Jeff Koons - Mastery artist

            With this installment, I wanted to mention a piece by Jeff Koons called the “Pink Panther”1988.  It is a sculpture roughly forty inches high and is of a pinup model embracing a pink panther cartoon character.  The sculpture is made of porcelain and well crafted.  Being a porcelain sculptor myself, I can see the extreme challenges that this faced in order to be intact and be a successful art piece.   The colors are pastels and soft to the eye.  This I’m sure was done with intent as to make it look cartoonish and less realistic.  The female in the piece has a big smile and with one arm embracing the pink panther and the other covering a bare breast she has exposed.    The detail is well done and the finish is glossy.   There are many opinions on this piece particularly.  The woman is seen by many to be Jayne Mansfield and the embrace symbolizes a certain masculinity that men today need more of. 

            The “Pink Panther” caught my attention because it was so disrespected in my opinion by the Stokstad text.  The author rips this piece pretty good saying that Koons’ art and especially this piece as being “openly materialistic and shallow, positively wallowing in popular culture”.  It also says that Koons enjoys the negativity and disapproval.  I think it is interesting that this has such a large negative connotation to it.  In the times that we are in, art is a form of expression of the times and societal ills that effect us.   Sounds like perhaps Stokstad is defining Koons as a avant-gardist.

         Here is a little history on Jeff Koons.  He was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania and currently resides in New York, NY.  He studied at the Art Instute of Chicago and received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.   He later worked in a museum of art as he molded his craft of sculpture and painted many pieces.

          Jeff Koons is a great sculptor in my opinion because he excels at creating very difficult sculpture using some very tempermental mediums.  Not all are fragile, but  I enjoy his outlook on the world around us and pictured here are a few of his other pieces. 

          I think his societal commentary is hilarious.... For example...

         He dabbles in shock value and takes the simple and makes it abstract enough to be seen as an extension of thought.  The majority of his work includes some amazing colors, brilliant and piercing objects that eject toward you as you look at them, especially some of the folded balloon pieces of varying reflective colors. 

        Some of his work is on the pornographic/elicit side and reference beautiful women engaged with stuffed animals and other objects.   He was married to an ex porn star, so that may explain that one.   Some of his work is loved and other bits are hated because of their offensive nature.  It is an interesting factoid that there is a video game where you can destroy Jeff Koons artwork.  Sounds like technology is catching up to the societal majority outlook of his work.  What I respect most in his work is that he has been quoted many times saying “There is absolutely no hidden meaning or agenda in my work”.  So if anyone says there is, it is obviously the thoughts of the viewer and their outlook on life changes how the work has been seen.  I think he revels in the fact that he is removed from any political discussion of his work, and that leaves him to only worry about being honest with himself and forget about what anyone else may think.

            An artist who I find impressive is Robert Smithson.  He is considered to be a minimalist installation artist, although he did produce some other work in abstract expression.  The majority of his work encompasses reflective surfaces and rock or some substrate of earth.  

             As a child he was enamored with nature and was quickly thrown in the art world with a scholarship to Art Students League in New York.  There he became a proponent of abstract art and did many paintings.

              He later married a minimalist artist who was a sculptor and he became very interested in that style.   Part of his ideals was to create an art project in nature and have it be consumed by nature.  In other words, he wanted nature to have its way with his projects.   He also styled in taking photos of landscapes and surroundings, then enlarging the photograph and then reinstalling the enlargement into the landscape.  He then would photograph the photograph within the landscape giving a sense of one referencing the other.  Robert Smithson lived from 1938-1973.  He died in an airplane crash while working on his latest project called “Amarillo Ramp” which was under survey for construction in Amarillo, TX. 

My focus today is an incredible piece of art and work for that matter known as “Spiral Jetty” by Robert Smithson 1970.  

This is Robert’s most notable work of art.  This particular piece is a fine example of “earthwork”, as it is made up of mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks and water.  The incredible structure is more than 1500 feet long in a spiral and the walls of the structure are fifteen feet in width.  Separating the spiral walls is water from Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA.  Robert saw the lake as a productive ocean killed by the Dead Sea.   This thought by Smithson, I believe had some reference to biblical plagues and death from a “God” event.   The spiral design of his mammoth sculpture was taken from the primitive use of spirals throughout many cultures.  The spiral design also appears in nature and can be seen in natural events (water storms) as well as in the biology of many creatures.

I find it very interesting how the color of the water changes as you get closer to the center of the spiral.   The enormity of the project is also very striking.  This was not something done and a few days, this was well thought out and executed with great precision.  I researched and was unable to find any of the chemistry or ecology factors that the spiral has changed.  Is the concentration of salt greater at the center of the spiral or is it less.  Might this be some technique that could be used to reduce or increase the salinity level of a watershed?   There are all kinds of questions, but one interesting thought is how the timeline of his death may have affected his work.  The rise of the environmentalist laws and regulations didn’t really start till 1973 with President Nixon.  If Smithson were alive today, would he be ridiculed for disrupting the environment, when all he was really after was showcasing how constructive and destructive forces with affect nature.  Perhaps the environmental movement would have shut down his future large scale natural art projects or may have demanded that the “Spiral Jetty” be removed for its impact at the Great Salt Lake.  Again, we see the politics of the day and art closely wound together,  as we have learned throughout our class. 

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-smithson-robert.htm

http://robertsmithson.org/biography.php

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/93345

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/01/arts/art-robert-smithson-pre-minimal-paintings.html