AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney is splendid art world spectacle. The lines are long, the crowds are lively, and the artist’s sculptures and paintings, particularly the monumentally-scaled works on the higher floors, spring to life inside the museum’s cavernous white-walled, stone-floored galleries.
The art varies tremendously in terms of materials, but it’s all of a piece: bright, synthetic, energetic, and relentlessly positive. Rather than beauty or pleasure, it goes after happiness. In his work from the 80’s Koon was focused, more intellectually, on consumer culture and advertising, and their promises of satisfaction. In later work, to get at the same, he crafts his own iconography of happiness. He shows us candy, toys, cartoon figures, pop culture heroes, romantic love and (very literally) sex. Embedded in all of this is a notion – sweet, uncomplicated, contemporary, and profoundly American – of what happiness is.
The most powerful pieces are from the 1994 Celebration series, massive sculptures and paintings based on popular imagery. The series includes the iconic sculpture Yellow Dog, a 10-foot high yellow stainless steel rendition of the kind of balloon animal distributed at childrens’ birthday parties. (It’s an elegant piece, and the most popular spot in the exhibit for selfies.) Also on display, from the same series, is a monumental, multi-colored aluminum sculpture of a pile of Play Dough, and paintings of toys: action figurines, plastic horses, stuffed animals, and building blocks.
My favorite painting shows of slice of birthday cake wrapped in pink mylar. It’s gigantic, about the size of a double door, and rendered in vivid, baroque perspective, as if it’s about to be shoved into the viewer’s mouth, in a palette of bracingly artificial colors. The cake is no longer food – a form of nourishment – but a symbol of bliss. The painting is set in a futuristic, hyper-real style, yet remains a literal, innocent image. There are no hidden depths here, no irony and no commentary. The dazzle is, for Koons, what happiness is all about.