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JEFF KOONS (b. 1955) BUSTER KEATON inscribed with signature, number and date "Jeff Koons 88" on t...

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JEFF KOONS (b. 1955) BUSTER KEATON inscribed with signature, number and date Jeff Koons 88 on t...
JEFF KOONS
(b. 1955)
BUSTER KEATON
inscribed with signature,
number and date "Jeff Koons 88" on the underside; inscribed
"FRANZ WIESER" on the base
polychromed wood
65 3/4 x 50 x 26 1/2 in.
(167 x 127 x 67.3 cm)
executed in 1988
this work is from an edition of three with one artist's proof <p>PROVENANCE
Sonnabend Gallery, NEW YORK <p>EXHIBITED
COLOGNE, Galerie Max Hetzler; NEW YORK, Sonnabend Gallery and CHICAGO, Donald Young Gallery, BANALITY, November 1988
PITTSBURGH, Carnegie Museum of Art, THE CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL, November 1988-January 1989
LOS ANGELES, Museum of Contemporary Art, A FOREST OF SIGNS: ART IN THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION, May-August 1989
TRENTO, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, AMERICAN ART OF THE EIGHTIES, December 1991-March 1992, p. 60 (illustrated)
MINNEAPOLIS, Walker Art Center; Portland Art Museum; PARIS, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; MEXICO CITY, Museo Rufino Tamayo and Miami Art Museum, LET'S ENTERTAIN, LIFE'S GUILTY PLEASURES, February 12, 2000-November 2001, p. 246, no. 41 (illustrated) <p>LITERATURE
R. Mahoney, "Miracle on W. Broadway", NEW YORK PRESS, December 9, 1988, p. 15
K. Levin, "The Evil of Banality", THE VILLAGE VOICE, December 20, 1988, p. 115
A. Muthesius, JEFF KOONS, COLOGNE, 1992, p. 119, no. 21 (illustrated) and p. 121 (installion view)
J. Koons, THE JEFF KOONS HANDBOOK, NEW YORK, 1992, p. 159
In 1988, when Jeff Koons introduced his BANALITY series, he breathed new life into the timeworn concept of the readymade. Like Marcel Duchamp and numerous Pop artists before him, Koons based these sculptures on mass-produced goods that exist in the everyday world. Unlike his predecessors, however, Koons chose to replicate objects that already functioned as art for countless middle-class Americans. As the present work demonstrates, Koons' unique conceptual maneuver dramatically expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.
Like all of the artist's BANALITY sculptures, Buster Keaton derives inspiration from the painted wooden and porcelain knick-knacks that are sold in gift shops throughout America and ultimately reside on shelves and tabletops in typical middle-class homes. By enlarging such small collectible figurines to the dramatic dimensions of a museum masterpiece, the artist confronts his audience with their own definitions of good taste and fine art. Brilliantly blurring the boundary between valuable sculpture and cheap kitsch, Koons challenges the arbitrary distinctions that create such categories, asking why one type of object may be a sign of prestige, and the other a source of potential embarrassment. Robert Rosenblum has recalled the powerful, transgressive impact of works like Buster Keaton. "I still remember the shock of my initial confrontation with Koons's lovingly hideous and accurate reconstructions of the lowest levels of three-dimensional kitsch, from porcelain Pink Panthers and Popples to painted wooden bears and angels. We all, of course, have been seeing this kind of stuff for years in every shopping center and tourist trap, but never before have we been forced, as one is in a gallery setting, to look head on and up close at its mind-boggling ugliness and deliriously vapid expressions.... Koons has proclaimed a new segment of popular bad taste as his own, rubbing our eyes in it and forcing us to look, really look, at this bizarre species of art that covers our planet and that pleases millions. If it is true that one of the exalting effects of art is to make us see, often for the first time, the commonplace realities that surround us by transforming and relocating them in a more purified, contemplative terrain, then Koons's success is total. Over and over again, what might have been a boring or trashy spectacle in this or that corner of a department store, mail-order catalog, or toy shop, has magically been reincarnated as art" (Robert Rosenblum, "Notes on Jeff Koons," THE JEFF KOONS HANDBOOK, NEW YORK: Rizzoli, 1992,
pp. 15-16).
Among the numerous sculptures that constitute the BANALITY series, the present work is distinguished as a possible self-portrait. Here Koons has fashioned a life-sized replica of Buster Keaton, the acclaimed slapstick comedian who starred in countless vaudeville productions and silent films in the 1910s and 1920s. Uncharacteristically, the comic entertainer wears a rather somber expression as he straddles a donkey too small for effective transportation. Some critics have interpreted this curious tableau as an allegory for Koons' own artistic ambitions, which, at one time, may have seemed larger than his means to achieve them. Yet, as Keaton's searching gesture seems to indicate (as well as the chirping bird that perches on his shoulder and appears to coax him forward), such anxieties were only short-lived for Koons, who has proven himself an artist of lasting significance. Indeed, BUSTER KEATON perfectly embodies the conflicted optimism that the artist has ascribed to all of his BANALITY sculptures. "I was telling the bourgeoisie to embrace the things that it likes, the things it responds to. For example, when you were a child and you went to your grandmother's place and she had this little knick-knack, that's inside you, and that's part of you. Embrace that, don't try to erase it because you're in some social standing now and you're ambitious and you're trying to become a new upper class. Don't divorce yourself from your true being, embrace it. That's the only way that you can truly move on to become a new upper class and not move backwards (Quoted in Fronia Simpson, ed. JEFF KOONS, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992, p. 63).
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