JEFF KOONS at The Whitney, & Rockefeller Center, NY.

One of the most famous & popular living artists today, last year, JEFF KOONS also became the most expensive when his orange Balloon Dog sculpture sold for $58.4 million at auction. 

Tomorrow his major 35 year retrospective opens at NY's Whitney. Taking over 5 floors, (more space than the museum ever devoted to any single artist, including Rothko, Hopper or Georgia O’Keeffe,) it's the final show before the Museum moves down to its new building in Chelsea. Also this week his large scale public sculpture with real flowers, Split-Rocker, is unveiled at the Rockefeller Center. 

Making art out of kitsch & ready mades since the 1980s, Koons has been slammed by some critics, praised by others. Now Popeye, a Gorilla, Hulk Elvis, the Pink Panther & other toys (luckily he has 6 kids) join his early radical vacuum cleaners & footballs in glass vitrines.    

The overall effect is seductive, shiny & big. Koons loves glitter; loves colour. He also loves giant-size kittens & big bows, and all that sentimental stuff so appealing to the public.  "He's making rich people buy this shit" was one comment at the crowded opening.  And true enough on the second floor we find  Banality, a series of man-sized kitsch figurines unveiled in 1988 which made Koons the neo-Pop god that he is today. Memorable in its ormulo gold is Michael Jackson & Bubbles, 6 feet of porcelain. 

Koons is a Chicago graduate. Arriving in NY in 1976, he got a lowly job at MoMA, There is saw  Duchamp.  Skint, he began making art out of cheap inflatable toys. The rest is history!

I first saw Koons in action at the 1990 Venice Biennale. A master of publicity, this soft spoken, clean-cut guy with the choir-boy face had attached himself to La Cicciolina,  the controversial soft porn star (& MP - only in Italy!)  Making art as well as wopee, his Venice Aperto pieces depicted them having it off in various poses. Looking at the images on show at the Whitney one sees how young he was. Now 59, older, wiser & richer, his recent work is larger, more shiny but based on ancient Greek & Roman antiquity. 

He may now use advanced CT scans & digital imaging, yet Metallic Venus is just as shiny as it walks a fine line between low & high art, original & copy, traditional & modern.  Above all he celebrates excessive commercialization; merchandising at its peak. 

 Koons at the Whitney

Going chronologically from ground up, each gallery is devoted to one theme or subject: 13 in total: Luxury, Made in Heaven, Easyfun, Ethereal, Celebration etc. All simple concepts and greeting card words. He says there is no hidden meaning in his work.  

Totaling 150 works, (he has 100 assistants) they range from 1979 Inflatable Flowers & painstaking super-realist oils of food  to minimalist mirrors like a red  Kangeroo 1999 created after his disaster with the soft porn Made in Heaven pictures and sculptures. 

He married La Cicciolina in 1991. It ended badly when she abducted his son. The Easyfun mirrors were a reaction to these problems, and are his only later move away from his beloved over the top baroque style. 

Amid all the fancy frolics, these crisp, cool animal faces stand out, as do the early 1980 pristine neon & vacuum cleaners in their antiseptic chambers. "Won't guess what kritics are gonna say. But lines will be around the block every day. Krazy art world," comments Phyllis Tuchman.  Until 19 October. 

To coincide with this, Koon's weird 37ft high outsize flowering sculpture, Split Rocker, (a giant toy horse adorned with 50,000 plants) is at the Rockefeller Center while Sothebys, who have recently gone retail, show a $8m orange Elephant. 

http://news.artnet.com/art-world/jeff-koonss-emsplit-rockerem-rocks-rockefeller-center-49284?utm_campaign=artnetnews&utm_source=062714daily&utm_medium=email

The Koons artworks in the Whitney retrospective are worth a cumulative $504m!

The 2014 Whitney Biennial  New York

So is it as bad as they say? The reviews are damning. Yesterday we went to see for ourselves. Conclusion? It's a sloppy, scrappy, slight, messy, ugly affair reminiscent of student shows. Too narrow a view. It includes the old, the very old & the dead. The average age of one floor is said to be 55, another 50. The film section lacks film. Overall there is little media or video apparent on the main exhibition floors, surely a perverse decision for 2014. From this Biennial, you would think American art, even art world-wide, is poor, trite, vapid. 

It's the last Biennial before the Whitney moves downtown to its new building in the meatpacking district beside the High Line, in Chelsea. What a sad sad end! The Whitney Biennial has a long history of excitement, important discoveries, surprise, buzz. Controversy, yes. Mediocrity, no.  

This time selection was in the hands of 3 curators from outside the Whitney Museum. Each has a floor. Michelle Grabner from the Art Institute School Chicago, crams her top floor space to overflowing. It's packed: stuffed with kitsch. She includes many women, (16 out of out of 38 - still majority men) & lots of crafts. There are ceramics (Kusaka b 1972 Japan), a silly waterfall of wool (Sheila Hicks), huge ugly pots by Ruby. 

Ruby

With so much stuff, it’s hard to focus. I liked Dawoud Bey's photo portraits, but then I have admired his work for years, ever since he was included in Scotland’s Fotofest in the 1990. (Whatever happened to that?) Also Charlesworth’s silhouettes & Mason's elegant Tile Wall & ceramics. Mason was born in 1927.

To be fair, Grabner loses a large chunk of her floor to an artist selected by Elms.  Zoe Leonard has fitted a camera obscura lens in the famous Breuer window, but tragically the result is forlorn grey, vapid shadows of no import whatsoever. A nice idea which should have been rejected. 

So this Biennial is NOT about emerging artists, not a snapshot of an American zeitgeist. Nor is it about painting of any kind. 

Mason

Charlesworth's dates are 1947-2013, and strangely many in this Biennial are dead & too many died savage deaths: from suicide, AIDS, even immolation. Surely the Whitney Biennial is not the place for memorials on this scale. It’s the first time I have ever noted down artists’ dates as I looked at what are over-long labels full of artspeak. 

The next floor, curated by Stuart Corner, ex Tate film, now MoMA media & performance art, has little film in it. Maybe there’s more hidden away.  He gives a small one-man show to Lebanese artist Etel Adnan & includes Triple Canopy, an interesting coop from Brooklyn.  More craft with Auerbach’s colourful knitwear & text in Lonidrew's 32 T shirts from 1976. Several walls are jam-packed with dreadful kitsch pictures (Mayerson) & dire nude photos...  A blockboard building fills a centre space. Best is Channa Horowitz’s rigid but refreshing graphs & codes for music & dance, (b 1931-d 2013.) 

Last Anthony Elms of ICA Philadelphia who talks about, “an American aesthetic of uncertainty." He also says, “Assembling an overview of American art these days is a fool's errand."  His 20 artists include Paul P's small subtle watercolour portraits, some high-up wall mounted aluminium cymbals by Adkins (1953-2014), wall of b & w collages by Von Heyl, a LED curtain and a too long empty wall of too many letterpress poems. 

Adkins

Von Heyl

Then there are the amateur-looking pieces so terrible I don't want to know the artists' names. Hideous straw hats, aimless constructions, lumpy sculptures,... The whole thing makes me angry - & in this I know I am not alone. The Whitney Biennial has a long history of excitement, important discoveries, ... Controversy, yes. Mediocrity, no.

 "WE hope that the 2014 Biennial will suggest the profoundly diverse & hybrid cultural identity of America today," says the Whitney. With a total 103 participants, (their word) I had hoped for at least one memorable exhibit of some sort. In the end the fact that "archives" played a role was the most interest outcome.

To contact me: clrhenry@aol.com or leave a message. 

BALTHUS & INDIANA.  Which to tell you about first??

For 2 weeks in NYC there is an important exhibition opening event every day - sometimes 2 or 3,  plus the Christies & Sotherby auctions plus performances, art book fairs, art fairs, United Nations causing traffic standstill. Where to start?! So I will entice u with 2 images, both well known but one perhaps the most iconic, famous image of the 1960s - 

                                                            Indiana's Love from 1966
"Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees." —Robert Indiana, 

                                                                         Balthus

ROBERT INDIANA IS AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM & BALTHUS IS AT THE MET. http://metmuseum.org

INDIANA, born the same year as Warhol, is that most American of Pop artists. Inspired by highway signs, pinball machines, roadside neon and flashing slot machines, his big, bold. hard edged, colourful graphics are mesmerising. 

This is the largest ever show of his work. I wrote about Indiana's 2004 show, "Peace Paintings" for the Financial Times, financial times . Politics often inspire his work, in this instance the Iraq war produced a heartfelt cry WHY OH WHY in strident hues around a CND logo. The last oil there was HOWL, SHRIEK, SHOUT, SCREAM FOR PEACE. Nothing changes. He is still a master of of eye-catching mottos & slogans.

Sadly the show lacks any drawings or note books, which I am told by Simon Salama-Caro who is doing Indiana's catalogue raisonne, are beautiful. But the 100 works here - many large 8 ft paintings and lots of little known obelisk totem sculpture, fill an entire floor with vibrant 60s Pop style colour, design and stencilled lettering:  HUG EAT SIN DIE.  And of course LOVE with its slanted O, an image ubiquitous from millions of mugs, key rings, T shirts, even doormats.

Whitney Indiana installation 

Big surprise is the number of vertical wooden columns or herms and constructions of wood n' metal which start early - in 1959. Lacking cash for paint & canvas he began collecting old metal wheels and rubbish from the NY warehouses being demolish for Wall St's expansion. He said he made "The Lost into Found. Junk into Art. Neglected into Wanted. Unloved into Loved." He was soon putting short everyday words onto these via found stencils. At this time text like this was unprecedented, and says Barbara, "Audacious."

PS. For Scots - Indiana learnt to set metal printing type at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1950s. 

Director Adam Weinberg & eminent curator Barbara Haskell

                                   Simon Salama-Caro, director of the Indiana catalogue Raisonne

Back in Scotland it's  Open Doors day in Edinburgh - http://www.doorsopendays.org.uk. 127 places. Take advantage. I will report on Glasgow's events later. 

IN THE AIR: T J WILCOX's PANORAMA at the WHITNEY

New York. New York. We never tire of it. Crowded, noisy, dirty, too hot, too humid, too cold, yet always invigorating, always glamourous. This week has been all blue sky and gorgeous: what's called "severe clear"... Perfect for T J Wilcox who spent many cloudy, rainy, misty days trying to film a new fashioned 360 degree video panorama of New York City from the top of his building at the corner of Union Square. "We filmed many times without success. Half way thro' it would rain."

Ten projectors with special lenses now compresses a 24 hour day/night into 30 minutes. It's enthralling. The huge 7ft high x35ft across circular screen hangs in space. U can duck under and into it. The light changes, tower block shadows fall across smaller buildings, at dusk windows twinkle on the Empire State, the new Freedom Tower replacing the World Trade Centre, and the wedge shape City Corps building, (we got married in St Peter's church underneath it - only in NY can they sell the air rights to a church!) It's mesmerising.

Every so often the skyline is punctuated by short 3 min stories which relates to NY - 1930s archival black & white film shot from the air; Gloria Vanderbilt; an account of 9/11 seen from the roof; Warhol's launch of a giant silver phallic ballon just as the Pope passed by his Factory!

Curated by Brit,  Chrissie Iles, it's a great immersive installation - one people will love.
www.whitney.org http://whitney.org

http://whitney.org