ART REVIEW : Jeff Koons: A Scrubbed New Life

The catalogue to the Jeff Koons retrospective exhibition contains no biography of the artist. None at all. This is exceedingly odd, because museum retrospective catalogues always include a biography, even if it’s just an abbreviated list of where and when the artist was born and went to school, and where he now lives and works.

But, not the Jeff Koons catalogue, published in conjunction with the show lately opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and organized by curator John Caldwell. Don’t turn to either for the story of the artist’s life.

Ironically, the glaring absence of a bio, typically an essential component of any retrospective, turns out to offer one pivotal revelation of the show: There is, in fact, no Jeff Koons--before or beyond or outside the artistic project he has undertaken. His sculptures, their public display and the published reviews about them are, in essence, the artist’s only identity.

The first piece introducing Koons’ first coherent body of work is a framed poster made from an ordinary childhood photograph. The boy, formally posed and brightly scrubbed for the occasion, his hair neatly parted and combed, sits with his arms folded across a coloring book, a box of rainbow Crayolas before him and one crayon clutched in his hand. Like St. Catherine’s knife-edged wheel or Paul Revere’s silver mug, the coloring book and crayons are attributes describing the central feature of the sitter’s life.

The grade school picture was probably photographed in the early 1960s, but its transformation into an actual work of art--into a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--dates from 1980. Titled “The New Jeff Koons,” the picture is precisely that. It marks the beginning of his artistic self-reinvention--America, of course, being the gloriously triumphant Eden of self-reinvention.

If “The New Jeff Koons” sounds like a product, rest assured that it is. This late-model persona is accompanied by the arrival of new Hoover shampoo polishers and new Shelton wet/dry vacuum cleaners, which constitute his sculptures from 1980-81. Encased in pristine Plexiglas boxes atop rows of bright, white, fluorescent lights, the machines are oddly anthropomorphic in appearance.

Stacked or standing vertically, they’re like spit-and-polish soldiers. Reclining horizontally, they’re like embalmed personages of note, now reverently lying in state. Koons’ shiny cleaners--literally brand new--are wafted heavenward on cold clouds of unyielding fluorescent light. You can practically hear the angels’ Muzak chorus.

Why polishers and vacuums? On one hand, the displays of machinery represent the apotheosis of the venerable history of American marketing, exemplified by the door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. On the other, they embody an excruciating cleanliness, which is what one wants and expects from newness. Newness means leaving that dirty, unclean past behind, in favor of an innocent, unsoiled and thus totally idealized dream.

Cleanliness turns out to be a prominent leitmotif in Koons’ work. Is there another artist who, when deciding on a durable material in which to cast a large percentage of his sculpture, settled on stainless steel? Among its chief assets is the capacity to sparkle with the gleam of silver without any fear of ever tarnishing.

The intoxicating pleasures of art are thus perpetually promised by liquor bottles, decanters and ice buckets, all gleamingly cast in stain-free steel, while any messy fear of hangover is precluded by the untouchable terms of a work of art.

When pigs turn up in Koons’ sculpture--and they do, three times--they’re never near the slopping trough. They’re pink and pudgy, like the huge, polychromed wood sow in “Ushering in Banality,” which sports a jaunty green bow and is escorted by winged cherubs.

Koons’ animals are, in fact, relentlessly domesticated. Dogs, penguins and chirping birds display a benign creepiness, like the cutesy-poo forest creatures in “Bambi” or the weird bluebirds that dressed Cinderella for the ball.

Emblematic is the double portrait “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” which features the pop star and his pet chimpanzee, pointedly dressed in identical gilded uniforms. Like the idealized, bizarrely anthropomorphic vacuum cleaners, the black youth and his monkey embody projections of mass-culture desire--they are both portrayed as white. Nearly six feet in length, this shocking sculpture is an effigy of an audience-created fantasy, which resonates against its status as the largest porcelain knickknack in the world.

When it comes to sex, cleanliness isn’t next to godliness in Koons’ art. It is godliness, with all the moral anxiety inevitably attached to any conception of forbidden fruit.

His famous “Rabbit”--an inflatable Easter toy resurrected in stainless steel--transforms Hugh Hefner’s logo for sexual fecundity into a goofy, icily forbidding little monster that’s part domesticated icon of pagan ritual, part inflatable sex doll. If Brancusi had been American rather than Romanian, his phallic sculptures might have looked like this.

Koons’ computer-generated paintings made from explicit photographs of sexual intercourse with his wife, former porn star and member of Italian parliament, Ilona Staller, entangle many of these threads. Plainly staged for the camera, they have a kind of lurid cheerfulness with virtually no erotic charge.

Even the physical grime of “Dirty--Jeff on Top” is obviously body make-up, its Mojave-like setting a painted backdrop. Scattered around the paintings are sculptures: Jeff and Ilona in assorted Kama Sutra positions fabricated from transparent colored crystal, and idealized busts of the lovers, chiseled from white marble that’s as pure--and chilling--as the driven snow.

Finally, these intimate acts of marital bliss are watched over by carved and painted wooden dogs, traditional symbol of fidelity. The perky terriers in “Three Puppies” are New World descendants of the one at the feet of husband and wife in Jan Van Eyck’s great “Arnolfini Wedding Portrait.”

“Made in Heaven,” as this final and most recent ensemble of work is punningly titled, is a wild oxymoron: clean pornography. It’s Disney Does Debby Does Dallas.

(Clean dirty pictures or not, the museum has posted warning signs outside the “Made in Heaven” gallery cautioning minors, while the most explicit painting, illustrated in the catalogue, has not been hung. Puritan terrors run deep.)

Koons is principally a sculptor, but a marked transition occurs in his work in 1986: He stops making sculpture and begins, specifically, to make statues. Sculpture, as a modern ideal, toppled the bourgeois conception of statuary, but Koons puts the statue back on its pedestal.

He isn’t the first to do so. Robert Graham is a long-time statue-maker. But, where Graham continues to exalt modernist idealism, Koons makes a radical revision.

He turns the traditional cliche of the work of art inside out: Rather than embodying a spiritual or expressive essence of a highly individuated artist, art is here composed from a distinctly American set of conventional, middle-class values. Nothing gets transcended. Existing only as a work of art, “Jeff Koons” is a complete and self-contained fabrication, constructed as a shockingly clear image of late-20th-Century bourgeois aspirations.

The show makes one significant misstep. Like the Crayolas that are attributes identifying the artist in the youthful photograph, Koons’ wondrously vulgar statues are attributes identifying us in our current predicament. Most of his statues from the past half-dozen years are multiples, not unique objects, but no multiple examples are displayed. That marketable multiplicity is an important part of their meaning.

Still, the misstep isn’t disastrous. In fact, the show does what retrospectives are supposed to do: It puts the artist in perspective--in this case, an artist who has been quite difficult to see, amid all the smoke and mirrors that have surrounded his career.

Koons turns out to be neither as awful nor as great as his detractors and his champions make out. However, given the current pandemonium over identity politics in art, it’s essential to pay attention to this peculiarly disturbing precedent. The exhibition removes any doubt that he’s an important young artist--whoever Jeff Koons might actually be.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 401 Van Ness Ave., (415) 252-4000, through Feb. 7. Closed Mondays.