Jeff Koons's reputation precedes him sufficiently that after decades of sensational artworks, even the act of going to see a Jeff Koons exhibition is a spectacle in itself.
Perhaps because of the breadth of Koons’s artistic activity, he is everything that cultural naysayers adore. Banality, pornography, pointlessness and ostentation, made all the more sensational by Koons's own gleeful indifference.
Over the years, he has played with the art world, creating works that challenge the viewer just by their own fault of visiting the exhibition in the first instance. Now as we get well into the 21st century, he shows no sign of stopping.
The show features a small but well-chosen selection of classic examples of Koons's work. The major themes are all there; banal items elevated to the status of art through the mechanisms of the museum, and everyday objects that are transformed into art by being manufactured in materials that contrast their own formality.
So you can see the balloon bunny fabricated in polished stainless steel and the mystery of the basketball suspended in a tank. You can see the kind of kitsch china figurines your granny used to have, brought into the exhibition on an enormous scale.
Koons combines elements of all of these in his new work, including an oversized figurine of ballerinas, made not only in the same fabricated stainless steel as the bunny, but also now coloured, rendering them in a super saccharine, insanely glossy, shiny tinsel spectacle.
Being almost life-size, recognizably human in form and yet so synthetic and shiny, it's as if there is some kind of android future lurking within them. In their shininess the more you gaze at them the more you are reflected back with all the distortion of the fairground hall of mirrors.
As well as being a retrospective of his own work, the history of art and the future of Koon's methods are brought together with his “gazing ball” paintings, where classical painting is combined with the mechanized industrial forms of Koon's sculptures.
Again as you stare and look at the painting, you see yourself reflected in it. You see everybody around you in the gallery reflected in the ball. But it also stares back at you, making me think of Hal from the film 2001 and it's cyclops, monotonal and stubborn refusal to help Commander Dave Bowman.
Also notable is a huge red metallic sculpture in the exhibition. There is something oddly feminine about it and yet visually it is reminiscent of the cellophane-wrapped sweets in Quality Street, or clusters of grapes, all rendered in this strange anodized coloured metal. It's as if Koons took the balloon concept and let it go wild to an almost obscene degree in its dimensions and ostentatiousness.
The very cute thing, of course, about Jeff Coons is his enormous pieces on display in the gallery translate down into perfect gifts, and if you can't quite work out what to do with a gigantic raspberry-coloured emblem of balloon-like femininity, you can buy a facsimile of a rabbit sculpture as if it was made from balloons, but cast in something shiny to put in your house and show to your friends as a sign that “you get what Jeff Koons is all about”.
Review by Francis Bookwood
Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean, Oxford runs from 7th of February to the 9th of June, 2019
