Jeff Koons: A Retrospective
June 27–Oct 19, 2014
Inflatables and Pre-New
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Koons moved to New York in 1977 after completing his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there he had been making paintings inspired by his dreams and the work of his hero Salvador Dalí. In New York, he took a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art, where he encountered recent Conceptual Art and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. For Koons, these unaltered industrial products—a urinal or shovel—engaged the everyday world more directly than the images he had painted from his fantasies. His first experiments with the readymade involved the cheap inflatables he found scouring novelty shops in downtown Manhattan. He used these toys to turn his East Village apartment into a riotous installation and to make sculptures that explore the fetishes and other irrational forces driving consumer culture.
Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny), 1979
Jeff Koons, Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny), 1979. Vinyl and mirrors; 32 x 25 x 19 in. (81.3 x 63.5 x 48.3 cm). The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica. © Jeff Koons
While searching for commercial products to incorporate into his art, Koons tirelessly perused the bins of the discount shops that extended across Fourteenth Street, Broadway, and New York’s Lower East Side. In so doing, he developed a connoisseur’s eye for the pleasures to be found in cheap toys and tchotchkes. Perhaps the most enduring of the products he encountered at this time were inflatable vinyl toys. Apart from their tactile surfaces and bright colors, Koons found a deeper message running through these objects—one that spoke to nothing less than mortality. He has said, “I think of the inflatables as anthropomorphic, we are ourselves inflatables, we take a breath, we expand, we contract, our last breath in life, our deflation.” With these words in mind, the optimism of his chosen products are also haunted by the specter of death.