollo, including the animatronic sculpture shown above, in which the god not only holds a kithara (the seven-stringed version of a lyre), but has to contend with a massive snake flicking its forked-tongue out [4].

 

For those - like me - who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing we like; whereas, on the other hand, for those - like Byung-Chul Han - who hate everything Koons does and represents, then this piece of Apollonian kitsch will just be another reason to damn him. But I think that's a shame. 

 

The fact that Koons has returned to antiquity is no real surprise; all artists, writers, and philosophers look back to the Greeks and Romans at some point. The trick is to find a way to recontextualise ideas and put a contemporary spin on the myths and images from the ancient world, thereby liberating us in a certain sense from the disadvantages identified by Nietzsche in both antiquarian and monumental models of history [5].

 

In a recent interview Koons spoke of trying to play metaphysically with time and in his new show I think we can see what he means by this. Koons gives us a vision of Apollo that is an amusing mix of pagan and postmodern, then, now, never was and might be tomorrow.

 

Inspired by a sculpture from the Hellenistic period that Koons viewed in the British Museum, Apollo Kithara has precisely the smooth, digital look that Byung-Chul Han objects to, though one might have thought he would at least acknowledge the amount of time and care that Koons puts into each of his works. 

         

At any rate, that's what I admire: Koons may, like Keats [6], appear to be a blank idiot when wearing Apollo's famous laurel wreath, but he isn't. 

 

As for all his talk of universal humanity and shared meanings - his insistence that we and the peoples of the past feel the same things and have similar thoughts and values - well, that's the sort of regrettable idealism that many artists like to believe and why, ultimately, as Herbert Grönemeyer, once said: Trust art, but never trust an artist ...

 

Jeff Koons 

Apollo Windspinner (2020-22)     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Koons's Apollo Kithara is an animatronic sculpture featured within the exhibition Jeff Koons: Apollo, at the Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece, in association with the DESTE Foundation  (21 June - 31 Oct 2022). For more details, click here. 

 

[2] In his Preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes it clear that he finds the book questionable to say the least; a Romantic work born of an overheated sensibility; "badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused [...] lacking in any desire for logical purity, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initates [...] an arrogant and fanatical book that [...] has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new and secret paths and dancing-places." 

      In other words, too much Dionysian frenzy and not enough Apollonian calm. It is, by some margin, my least favourite of Nietzsche's books, although, it is perhaps his best known and most widely read text outside of philosophical circles, with the exception of Zarathustra. 

      See 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism', Preface to The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 5-6. 

 

[3] Interestingly, someone who advocates for the Apollonian is the American feminist writer Camille Paglia. Whilst she broadly accepts Nietzsche's definition of the Apollonian and Dionysian, she attributes all human progress to the former (associated with masculinity, reason, celibacy and/or homosexuality) in revolt against the Chthonic forces of nature (including womanhood and procreation): "Everything great in western civilization comes from the struggle against our origins."

      See Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, (Vintage Books, 1991). The line quoted is on p. 40.  

 

[4] Those familiar with Greek mythology will recall that Apollo killed a huge serpent, called Python, who, it is said, not only persecuted Apollo's mother during her pregnancy, but wished to prevent Apollo from establishing his own temple and oracle at Delphi.   

 

[5] See Nietzsche's essay 'On the Use and Abuse of History for Life' (1874), in Untimely Meditations. 

 

[6] I'm referring to the poem by Keats entitled 'Hymn to Apollo' (not to be confused with his 'Ode to Apollo', though both works were probably written in 1815). Click here to read on allpoetry.com

 

 

This post is for MLG Maria Thanassa.  

 

Art, Sex and Dolphins (with Reference to the Work of Jeff Koons)

Jeff Koons: Antiquity 2 (2009-2011)
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 ...

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.