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JEFF KOONS: A RETROSPECTIVE

Jeff Koons, “Moon (Light Pink),” mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, 1995-2000, and “Play-Doh,” polychromed aluminum, 1994-2014 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Through Sunday, October 19, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

Perhaps no other living contemporary artist elicits such a vast range of emotions and responses at the mere mention of his name than Jeff Koons. For three dozen years, Koons has been giving the people what they want while confounding and angering his many, many critics. “From the beginning, Jeff Koons provoked superlatives. Mere adjectives seemed insufficient to describe the jolt of his art — and soon him,” curator Scott Rothkopf writes in his essay “No Limits” in the catalog for the museumwide exhibition “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,” which runs through October 19 at the Whitney. “As far as art and artists are concerned, shock, fame, expense, controversy, subversiveness, and ambition are certainly not accepted unanimously as virtues. Finally, it must be said that not one of these claims . . . could be verified as true.” From a purely aesthetic point of view, Koons’s vast oeuvre, primarily works in series that often involve the readymade, is colorful and engaging, inviting and personable, even as it induces even the least jaded individual to wonder, “But is it art?” Accepting it as art without question, I found myself, as I walked through the retrospective, transported back to my childhood, happily besieged by recollections popping into my head that I hadn’t thought about for years. “Unlike many artists, for whom a conventional American hometown was a place to escape, Koons continues to draw on his boyhood home of York, Pennsylvania, as a primary source of inspiration,” writes Jeffrey Deitch in his catalog essay, “York to New York,” adding, “The city has remained central to his life as an artist, and he returns there almost every weekend. Koons retains an extraordinary ability to access his early childhood memories and build on them in creating his art. He can recall childhood visions and the emotions that accompanied them as if they are happening in the present. He claims even to remember being in his crib. Koons is able to experience these images not just as fleeting memories but as deep aesthetic structures that can be channeled into artistic form.”

Jeff Koons’s Hoover installations are part of “The New” series from the 1980s (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

For me, winding my way through the nearly 150 paintings, sculptures, and installations was an immensely pleasurable journey into my own past. Koons’s vacuum-cleaner pieces, such as “New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue Doubledecker,” from his 1980s series “The New,” had me back in the den, trying to hear my favorite Saturday-morning cartoons as my mother vacuumed the house, while the lithograph-on-cotton billboard “New Rooomy Toyota Family Camry” reminded me of when my father came home with a new Dodge Charger. Koons’s “One Ball,” “Two Ball,” “Three Ball” works featuring basketballs suspended in water tanks, from the “Equilibrium” series, reminded me of when we realized that my father had put up our backyard basketball hoop too high, at more than ten feet. The “Luxury and Degradation” series of oils consists of reproductions of booze ads, along with a stainless-steel ice bucket and “Travel Bar,” that sent me back to memories of my friends and I raiding my parents’ liquor cabinet when they were away. Polychromed wood and porcelain figures from the “Banality” series — Koons’s series titles are another important part of his own self-evaluation, intentions, and art-historical references — had me thinking of the tchotchkes my mother collected and displayed in the living room. And “Made in Heaven,” comprising revealing paintings and sculptures of Koons having sex with Hungarian-born Italian porn star and politician Illona Staller — shortly thereafter they were married, had a son, and then divorced — sent me back to the day I found my father’s hidden stash of Playboy magazines and Swedish blue movies.

Jeff Koons’s “Banality” series offers different views of domesticity and life as kitsch (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Of course, Koons’s recurring use of animals and toys, including stainless-steel balloon dogs, a bronze Hulk, an inflatable bunny, a granite gorilla and Popeye, an oil painting of a slice of birthday cake, and an adorable (if crucifixion-like) polyethylene cat on a clothesline, evoke more universal childhood memories. In addition, many of his works involve mirrors and mirror-polished stainless steel, from the enormous balloon dogs to crystal-glass depictions of the heads of a giraffe, a kangaroo, a walrus, and other animals, as well as the lovely “Hanging Heart (Violet/Gold)”; children and adults flock to see their reflections in these pieces and take pictures of themselves in them, as if they are part of the exhibition, at least for a moment, creating new (digital) memories. However, despite their seemingly overt simplicity, much of Koons’s output took years to fabricate, as new machination procedures had to be developed in order for them to come into existence. Wall text highlights fascinating details about Koons’s construction techniques, adding a level of depth to works that are often ridiculed as simplistic and, well, banal. The centerpiece of the show, and perhaps the single piece that is most representative of Koons’s mind-set, is “Play-Doh” (1994-2014), a large-scale polychromed-aluminum rendition of multiple blobs of different-colored Play-Doh reaching ten feet high and nine feet wide. “‘Play-Doh’ is a deceptively simple sculpture,” Rothkopf explains on the audio guide. “I say ‘deceptive’ because it’s one of the most technically challenging objects in the entire exhibition and one that Koons has been working on for twenty years and completed, in fact, just in June. The idea for this work originally came about out of a mound of Play-Doh that his son, Ludwig, made. Koons talks about his interest in this object being the freedom that the child had to express himself.” That essentially sums up where Koons is coming from, a place inside himself, and each of us, that we all can relate to, the freedom that childhood offers. Eventually, we grow up and move on to other things, saying goodbye to childhood, which is a shame, as this retrospective — which in its own way is helping us all say farewell to Marcel Breuer’s familiar building (the Koons show is the last in the Upper East Side space, as the Whitney moves next year to a new home in the Meatpacking District, designed by Renzo Piano) — is a love letter to the glories of being a kid and retaining at least some of that innocence. The Whitney will celebrate the end of the exhibit and the closing of the building with a marathon viewing for the final weekend, remaining open from 11:00 am on Saturday, October 18, through 11:00 pm on Sunday, October 19. Koons will be at the museum on Saturday night at 9:00 to sign copies of the exhibition catalog, while Rothkopf will participate in a Q&A Saturday at midnight.

JEFF KOONS: SPLIT-ROCKER

Jeff Koons sculpture will keep on rockin’ through September 12 at Rockefeller Center (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Jeff Koons topiary sculpture will keep on rockin’ through September 12 at Rockefeller Center (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Rockefeller Plaza
49th to 50th Sts. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through September 12, free
www.publicartfund.org
www.rockefellercenter.com

Back in the summer of 2000, Jeff Koons’s massive “Puppy” looked out over the crowds at Rockefeller Center. Koons is back at the plaza this season with “Split-Rocker,” a Public Art Fund project that serves as a tasty amuse-bouche to his career-redefining retrospective at the Whitney. Standing thirty-seven-feet high and covered with fifty thousand flowering plants, “Split-Rocker” is a giant children’s rocking chair, a pony head on one side (based on his son’s toy) and a dinosaur (“Dino”) on the other. The 150-ton topiary sculpture, previous versions of which have been displayed in Avignon, Versailles, Riehen/Basel, and Potomac, Maryland, since 2000, is much brighter and more colorful on the pony half, but the work will change during its stay as some flowers die off and others come to life; among the varieties are begonias, geraniums, petunias, and fuchsias. The title is key, as the “split” is more than evident; Koons fashioned the piece so there is a clear differentiation between the two halves, which are slightly misaligned, allowing viewers to glimpse the mirrorlike metal separator. In addition, there is an inviting opening in the back — seemingly offering shelter, although you are not allowed inside — that reveals how the structure was built, with beams and an irrigation system. “I love the dialogue with nature in creating a piece that needs so much control — How many plants should be planted? How will these plants survive? — while at the same time giving up the control,” Koons said in a statement. “It’s in nature’s hands, even though you try to plan everything to make the plants survive. This sense of giving up control is very beautiful. The balance between control and giving up control reminds us of the polarity of existence.” The utterly delightful piece will remain on view through September 12, while the Whitney show, which includes a maquette of “Split-Rocker,” continues until October 19. Koons, who lives and works in New York City and York, Pennsylvania, where he was born and raised, will discuss the project in a Public Art Fund Talk at the New School on September 10; he will also deliver the prestigious 2014 Walter Annenberg Lecture at the Whitney on September 30.

WHITNEY BIENNIAL PERFORMANCES AND SPECIAL EVENTS

Lisa Anne Auerbach will activate her “American Megazine” on Friday nights at the Whitney Biennial (photograph © Lisa Anne Auerbach)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Through May 25, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
Many programs require advance registration and/or tickets
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

The 2014 Whitney Biennial, the last to be held in Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith’s 1960s building on the corner of Madison and Seventy-Fifth, is another mixed bag, further complicated by the curious decision to have three floors organized by three different curators, creating a more disjointed survey of the state of American art than usual. Perhaps the best time to take in this year’s model is when you get the added bonus of a special performance or program, many of which require advance RSVP or tickets. On May 7 at 7:30 ($8), the curators, Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms, and Michelle Grabner, will participate in a roundtable discussion with Jay Sanders that should shed plenty of light on their choices, but there are lots of other events as well. From April 2 to 6 in the second-floor Kaufman Astoria Studios Film and Video Gallery, Academy Records and Matt Hanner present the concurrent film loop The Bower with the three-hour audio No Jets, combining visuals of a cherry tree with audio of flight delays immediately following the events of September 11, while Gary Indiana’s Stanley Park merges images of a Cuban prison with shots of jellyfish. Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s twenty-three-minute short, She Gone Rogue, plays April 2-6 and 9-13 in the lobby gallery. On April 4, New York City teens in grades nine through twelve are invited to a free artist workshop led by the collective My Barbarian; the program continues April 11 with Joshua Mosley. On Friday nights through May 23, Lisa Anne Auerbach will activate her large-scale American Megazine on the third floor.

Miguel Gutierrez and Mickey Mahar team up for dance performance that examines midcareer anxiety (photo by Eric McNatt)

On April 6 at 4:00, James Benning’s re-creation of the 1969 classic Easy Rider will be shown in the Kaufman gallery in conjunction with Julie Ault’s “Afterlife: a constellation.” Composer Robert Ashley and director Alex Waterman will present the world premiere of their opera, Crash, April 10-13 ($20); their Spanish-language TV opera, Vidas Perfectas, runs April 17-20 ($20), while their reimagined speaking opera, The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity, with Amy Sillman, Wayne Koestenbaum, Mary Farley, and Barbara Bloom, plays April 23-27 ($20). Fred Lonidier will lead a teach-in on April 11 at 7:00 that looks at art and labor. On April 12 and 26 ($10 per family), Whitney Wees offers kid-friendly tours and workshops for families with children ages four to five, in addition to the sketching tour “Sculpture and Drawing” for families with kids ages six to ten ($10); also on April 12, Mosely will be leading an Artist’s Choice Workshop for families with children ages eight to twelve ($10), and the Open Studio program, for kids of all ages, will examine Sheila Hicks’s “Pillar of Inquiry / Supple Column.” (Other family workshops are scheduled for April 26 in the Whitney Studio, May 2 with Dan Walsh, May 10 for kids with autism and with My Barbarian, and May 17 with Sara Greenberger Rafferty.) From April 16 to 20, Taisha Paggett will debut a new performance piece in the lobby gallery. On April 17 at 7:00 ($8), Miguel Gutierrez and My Barbarian’s Alexandro Segade have put together “Take Ecstasy with Me,” an evening of performances and reflections by Kalup Linzy, Jacolby Satterwhite, Nao Bustamante, Jorge Cortiñas, A. L. Steiner, Kate Bush Dance Troupe, Juliana Huxtable, and others, inspired by the work of the late Cuban theorist José Esteban Muñoz; Gutierrez will perform the duet Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ with dancer Mickey Mahar April 23 – May 4 ($20).

Anthony Elms, Stuart Comer, and Michelle Grabner will discuss their curatorial choices at May 7 panel discussion (photo by Filip Wolak)

On April 18 at 7:30, Kevin Beasley, with Leon Finley and Christhian Diaz, will present the interactive audio piece “Public Programs in Sonic Masses.” (Beasley will also host a teen workshop on May 2 and activate his sound sculptures on May 14 at noon, May 16 at 1:00, and May 17 at 3:00 in the lobby gallery.) On April 26 at 6:30 ($8), Triple Canopy will investigate “Media Replication Services.” Doug Ischar’s Come Lontano, Tristes Tarzan, and Alone with You will screen April 30 – May 4 in the Kaufman gallery. On May 1 at 6:30 ($8), Joseph Grigely will deliver a “Seminars with Artists” lecture about communication and miscommunication, followed by Susan Howe’s talk on the “telepathy of archives” on May 14 at 6:30 ($8) and Amy Sillman examining the materiality of color on May 22 at 6:30 ($8). On May 6 at 7:00 ($8), Ault, Benning, and William Least Heat-Moon will discuss “Histories of Place.” On May 11, Travis Jeppesen will read his novel The Suiciders in a durational performance on the third floor. And on May 19 at 7:00 ($8), Dawoud Bey will lead a roundtable Conversations of Art discussion about the portrayal of southern blacks during the civil rights movement. Tickets are available in advance for all of the above events that require an additional fee, as indicated in parentheses; some free programs require preregistration, so don’t hesitate if you want to attend any of these Whitney Biennial bonuses.

T. J. WILCOX: IN THE AIR

T. J. Wilcox’s “In the Air” gives visitors a panoramic view of New York City both past and present (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
Mildred and Herbert Lee Galleries, second floor
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Through Sunday, February 9, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

In his Whitney installation “In the Air,” Seattle-born, New York-based artist T. J. Wilcox invites visitors into his Union Square rooftop studio for a swirling look at his view of the city, past and present. Upon entering the second floor galleries, people can duck into a 360-degree panorama of the city composed of shots from six projectors. Over the course of one day compressed into thirty-five minutes, the film breaks into half a dozen short narratives on individual panels, each of which explores a part of New York history associated with that area. The short documentaries look at heiress and jeans designer Gloria Vanderbilt, the plan to have zeppelins dock on top of the Empire State Building, Andy Warhol preparing silver Mylar balloons to greet Pope Paul VI’s motorcade passing by the Factory, Manhattanhenge glowing in the distance, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, and Wilcox’s building super describing in detail how he watched 9/11 unfold from the roof. In the short pieces, Wilcox, a pop-culture junkie who has previously made short films about Marie Antoinette, Jerry Hall, and Marlene Dietrich, relates how the subject influenced him as an artist and a human being. “I became really interested in this idea that I was seeing the view in the present tense as I was looking at the New York City scape but that I was also looking across time,” Wilcox says in a video about the piece on the Whitney website. Part of the fun of “In the Air” is spinning around, wondering where the next of the six documentaries is going to appear; it also makes viewers create their own narratives, peering out at a section of the city and being hit with a personal memory. Wilcox supplements the installation with fifteen works selected from the Whitney’s permanent collection that all involve ways of looking (in general and at New York specifically), including videos, assemblages, photographs, and paintings by Charles Atlas, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Helen Levitt, Joseph Cornell, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joan Jonas, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, and Gordon Matta-Clark.

ROBERT INDIANA: BEYOND LOVE

(© 2013 The Morgan Art Foundation, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Through January 5, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

Perhaps no other living American contemporary artist has suffered at the hands of an early creation quite the way Robert Indiana has. Robert Clark took on the “nom de brush” Robert Indiana in 1958, naming himself after his home state in tribute to his Midwest roots and shedding the name of the Clarks, who had adopted him as a baby, then divorced when he was eight. In 1965 he created a Christmas card for MoMA in which he painted the word “Love” in red, with blue and green filling the negative space, the first two letters balanced on top of the last two letters, an arrow pointing down in the “V,” the “O” tilted to represent, among other things, the instability of the most human of emotions. The image quickly became a misunderstood icon, eventually appearing on stamps, posters, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia and coming to symbolize the late 1960s and the Summer of Love. All the while, Indiana continued to explore the American Dream, which had let him down in various ways, from his childhood to his problems with the copyright on his “Love” design. The Whitney examines the full scope of Indiana’s career, which is much more than just that one iconic image, in “Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE,” his first major museum retrospective, which finally arrives more than fifty years after his New York solo debut at the Stable Gallery in 1962. Curated by Barbara Haskell, the eye-catching show begins in the lobby with “The Electric LOVE,” a polychrome aluminum sculpture with dazzling electric lights going on and off like a Times Square billboard, taking Indiana’s central image to the extreme while also getting it out of the way before visitors head upstairs to the fourth floor to see more than one hundred paintings and sculptures, only a few of which contain that four-letter word.

Robert Indiana, “The Electric LOVE,” polychrome aluminum with electric lights, 1966/2000 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“I have never made a painting without a message,” Indiana, an air force veteran who is now eighty-five, once said, and indeed, his oeuvre is loaded with meaning. Walking through the exhibit is like taking a trip through twentieth-century America, passing by his herms, cultural mile markers inspired by ancient Greece featuring such stenciled words as “Moon,” “Hub,” “Womb,” and “Hole”; examining maps of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida surrounded by the sentence “Just as in the anatomy of man every nation must have its hind part,” calling out confederate states that seceded from the Union and where violence against blacks took place during the civil rights movement; and hard-edge, text- and numeral-based canvases from his “American Dream” series that explode with advertising-style bold letters, geometric shapes, and colors with such words and phrases as “Eat” and “Die,” “Tilt,” “Take,” and “666.” Indiana also pays tribute to Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and other American artists and writers by incorporating words and/or images associated with them into his works. Also on view are his rarely seen cut-paper costume designs for the Santa Fe Opera’s bicentennial version of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s The Mother of Us All, about Susan B. Anthony and the suffragist movement. In addition, Indiana, who left New York City in 1978 for Vinalhaven, Maine, where he still resides, often hides meaning deep within his work; for example, “The Sweet Mystery” includes veiled references to his parents, his homosexuality, a friend who committed suicide, and other personal elements, none of which are apparent in the graphic depiction of two yellow gingko leaves bordered at top and bottom by a red and black warning pattern. And then there it is again, near the end of the show, the spectacular 1966 “LOVE” painting in all its glory, a beautifully rendered emotion that takes on a whole new light in conjunction with the myriad works around it.

WALLS AND BRIDGES — THE ANIMAL VISION: IN CONNECTION WITH THE DRAWING CENTER EXHIBIT “ALEXIS ROCKMAN: DRAWINGS FROM ‘LIFE OF PI’”

Alexis Rockman will discuss his fantastical creations he made, such as the above watercolor, for Ang Lee’s LIFE OF PI in special Walls and Bridges program

The Drawing Center
35 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Thursday, October 17, free, 6:30
www.wallsandbridges.net
www.drawingcenter.org

When making his 2012 hit film Life of Pi, director Ang Lee turned to artist Alexis Rockman to create aquatic species for the central part of the narrative, which takes place on the open sea. Rockman’s watercolor drawings are now on view at the Drawing Center, which is the site for the special October 17 program “The Animal Vision,” part of the third annual Franco-American Walls and Bridges festival. New York native Rockman will discuss his hallucinatory work with Belgian philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret; the event will be hosted by Rice University English professor Cary Wolfe (Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory). Rockman’s “Drawings from Life of Pi” continues at the Drawing Center through November 3; in addition, Rockman’s “Rubicon,” consisting of such new paintings as the large-scale “Bronx Zoo” and “Gowanus,” which depict a heavily detailed, surreal animal world, are on view through November 2 at Sperone Westwater. The ten-day Walls and Bridges festival also includes the multimedia presentation “Unrest” October 18 at the Whitney, featuring the live performance “Meurtrière” by Philippe Grandrieux, a screening of Grandrieux’s film White Epilepsy, and a discussion with Grandrieux, Avital Ronell, and Lynne Tillman; “City Shapes,” in which French geographer Michel Lussault and American photographer Matthew Pillsbury discuss the changing urban environment, October 19 at the Aperture Gallery; and the Oh! Oui… company’s music and theater production Stille Nacht October 20 at the Invisible Dog Art Center.

HOPPER DRAWING

Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks,” oil on canvas, 1942 (Friends of American Art Collection, Art Institute of Chicago)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 6, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

There are only five days left to see the most exciting room in any New York City museum right now, the centerpiece of the Whitney’s “Hopper Drawing” exhibit, which continues through Sunday. Although the primary focus of the show is the New York realist’s drawings and preparatory sketches, the well-curated display also includes two of Edward Hopper’s greatest paintings, installed across from each other in a spacious gallery. On one wall hangs Hopper’s most famous work, 1942’s “Nighthawks,” a bravura noir oil of light, shadow, and color in which a lone man and a couple sit at a diner counter being served by a male worker in white. Every detail in the masterful composition, inspired by a Greenwich Village street and, perhaps, the Flatiron Building, is a wonder to observe. Seeing it in this context, the viewer is able to remove all of the meta surrounding the work, the endless parodies, homages, rip-offs, and tributes that keep coming and instead just appreciate the dazzling glory of the original. It’s a genuine treat to see “Nighthawks” in New York, as it’s on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, where it’s been ever since Daniel Catton Rich bought it from Hopper for three thousand dollars shortly after it was completed. On May 13, 1942, Hopper sent a letter to Rich, explaining, “It is, I believe, one of the very best things I have painted. I seem to have come nearer to saying what I want to say in my work, this past winter, than I ever have before.”

Edward Hopper, “Early Sunday Morning,” oil on canvas, 1930 (© Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art)

On the other side of the room, in the corner on a platform, resides one of the other very best things Hopper painted, the Whitney’s own “Early Sunday Morning.” Placed on Hopper’s easel in the corner, echoing the architectural layout in “Nighthawks,” the 1930 oil painting depicts a depression-era Seventh Ave. devoid of people as dawn breaks. Hopper re-creates a horizontal two-story building, the ground floor consisting of closed businesses with blurred names, the second floor comprising apartments with shades drawn at different levels, implying some kind of life going on inside. A fire hydrant and a barbershop pole, along with an unseen element, cast shadows, while an ominous dark rectangle in the upper right corner, contrasting with the blue of the sky, portends to the coming of monstrous skyscrapers that would signal the end of small-town living. The canvas’s deceptive simplicity is both devastating and mesmerizing, worthy of extended viewing that is sure to produce powerful emotional reactions. “Early Sunday Morning” marvelously captures an America teetering between the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal, a moment in time when the future was as uncertain as it’s ever been. Perhaps some of those people missing in “Early Sunday Morning” found themselves still lost a dozen years later, sitting silently in a dark corner diner, wondering where things might have gone wrong. Related drawings, audio, video, and wall text further explore the creative process Hooper employed in both works, including trying to find the precise geographic locations that influenced these majestic paintings, which, seen together, shed even more light on their brilliance.