Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, through 12 September 2001.

Is Jeff Koons life-enhancing? Or is he subtly undermining the materialistic hegemony of today’s curatorium? This challenging exhibition in Edinburgh shows how this ever-matronly city of festival culture et al, can still score a dramatic first in the visual arts – the first Jeff Koons show ever presented in the United Kingdom and while still reversing away from the visual arts as a festival component. For the show at the Fruitmarket emphasises a number of such issues.

One, as Frank Whitford recently tackled admirably (Sunday Times: Culture, 5 August 2001), hinges upon this amazing contradiction, whereby the official Festival does actually wholly ignore in all its literature, the very existence of art exhibitions, as if even beyond the ‘fringe’. Such is the power of ‘drama’ that we even find Richard Calvacoressi (says Whitford), who is Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, obliged to take to the Royal Lyceum Theatre stage in John Cage’s ‘Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet’ (August 30–1 September 2001). And this is cited by the Festival Director himself as evidence that ‘we’re all co-operating really well’. Could we then see next, for example, Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate Galleries, appearing now in ‘Humble Boy’ at the National Theatre, with Dame Diana Rigg? The pulse accelerates. The imagination races.

‘But to return to Koons. There is evidence that his real preoccupation is about the actual ‘feminisation’ of our contemporary culture; this conspires with its secularisation (in his view) to perfume our lives in an ocean of soft, caressing promotional pornography (such as currently pervading the internet). Certainly such works by Koons as ‘Lips’, or ‘Hair with Cheese’ convey this essence. The seven new paintings here on show seduce the viewer with a glossy commodification where all seems synthetically enhanced. In Edinburgh, capital of surrealism (witness the superb collections at the Dean Gallery, National Gallery of Modern Art), the precedent of Dali to Koons is inescapable. The latter’s works are often, however, the collaborative product of up to forty assistants. The seamless collaging of human orifices, limbs organs, together with prepared foods, high heels, and instant landscaping only denies the natural presence of body fluids and odours. But all is homogenised most ingeniously with a single gloss veneer. For Koons, ‘appeal’ is what counts – taste is redundant. Koons, one-time commodities broker, is himself explicit in such definitions. Here perhaps, he knows full well both the context of his work today, and authentically reflects all this in his work. It is the golden touch. At the same time, to his credit, he calls us to question this contemporary zeitgeist, as does no other artist working today with such devastating, seductive effect.