Jeff Koons

EO

I wanted to start with this question about ‘self-invention’ because it presented itself to me. Part of your origin story as an artist begins with you phoning up Salvador Dalí, who you learned was staying at the St. Regis Hotel in New York in January 1974, and then him inviting you to meet on Saturday at noon in the lobby. Do you still feel like that’s where your story begins? 

JK

Whenever I think of my history I go back to my family. My mind goes back to York, Pennsylvania and the memories I have from being very young and being in the crib. I remember the room and the corner my crib was in and looking around. I remember the support that I felt from my family, my mom and my dad, and growing up in a middle-class household. I don’t know if we were lower middle class or upper middle class at the time, but my parents probably lived in a home that they built, a new home that they acquired, which probably cost them about $8,000 or $10,000 when they purchased it in the early 1950s.

It was modest and my dad was an interior decorator, so I learned aesthetics from him. It was a controlled environment. Outside of my kindergarten there was a little shed they would open up where we would go and ask for art supplies. I started making drawings and gluing things together, popsicle sticks and other things. My parents realized that I liked to make things. In our local newspaper, The York Dispatch, every Sunday they would have a section in the back with the cartoons called “Cappy Dick.” And Cappy Dick was the captain of a ship, and he would have these different tasks that kids could do. And one task would be a little drawing, and you were to cut this little cartoon out, glue it down on a page and extend the drawing. I would do this every weekend. And I would send it in because you could win a prize, a set of encyclopedias. [Laughs.] I never won but I’d usually come in second or third every week. And I just remember my parents coming up to me one time and kind of saying, “that’s a really nice drawing.” They gave me a pat on the back and they told me that if I wanted to take private lessons, they would set that up for me. For me, art was a way I learned to have a sense of self. I had one sibling, a sister who was three years older. I always felt like she could do everything better because she was older, and because she actually could. She could count higher, and physically, she was bigger than I was. I had the sense that art was something that was kind of being defined within the family as something that was special about me. So I continued with it. I went through the public school system in rural Pennsylvania. I wish that I would have been more involved with my education. I was in the art room all day. Anytime I had a study hall or a free period, I was in the art room. When it came time to go to college, I wasn’t prepared to study physics or mathematics. I thought about going to liberal arts college, but the only thing that I was prepared for was art. So, I applied to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and I was able to get a liberal arts education there. I studied philosophy, psychology, and art history. It was life changing for me because prior to going to art school, I had no idea what art could be.

EO

What was college like for you?

JK

I always wanted to feel part of a group. While I was growing up, I was always an outsider. But in art school, I had shared interests with everybody. I was so excited because I could be involved in psychology and philosophy and sociology and physics and everything kind of just opened up to me. And I was always very competitive with myself.

I remember talking to my sociology teacher and starting to feel connections, so when I was making my artwork in an intuitive manner, things were starting to interlock with other things in my life. Things became more profound, and I felt like I had a reason for existing. I could feel myself transcending. I started to see artworks of other artists that I could connect to at the time. I liked the work of the Chicago Imagists, like Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Roger Brown. I felt that this was work that was different from what was going on in New York at the time, which I really wasn’t pulled to. It felt too academic, as if it was art that was made following rules or some structure. I was pulled more to outsider art, work that was dealing more with Surrealism and Dadaism.

EO

What did art mean and symbolize for you? 

JK

It meant being able to reproduce something in a very realistic three-dimensional manner. Making a beautiful bouquet of flowers or painting a landscape that was able to create the third dimension. I had already made copies of some old master paintings. My dad would commission me to make a painting of a group of people dancing, maybe based on a painting from the Louvre. I would make copies of works for some of his clients that were looking for them. They weren't forgeries, but rather copies of paintings in the original manner. This was something that generated anxiety for me because it dealt with rules. It dealt with performing, which I knew I could do. I had the abilities. I had the eye and coordination for drawing. Intellectually, I enjoyed the concept of mechanical drawing and making things in three dimensions. However, it wasn't until I went to art school and started to understand art history, and how art absorbs all of the human disciplines, that I realized that it was a vehicle for me. I realized that I was becoming a different person, and I enjoyed the feeling that I was involved in that becoming. My life was becoming vaster. 

EO

To return to the idea of performance in your work, was that something you saw in art or did you pick it up from cinema or theater?

JK

I liked the feelings and the sensations that I was starting to have when the anxiety wasn’t present. This happened when I was making something that wasn’t about following rules, but was about things that I felt were relevant to me. The works were about my interests and about the different connections that I was starting to make. From that came the sense of feeling myself transcending. I’m using “transcending” and “becoming” interchangeably. [Laughs.] This was the type of performance that I started to enjoy: the feeling of putting myself out onto the edge.

EO

Transcending what and becoming what?

JK

A different person. A vaster person. A person who had more potential, who could have more feelings. I could feel stronger sensations. Feelings and sensations are at the basis of all ideas, and they eventually form themselves into ideas and then potentially objects. I enjoyed this process first and foremost for myself. Still, I enjoyed being part of a larger whole, being part of something outside of myself, and being part of something greater than the self. This is not about being loved. A lot of people think that people who enjoy communication just want to be loved, but that’s not right. It’s about wanting to be generous. It’s about wanting to share. First you do things for yourself, and once you can take care of yourself, then you want to automatically share that with others. That’s the beauty of art, and that’s what I’ve always loved about it.

EO

There’s a quote from you: “As I developed a sense of personal iconography, I learned that you start to become comfortable with yourself, to accept yourself. Once that happens, you want to go external. You go from subjective to objective art, and art becomes a journey, which is really about sharing with people.”

JK

When I was in Chicago, I became embedded in work that was very much about personal iconography. It was about what I had dreamt the night before, and communicating those feelings and sensations. At a certain point in Chicago, I had dreams that I’d be walking down the hall of the museum at the Art Institute and my legs would give out from underneath me. I would fall down and couldn’t stand back up. I would have dreams like this quite often. Then it started to happen in real life. I’d be walking and all of a sudden I’d feel like my legs were going to give out. My parents took me to a specialist and he said that there was nothing wrong. [Laughs.] He told me to get a new mattress, but I realized that it was really a psychological problem. It was an understanding that I had to move on. I ended up listening to Patti Smith one day while I was painting in my apartment studio. The radio DJ mentioned that the album Horses had just come out. This must have been 1976, and the DJ was talking about the album and how there was all of this energy coming from this new wave movement in New York with all these young poets and artists. So I listened to the album and hitchhiked to New York the next day. And I’ve really been here ever since. I mean, I went back to Chicago after two weeks to gather up my belongings, but by the beginning of January 1977 I had my own apartment in New York. I needed to move on and I needed to be involved in something that was outside of myself and was also about my own generation and about being part of a larger whole.

EO

What about Horses reached you? What about the connection to Surrealism, which you mentioned earlier?

JK

I liked its Surrealistic qualities, like the influence of Rimbaud. I just like Patti. She was a great poet. She is a great poet. But I was also intrigued by the group of people she was a part of, a whole new generation which was developing a voice. That generation was gathering around some of these performers at the time. I had a friend in Chicago named Mike Zeeb who was very close with David Byrne from when they went to the Rhode Island School of Design together. When Talking Heads was starting to perform, Mike would open with a band he was in called The Dons. So immediately Mike put me in touch with Talking Heads. On my first night in New York I had dinner with David. I was intrigued about being involved, because I wanted to continue to evolve, and you evolve by interacting with people and sharing ideas. You sit around with some beers and you talk. I learned a lot about young European artists who were involved with Fluxus. I immediately became involved in a kind of photo narrative work. I also absorbed a lot of minimalism.

EO

Earlier you said that you weren’t interested in New York initially, so what changed and who were those people that you felt were defining the moment?

JK

Patti would have been one. I think David Byrne would have been one. I always loved the Pop artists, so Andy was one. Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Robert Morris. One of my first jobs in New York was working the membership desk at the Museum of Modern Art, which had the Elaine Dannheisser Projects series that featured the work of emerging artists. I remember loving Bill Beckley’s show. He was making photo narrative works. Jackie Windsoralso had a wonderful exhibition at MoMA. The hierarchy that I initially felt existed with the academic structure of the art world seemed to vanish with this new generation. There were also alternative spaces. We had Artists Space. We had the New Museum, which Marcia Tucker started in 1977. We had The Drawing Center. As young artists, these alternative spaces provided opportunities to eventually exhibit work. 

EO

Did you resonate with what Gordon Matta-Clark or Donald Judd was doing? Did you sense the future of the work?

JK

Yeah, absolutely. I liked Matta-Clark’s work, Judd’s work, and Robert Smithson’s work. On any given weekend, you could go to Soho, or you could go to 57th Street and see almost every exhibition that was taking place in New York. So you were really able to get a pretty good handle on what was in the air culturally. John Gibson was a gallery that was showing artists. Bill Lomberg was one that I was very interested in. The Biker Gallery was a gallery that was showing a lot of different works. Holly Solomon Gallery, you had the Pattern and Decoration artists, Mary Boone’s Gallery. 

EO

How did you see yourself contributing to that landscape? How did you will the life you’re living into existence and how did it change the art that you were making?

JK

I think that the conceptual throughline would be acceptance. I was always a little bit of an outsider, even when I was in New York, which I was seeing in a completely different framework than I had perceived it in the past. I felt that I learned how to generate these feelings when I was still a painter. I always studied painting. I hadn’t made sculptures when I first arrived in New York. My paintings became so large and I started attaching ready-made objects onto them, little porcelain figures and bows, different things that made them so heavy that I had to take them off the wall. So I set one of them down on a table, which I then decorated and placed two inflatables on, one on one side of the table and one on the other.

That was the first time I worked with an inflatable. It started to generate these feelings that became so overwhelming that I’d have to go out for a beer or something to calm down. I started to make them slightly more minimal. I would buy inflatables that looked like flowers and put them on plexiglass squares or on store bought mirrors that were square to make little setups so I could photograph them. The intensity of just picking up on the difference between seeing something in real time, in person and in three dimensions, and then also looking at its reflection in the mirror and recognizing the plasticity of these materials would really affect me emotionally. I hoped that I was finally starting to contribute something. That’s when I started to also work in sculpture. To this day I still make things in 2D, I still love making paintings, because I often think in two dimensions. But I like working in 3D because it kind of brings everything together, the form with the color. 

EO

You said something in a video about reflection being abstraction. I think reflecting and mirroring is a practice of giving something depth. I feel like what you really do is related to taking consumer products and giving them depth, taking mass symbols or ornaments and giving them beauty or humanity.

JK

Part of it relates to the things that I grew up with. My father was an interior decorator, so I’d go to showrooms and see a lot of beautiful lamps, beautiful fabrics, wallpapers, all different things. I also remember the tchotchkes we would have in our home, or that my grandparents would have: porcelain or ceramic ashtrays or little figurines. I wanted to practice an acceptance of everything and resist hierarchies of value. It really has to do with self-acceptance. But when you are practicing acceptance that means that everything is automatically in play. Everything is perfect on its own. It can’t be anything other than what it is. It’s essentially perfect.

EO

Yes, like a Platonic ideal.

JK

Yes, and it’s all without any judgment because everything is there to work with. It’s all at your disposal. It’s there to incorporate, to use. As you make a judgment, you start to segregate, and you are no longer empowering yourself to be able to work with these things and interact with them or celebrate them. So there’s just no place for judgment because I believe that judgment creates anxiety. The way you walk out of Plato’s cave is through the removal of judgment and the practice of acceptance. I was trying to create things that weren’t just about my personal history, but that could communicate with people no matter their history.

If art is to automatically be at the service of people, it has to let the viewer know that it’s about them. It’s not about bending down in front of the object by praising and recognizing that this object is great, but it’s about celebrating the act of viewing. It’s about being able to continue to evolve. So the vocabulary is never to be placed above the person engaging the work. The viewer should not feel intimidated by the art, but should instead be able to embrace it, and through that be more open to dialogue with it. This won’t happen if a work is creating any form of hierarchy that is in some manner restricting them from being free to interpret it.

EO

So it’s not really about nostalgia. You’re not trying to reclaim a past or stage objects that you like in a new light?

JK

[Laughs.] No. I like the idea of history and the idea of being part of a lineage. We have an opportunity to deal with metaphysics to deal with the past. One of the ways to do that is to be able to make connections to things that are relevant to you from your past, and to make reference to other people and other things and to our biological histories. Art has the ability to make us aware of the moment, but more importantly its essence is about our future, and that excites. You view a work of art or you read a book or something that stimulates you and it’s all about the future, it’s all about becoming, it’s all about the opportunity you have to expand your parameters, and that’s what I'm hooked on.

EO

I'm curious about the logic behind taking these objects and further anthropomorphizing them, taking the aesthetic language of that object and recasting it in a different material that makes it still look petite and light, but actually weighs a ton. Why did you want to translate that object into a different material but retain its original register?

JK

When I started working with objects, I was very much coming out of the Duchampian tradition of the ready-made. I liked the idea of working in a conceptual manner, and the gestalt and the confrontation, the physical confrontation with things. When I started to work in stainless steel, and even the vacuum cleaner pieces, I was always working with the new. I was attempting to preserve all the perfections and imperfections of objects. If I bought a new vacuum cleaner and never turned it on, I could just display it for its integrity at birth. Everything was about maintaining its integrity. So when I would cast things like a rabbit, I would try to have all the seams just perfect and the reflection perfect. There was a certain point that I reached though when I made this piece called Kiepenkerl, which didn’t come out well. It was a flawed piece because of the casting, and that was an eye-opener for me. I realized that all that my work is linked to is the viewer. They become the ready-made, and that’s what I care about. They’re the perfections and the imperfections that are important. The only thing that’s relevant is the viewer, and that’s why I was working with reflection.

EO

So it’s about holding up a mirror to the viewer?

JK

To the viewer, but it’s also meant to be an intoxication too, because a mirror can be very dislocating. It can be quite thoughtful or philosophical depending on which way the mirror is facing, what it’s reflecting. But it also lets you affirm you. You face the mirror towards you. You’re affirmed in your existence, and it’s all about you. Still, it also lets you contemplate alternative realities in a way, which is part of the intoxicating quality. I mean, all of life’s energy is very dependent on the sun, and to have reflection, you need light.

I like this idea of staying with life’s energy and dealing with a material that's durable. I ended up working with steel, but I’ve worked with a lot of materials. I enjoy different materials for the different psychological information that they carry with them.

EO

But why did you want to turn these toys into monuments? What’s the psychology there?

JK

I think they’re about our internal being. If you take a deep breath, you’re a balloon. You’re an inflatable. That’s kind of a symbol of optimism. And when you exhale, it’s a symbol of death. If you think of my balloon dog, that could be our intestine, and I always imagine people from the past, from ancient civilizations, who would maybe work with the intestines of some animal in order to make a ritualistic object that a community could rally around. So it has to do with this interface, which the reflective surface also serves, between the external world and the internal world. I mean, skin is that same membrane. It’s all about that communication back and forth between your perceptions of the external world and how it’s affecting you. John Dewey, the philosopher, speaks about this beautifully in Art as Experience. You change because of how the environment changes you. In return, now that you’re different, you’re affecting the environment in a different way. This back and forth is true communication. That’s life experience. That’s art. That’s the power of the arts.

EO

But I’m curious because there’s still an object at play. There’s the theory aspect, there’s the psychology, and then there’s the reality. I’m thinking about the series Gazing Ball. I feel that’s kind of the summation of your practice in a way, because there are these objects that are beautiful and perfect and speak to history in a really specific way, but then, there’s this intervention. What made you want to intervene in that way? How did that become your signature? How did that become part of your practice?

JK

I love the Gazing Ball paintings. I have one here in my office. I like the series because gazing balls are really just ornaments. They’re not objects that are held in high esteem. There are things that people put in their yard for whoever goes by just for their visual enjoyment, which comes with that excitement, that sense of joy, that stimulation.

EO

You’re talking about the external, but I’m talking about what makes it exciting for you when you encounter the gazing ball and the paintings you made with them.

JK

Yes, I’m talking about the external in the sense that it’s in the yard, but I’m also talking about the internal which is the stimulation, the excitement, the joy. Somebody looks at it. They’re reflected in almost 360 degrees. It’s telling you everything it can about where you are in the universe. It’s like a GPS system. So the body and the mind reward each other to tell you where you are at any given moment–it works as a kind of reminder. Both want to know. In 2014, this couple, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their work on cells and positioning systems in the brain. It’s something very inherent in us as human beings to want to know where we are. But it also brings up the issue of the gaze. Whose gaze is this? Is it your gaze? And the answer is that it is always your gaze. If you’re perceiving it, it’s your gaze. That’s the only gaze that matters. Your perception is the only perception that matters. This object itself is also a firm tool, because you don’t necessarily feel the gaze of that object in return.

EO

Right. When you view art, you’re not aware of your presence. You’re aware of the object’s existence, but you don’t participate and aren’t implicated. With the gazing balls the works take on this metanarrative where you’re a participant in this actual intervention of this object with this other mirror surface.

JK

Yes, the object is just like a transponder. It’s just something that excites and stimulates. It’s like having the internet, because if you’re not there to use it in a manner that’s meaningful to you, it’s valueless. The only value of anything is what it can mean for you.

EO

Yes. Let’s talk about scale, because you said that when you first moved to the Lower East Side you were making these really massive canvases with souvenirs tacked to them. How did you grow to want to make objects that were really big? Why did you want to turn these tiny tchotchkes into these massive objects?

JK

I’ve always just listened to myself in terms of deciding what size something wants to be. For example, with my vacuum cleaner pieces, I started off by making single stacked pieces, then they became double-deckers and then triple-deckers. There’s this aspect of limitation in a more domestic situation that isn’t there as much in an institutional or gallery setting. Some of the scale changes came from having opportunities that were beyond my apartment, which was basically my studio too. [Laughs.] Plato would always say the first thing in art is scale. It’s the first thing that you have to work out. I try to just intuitively feel what the scale wants to be. When I did my Banality exhibition, there were works like Ushering in Banality and Bear and Policeman, both big wooden sculptures. These objects would normally be quite small. If they existed, you would encounter them as humble figurines or little wood carvings made in Bavaria. They became much larger. They weren’t huge, but they became larger. The porcelain pieces were scaled up a little bit. When I was going to have an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens asked me if I had a body of work ready, and I had been working on my Celebration series, which was made up of large pieces.

EO

This was in the 1990s?

JK

Yes, this would have been in the ’90s. Tom would have come to me around 1994, maybe ’93. But I had already started the series. I made Cat on a Clothesline already, and I was working on Sacred Heart, Hanging Heart, Moon, Balloon Dog. If Balloon Dog was on a smaller scale, it wouldn’t carry the same meaning. For me, Balloon Dog is an object that I envision a community rallying around, like some sort of ancient ritual of observation. And if it didn’t have that scale, it also wouldn’t have this mythic quality of like a Trojan horse or something. It exists on the border between this mythic space and something that’s much more intimate within our history. A year and a half ago, when one of the Balloon Dogs was knocked over at an art fair, and the media covered it, and sent the news all around the world, everyone sort of rallied around the Balloon Dog. It was just as I had always envisioned a ritual taking place around it in ancient times.

EO

Why do you think they rallied around it?

JK

Because it was in the media throughout the whole world. So many different places covered this story just about this Balloon Dog being broken. 

EO

You sat with an object like Play-Doh for like 20 years, and I’m curious what about that object required that kind of time? What is your relationship to time, especially as you’re developing objects?

JK

Well, I thought about my Gazing Ball series for 30 years before I made it. And then when I started, I made them quite rapidly. I could make each sculpture within less than a year. The paintings would take me maybe two years, but I really thought about how I could work with a gazing ball. In making a piece like Play-Doh, a lot of that had to do with just the production. Originally, I was going to work in polyethylene, which is a material that a lot of children’s toys are made out of. I wanted it to have that quality, but I couldn’t get the detail I wanted. The company I was working with eventually went bankrupt, so I had to move the model to another company to finish it. Then I switched from polyethylene to aluminum, and that was what caused so much time to go by. But I usually just let things resonate. Almost any artwork that I start today, if I really look back, I’ve been thinking about for a minimum of two or three years. If I finally say, “Okay, I’m going to do it,” it’s already been contemplated. It’s already been something that I’ve let resonate on its own.