Jade Hochberger
Tricks are for Kids
“I want the world. I want the whole world. I want to lock it all up in
my pocket. It's my bar of chocolate. Give it to me now.”
– Veruca Salt
Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955. His name has
accumulated notoriety since 1980, when his first exhibition The New (A Window
Installation) opened at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.
Since The New and right up to his most recent collections, Koons’ pieces have
focused on American-specific themes like commodity and materialism, while still
drawing influence from the artist’s personal experience growing up in a suburban
American environment. Koons critiques the American tendency to assign value - to
try to buy and sell everything, and identifies sex as an overarching theme within
American commodity culture. Ironically, Koons chose youth as the window through
which to reveal the corruption of American culture. Using commonplace items from
his traditionally American boyhood home, the artist has redefined the artistic readymade and taken pop art to new lengths. Koons’ work realizes the commodification
of the American childhood as well as its vehicle of operation: sex. Supposedly the
utmost era of innocence, the American childhood has morphed into a time for mass
consumption, driven and sustained by an urgent and insatiable lust for more, more,
more. Jeff Koons’ work is sustained by the intermingling of the American cultural
constructs of childhood, commodity, and sex.
Stirring up the nostalgia and sentimentality associated with adolescent
treasures, Koons unites his audience through a shared experience, one every
average American can relate to. Shimmering in perfect detail before us, we inspect
the surfaces of monumental toys and balloons we know only too well, reminded of
the last time we got excited about a plastic bag inflated with helium. But beneath our
awe and wonderment there also lurks an eerie sense of discomfort. No longer
blinded by our childhood innocence, normally asexual objects are presented to us
from an adult perspective, perversely intertwining sex and childhood.
Defining the term “childhood” is indeed a difficult task. It is not something we
can easily identify, its parameters blurry and fluid. Americans cannot even decide
on one age for both drinking and driving - two things children probably should not
do. Childhood is a relative term, a construct of our cultural and social atmospheres.
In his ethnography on Brazilian street children, American anthropologist Tobias
Hecht observes how people who no longer consider themselves children articulate
their ideas about childhood. Many programs attempting to combat childhood
homelessness coined in their literature phrases like “robbed of a childhood,”
implying kids who did not have the traditional western upbringing were not
receiving their childhoods at all (Hecht, 1998). But then, did that mean an 8-year-old
boy working in a factory was not a child? Hecht draws upon points like these to try
to deconstruct the ideas and preconceptions we have about “childhood,” arguing
that none of them really exist.
Americans have constructed childhood in a way that caters to our society. At its
foundations America was built on capitalism and a market economy. Today, this
translates into a sense of lustful materialism in nearly every aspect of our daily lives;
from what toothpaste we use in the morning, to what kind of car we drive, right
down to the shoes on our feet. Everything is a commodity; everything can be
assigned value, both monetarily and socially.
Jeff Koons is keenly aware of how engrained in us our American commodity
culture is, and how this has affected our definition of childhood. In Celebration, one
of his more recent series’, Koons constructed a piece entitled Balloon Dog, which
would later make history with the highest sum ever paid for a work by a living
artist: $58.4 million. A huge 10-foot stainless steel reproduction of a balloon animal,
the sculpture is a tribute to the American childhood. What did we love more as a
child than that moment at a carnival or wedding reception when, by some divine
intervention, there was an uncle with a bag of tube balloons and an air pump? The
piece is abstract yet recognizable, like the childhoods we can never quite put our
fingers on.
Recreated in finite detail, the colossal childhood fetish genuinely seems inflated,
paralleling the seemingly ever-expanding adolescent market. Modern American
childhoods are an endless stream of advertising and bait-dangling before parents
and their children. Everything a child could ever dream of - from roller skates, to
ponies, to roller skates for ponies - childhood is one big shopping spree, and undereighteens are one of the most profitable demographics in America. Inflated with the
airy promises of happier lives with the newest hot wheels and the matching hot
wheels lunchable, Koons’ balloon dog is simply a byproduct of the culture it
represents.
One of Koons’ most recent works, also from Celebration, Play-Doh depicts the
favorite children’s toy (if we can call it that?) in monumental lumps, squashed and
piled in different brightly colored scoops towering ten feet high. Polychromed
aluminum recreates every puff and every divot of the soft matter, magnified to
larger-than-life size but still intricately accurate in detail. Standing before the
morbid mountain we are helplessly reduced to wonder-struck toddlers, mouths
watering as we gaze, wide-eyed, at all that mushy fun.
The dramatic exaggeration in size implies more than just hours of modeling
enjoyment. Koons does not fail to articulate with Play-Doh the trademark
excessiveness of American culture. The television tells us to continue piling Barbie’s
and racecar beds and other necessities on top of our children, until they are ten feet
tall; a colorful landfill of youthful commodities, much like a massive mound of playdoh, disturbing confirmation that materialism can and will corrupt even the most
innocent of creatures.
It took Koons’ nearly ten years to mimic nearly perfectly play-doh’s texture.
Through long and extremely complex technological exploits, using more
sophisticated versions of the machines that created his ready-made subject matter,
Koons parallels commodity industry in his dedication to accuracy as well as his tools
of operation. Like the labyrinths we call toy stores, Play-Doh is a child’s wet dream,
but to the trained eye it reveals much more concerning truths about the
commodification of youth.
Koons’ pieces have a fantasy-like quality to them. As if hearing our childhood
prayers for a balloon animal that would never pop or an endless supply of play-doh.,
Koons pieces fuse child-like imagination with stunning likeness to reality. By
utilizing ready-made industry technology Koons executes his visions to
unprecedented standards of both technological complexity and aesthetic appeal,
producing works that both tug at our heartstrings and drop our jaws. In his pieces
he incorporates subtle sexuality, paralleling American material-lustfulness.
Works Cited
Kuo, Michelle. “One of a Kind.” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective. Ed. Scott Rothkopf. New
York : Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014. 247-252. Print.
Deitch, Jeffrey. “York to New York.” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective. Ed. Scott Rothkopf.
New York : Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014. 215-218. Print.
Koons, Jeff. Balloon Dog. 1994-2000. High chromium stainless steel with transparent
color coating. Celebration.
Koons, Jeff. Play-Doh. 1994-2014. Polychromed aluminum. Celebration.