In Defence of Jeff Koons's Easyfun-Ethereal

Cover of the exhibition catalogue 

published by Harry N. Abrams (2001) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Clearly, Jeff Koons features as a very special kind of hate figure in the work of Byung-Chul Han. 

 

Not only does he have an intense dislike for the ultra-smoothness of Koons's sculptural works - including his stainless steel Rabbit (1986), which, for Han, reflects a social imperative lacking in all negativity [2] - but he doesn't much care for Koons's paintings either. 

 

Writing with reference to the Easyfun-Ethereal series in which a wide variety of things, including food items and human body parts, are assembled, Han says:

 

"His pictures mirror our society, which has become a department store. It is stuffed full of short-lived objects and advertisements. It has lost all otherness, all foreignness; thus it is no longer possible to marvel at anything. Jeff Koons's art, which merges seamessly with consumer culture, elevates consumerism to a figure of salvation." [3] 

 

Well, maybe: but then, on the other hand, it could be that Koons's work is actually a critique of consumerism, exposing the false hopes, empty dreams, and the banality of the mass produced goods that the latter trades in. 

 

If you don't want to buy that, then try this: maybe what Koons is attempting to do is give back to things their strangeness and inviting us to delight in the culture we inhabit - as is, and free from shame and snobbery. To assist in the overcoming of bad conscience - i.e., to allow people to take pleasure in the things they like without feeling guilty, or having to justify their tastes - would be a good thing, no?   

 

 

II. 

 

In the Easyfun-Ethereal series, Koons has cut and pasted (seemingly at random) pictues found in glossy magazines and old ads, as well as photographs of his own, creating digital collages that appear to be as chaotic as they are colourful. 

 

Although initially this work is performed on a computer using Photoshop softwear, the electronic images are then transformed into traditional oil on canvas paintings, with painstaking photo-realist attention to detail; Koons and his team of assistants spend months meticulously applying computer-calibrated colours by hand. 

 

The word traditional may seem an odd one to use with reference to Koons's paintings. But, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what his work is. Far from emerging out of nowhere, his paintings are rich in many elements that recall art history (and not just Pop art history). Unlike Han, I think there's much to marvel at in the windows of our great department stores - and much to marvel at in Koons's pictures too. 

 

His canvases don't merely mirror our society, they also - more importantly - speak of what Levi Bryant termed the democracy of objects, i.e., a flat ontological realm wherein objects of all sorts - from hot dogs, elephants, and rollercoasters, to lips, wigs, and bikini bottoms - equally exist without being reducible to other objects and can dynamically interact outside of any transcendent system of meaning [4].        

 

This, for me at least, gives Koons's work not only cultural and aesthetic interest, but philosophical import too. But readers can make up their own mind by visiting his website and viewing the twenty-four pictures - from Auto to Venus - that make up the Easyfun-Ethereal series: click here.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This catalogue was published on the occasion of an exhibition that ran from 27 Oct 2000 - 14 Jan 2001, featuring seven new works by Jeff Koons commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin). Illustrated with full-colour reproductions, the catalogue also includes an interview with the artist by David Sylvester, as well as an essay by Robert Rosenblum analysing Koons's technique and imagery.

 

[2] See the post entitled 'On Smoothness' (5 Dec 2021): click here.  

 

[3] Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other, trans. Wieland Hoban, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 59.  

[4] See: Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, (Open Humanities Press, 2011). 

 

    

On Smoothness

Jeff Koons: Rabbit (1986) 

Stainless steel sculpture [1]

 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence famously contrasted the shape and surface of a peach with that of a billiard ball; privileging the former, velvety and wrinkled with secrets, over that of the latter, so round and finished but lacking in voluptuous beauty for all its smooth perfection [2].  

 

Clearly, for Lawrence, this is an erotico-aesthetic issue; he doesn't like the look or feel of the billiard ball as an object and regrets that it doesn't have the indentation or groove of the peach running along its body; the ripple down the sphere with the suggestion of incision [3].

 

 

II.

 

Byung-Chul Han is another writer who doesn't much care for smoothness and he not only perceives a connection between Brazilian waxing, the iPhone, and the sculptures of Jeff Koons, but objects to all these things on politico-philosophical grounds. 

 

Speaking in conversation with Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert in 2014, Han explained why he sees similarities between these things and why the ideal of smoothness troubles him:

 

"The commonality isn't that difficult to see: it is the smooth. Smoothness is characteristic of our present. Do you know the G Flex, a smarthone by LG? This smartphone has a special covering. If it gets scratched, the scratch quickly disappears. That is, it has a self-healing skin, almost an organic skin. The smartphone therefore remains perfectly smooth. I ask myself: What is the problem with an object getting a few scratches? Why this striving for a smooth surface? And straightaway a connection opens up between the smooth smartphone, smooth skin, and love." [4] 

 

Han continues: 

 

"The smooth surface of the smartphone is a skin that cannot be damaged, that can avoid any injury. And isn't it the case that today we seek to avoid any kind of harm in love as well? We do not want to be vulnerable; we shy away from hurting and from being hurt. [...] 

      [...] Even art  seeks to avoid injury. There is no damage to be found on a Jeff Koons sculpture - no tears, no fault lines, no sharp edges, no seam either. Everything flows in soft and smooth transitions. It all appears rounded, polished, smoothed out - Jeff Koons's art is dedicated to the smooth surface." [5]    

 

 

III. 

 

What, then, do I think of this? 

 

Well, on the one hand, I quite agree that it's often the irregularities and imperfections that make things (including people) lovable and longtime readers will know that I subscribe to a gargoyle aesthetic [click here, or here, for example], which means I challenge all ideas of wholeness, or completion, or smooth perfection. The devil - which is to say the seductive charm - is always in the detail.    

 

On the other hand, I've also indicated in past posts that I'm a fan of the work of Jeff Koons [click here, or here, for example], have written on the beauty and genius of the iPhone [click here], wear spectacles with anti-scratch lenses, and prefer girls with legs that are silky smooth, rather than rough and hairy [6]. 

 

So let's just say I'm a little more ambivalent on this question than Han ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Koons had three identical stainless steel rabbits made in 1986. One of these figures sold for over $91,000,000 in May 2019, making it the most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction. 

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Peach', in The Poems, Vo. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 232. The poem can be found on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

      I'm aware of the fact that were one to closely examine a billiard ball one would find that it is neither perfectly round nor perfectly smooth, despite being machine manufactured and cast in resilient plastic materials. It might look (to the naked eye) and feel (to the poet's fingertip) absolutely smooth, but there are numerous micro pits, bumps and scratches on the surface of a billiard ball. 

[3] One is reminded reading this that, for Lawrence "fruits are all of them female" and that he cannot help relating the body of the fig, peach, or pomegranate to the body of woman and her sexual organs. See The Poems Vol. I, p. 229. 

      This metaphorical comparison between fruit and sex is of course long established in the arts; it is, in fact, something of a cliché for (predominantly male) poets and painters to compare breasts to melons, nipples to dark cherries, and moist cunts to ripe figs showing crimson through the purple slit, as D. H. Lawrence would have it. I comment at greater length on this elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark; click here for example, or here.

 

[4] Byung-Chul Han, 'I Am Sorry, But These Are the Facts', in Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021), pp. 125-26. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 126. 

      Note that Byung-Chul Han sets out his thinking on smoothness (in relation to the body and to aesthetics) in Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2018). See the first three chapters in particular. 

[6] Having said that, in one of the earliest posts on this blog (8 Jan 2013), I wrote with regret about the universal Brazilianization of women obliged by porno-social convention to wax or shave their pubic region and recalled the words of Henry Miller to the effect that a hairless cunt lacks mystery and resembles a dead clam (one assumes that Byng-Chul Han would agree with this). Click here if interesed in reading the post in full.  

Rabbit: On the Obscene Beyond and Other Abhorrent Mysteries

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit 

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit ...

 

 

One of the most astonishing and disturbing chapters in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) is entitled Rabbit. 

 

And although there is a large lagomorph at the centre of the chapter, our main concern here is with what Lawrence terms the obscene beyond and the manner in which Gudrun and Gerald conduct their love affair in relation to this material reality which threatens to disrupt life as it is lived ideally beneath the Great Umbrella that mankind has erected between itself and the inhuman chaos of actuality which is neither Good, True, nor Beautiful.   

 

Gudrun is acting as art mistress to Gerald's young sister, Winifred, and it is decided they will draw the latter's pet rabbit, Bismarck. Gerald is hanging around watching - disconcerted by Gudrun's pale-yellow stockings, but in love with her all the same. He can't help admiring her body and imagining the silky softness of her flesh; "she was the all-desirable, the all-beautiful" [a] and he wanted only to give himself to her.

 

(Be careful what you wish for ...)

 

Bismarck, it turns out, is not only big, he's also strong - and he doesn't like to be handled:

 

"They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms' length, averting her face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind." [240]

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and utterly overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the midlessness and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her." [240]    

 

At this point Gerald steps forward to offer his assistance and, after a further struggle, the demonic bunny is eventually subdued. But this incident has brought him and Gudrun into a fateful relation of some kind and there was a mutual hellish recognition: "They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries." [242]  

 

Ignoring his own scratches, Gerald is perversely fascinated by the deep red gash on the silken white arm of Gudrun: 

 

"It was as if he had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm [...] The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond. [...] 

      There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate. [...]

      Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition." [242-43]  

 

These lines tell us something crucial about Gudrun and Gerald's relationship and indeed about the violent metaphysics of obscenity underlying Lawrence's thinking. 

 

He, Lawrence, obviously uses the term knowledge here in the biblical (i.e., carnal) sense, which implies that the gaping wound on Gudrun's arm has a sexual (as well as deathly) aspect, although Gerald doesn't merely equate it with her vagina, but sees within it a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities [b]. 

 

And Gudrun knows it: they both delight in recognition of this fact and that soul-destructive obscenity is at the heart of their passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 239. Future references to this edition of the novel will be given directly in the text. [b] 

 

This phrase - which I hope I recall correctly - is from J. G. Ballard's brilliant novel Crash (Jonathan Cape, 1973).