Looking at Jeff Koons Looking at Venus
George & Rory go to the art gallery
Early in 2021, Rory and I visited the Triennial exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. This piece is about how we found ourselves before the headline item: Jeff Koons’ Venus, a large, highly reflective sculpture the erstwhile stockbroker spent six years shaping out of stainless steel. It is a faithful reproduction of a 33-centimetre-tall painted porcelain figurine by Wilhelm Christian Meyer, from 1769. Koons took this modest antique form and enlarged it to towering metallic proportions (2.5 metres), tempering the neoclassical with his particular reviled brand of naïvely postmodern optimism. He bypassed ‘kitschy reproduction’ and went immediately to a sublime disregard for the classical proportion of the original. Not a proportion among the parts of the object, but rather the proportioning of the object to its surroundings. Normally if you enlarge a digital image by a significant amount you become aware of its pixilation. The dilation of the image out of its proper circumstances causes optical distress. In the case of Venus, its viewers are being stared down upon by what was originally a petit objet d’art. Koons has wrought a fierce kitschy goddess that makes one feel like a shrunk insect in a drawing room.
The two us looked at it and became quite a crowd. I saw myself upside down, distorted, absorbed in the curve of an appropriately medium-sized breast. Venus is a body made out of reflections. There is looking everywhere: I am looking at her, and multiple versions of me look back. Does she look? Her body is gracefully angled but her head is turned quite dramatically to the right, ignoring the destination of her chariot. You cannot catch her eye, even though you can walk all around her.
She is made of metal. Walter Benjamin, in the 1935 exposé to his Arcades project, writes of the architectural, material, and metallic conditions for the new commercial spaces of Paris. Specifically,
Just as Napoleon failed to understand the functional nature of the state as an instrument of domination by the bourgeois class, so the architects of his time failed to understand the functional nature of iron, with which the constructive principle began its domination of architecture. (4)
Architecture began to wear its “subconscious” in its parodic classical models, rounded up and subjugated by iron, which drives a wedge “between builder and decorator, Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Beaux-Arts” (4). Koons is clearly an aesthetic engineer, a conquering iron-monger, except his iron is now stainless steel, exceeding even the utopian imagination of Scheebart and Fourier, Benjamin’s subjects. He writes further:
for the first time in the history of architecture, an artificial building material appears: iron. It undergoes an evolution whose tempo will accelerate in the course of the century … Iron is avoided in home construction but used in arcades, exhibition halls, train stations—buildings that serve transitory purposes. (4)
Parisian heterotopia. Porcelain is incompatible with iron: it is more like “the colourful idyll of Biedermeier” in the bourgeois drawing-room of the imagination (5). Koons subsumes the decorative, the utopian, and the anti-constructive in his massive metallic aesthetic. It metonymically binds the two aspects of the world exhibition – the enormous iron girders that invent a new imperial space, and the unique contents, the delicate décor and tracery of commercial crafts – which, as Benjamin argues, is a new kind of event designed to “glorify the exchange value of the commodity” and “open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted” (7). Venus takes you on a journey to the homeland of bourgeois aesthetics, to the lemonade sea which birthed a metal goddess.
What fracturing insight is splintered in this form? What, Rory asks, would Theodor Adorno say? Firstly, of course, Koons is the avowed enemy of insight: “A viewer might at first see irony in my work, but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation” (Jeff Koons Handbook 25). The frustrated critical thinker might want to dismiss Koons’ anti-intellectualism out of hand. Venus, however, is the objectification of exactly this failed artistic project. It is a commodity obsessed with its status as commodity, a commodity which has tried to reproduce the shiny, perfectly packaged aura of the impenetrably ephemeral exchange value in its own body. It is the aura of mechanical reproduction. The end result is a sparkling void, and all we see is our own desire to see.
Koons’ predilection for stainless steel, in Venus and elsewhere, is multiply symbolic. It could be taken as a fetish for cleanliness and purity: it cannot be stained with other meanings. Its reflectiveness means all things to all people. The shiny surface of Venus is constantly shifting; its appearance is determined by the bodies that surround it, by those who wander in and out of frame, as it were, passing through the gallery or hanging around to take notes. You can imagine a maximally charged Venus completely overflowing with the bodies of its attendants, a model success for the attention economy. Or alternatively Venus alone, reflecting nothing but white wall, by definition unviewable. This is an artwork without a fixed aesthetic surface to speak of. Because Venus has a classically feminine body, we can see how this lends itself to a particular feminist reading, or a point about the kinds of gazes by which bodies are organised. More generally, Venus models the function of the human body as a surface for identification by destroying the integrity of its own surface. When the two of us talk to each other, our bodies become reflective surfaces; we participate in mirrored body language or cooperative speech patterning. Venus mimes this process to the point of self-effacement, a parody of social pliability enwrapping a totally resistant armature.
Venus effects a wreckaging of the contemporary body. It is the body self-consumed by the force and aesthetic of the commodity, and, worse, it asks for your participation – it feigns interest in the sociality of the gallery space and plasters the viewer onto its aesthetic surface like a delivery label. The two of us nonetheless registered the addictive intrigue of its play of light and shape; it has a kind of empty fizz to it that you drink again. In an interview with Nick Bryant about his work in Melbourne, Koons insists that “art demands nothing. You never have to bring to art anything other than yourself.” There is irony here: art demands nothing, which is to say, it demands exactly one thing, your self-satisfied bourgeois individuality, the ready-to-wear clothing of the cold metal goddess.
Michel Foucault opens his 1966 text The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences with a discussion of the 1656 oil painting Las Meninas, or ‘The Ladies-in-waiting,’ by Diego Velázquez. It is a rhetorical move that frames and illuminates his broader philosophical investigation into the conditions of possibility for discourse, sight, and thought in different historical periods. Gilles Deleuze glosses Foucault’s project, in his 1986 monograph Foucault, by describing it as an investigation of ‘statements,’ or the principles that govern the production of real sentences, and ‘visibilities,’ which govern what can be seen. Both Las Meninas and Venus are exemplary problematisations of the visible in their own time. Deleuze writes the following:
Visibilities are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible, such as qualities, things, objects, compounds of objects. In this respect Foucault constructs a function that is no less original than that of the statement. We must break things open. Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer. (Foucault 52)
The painter self-depicted in Las Meninas “rules at the threshold of … two incompatible visibilities,” because he is both represented and engaged in the work of representation (OT 4). He is subject to two modes of seeing that are captured and stressed by a form he invents. There is a mirror in this painting, too. Koons delights endlessly in “that enchantment of the double” that a mirror produces, but Velázquez hides it away at a single reflective point in the background (OT 7).
Foucault suggests that the mirror produces a “metathesis” or transposed superimposition of visibility: “it allows us to see, in the centre of the canvas, what in the painting is of necessity doubly invisible” (OT 9). The painter’s own painting is hidden from view, but it is a painting of the King and Queen of Spain, who appear in the mirror. But then again, the King and Queen of Spain occupy the position of the viewer’s perspective, made invisible by the composition of the painting. Their mirror image is distant, a bit blurred, not grand at all, but the viewer is simultaneously far too intimate with royalty, far too close to the grandeur, in fact standing directly in its place. This is the double invisibility, a double action of representation made suddenly explicit and treasonous by the alignment of a real-world subject with the projected subject of the painting painter. How has it become possible to look into your own reflection and see the sovereign?
Foucault studies this tension, this clash between visibilities, considered as objects of historical seeing that themselves produce ways of seeing. Koons’ Venus seems to proliferate visibilities; it seems to be Deleuze’s luminosity that makes the body into a machine for seeing. But the proliferation is a bad infinity, an endless three-dimensional array of perspectives aligned on one irregular surface that cannot themselves be unified into knowledge of Venus. Everyone is looking at the same referent, but the sense is infinite; morning star, evening star, George, Rory. The viewers instead see only themselves caught up in a silvered fantasied surface. Venus refuses to be ‘broken open,’ in Deleuze’s expression, because it effects a sort of imperial monopolising of aesthetic ways of seeing precisely through its faux individualism, its infinitising of viewpoint. Foucault writes that
we could, in effect, guess what it is the painter is looking at if it were possible for us to glance for a moment at the canvas he is working on; but all we can see of that canvas is its texture, the horizontal and vertical bars of the stretcher, and the obliquely rising foot of the easel. The tall, monotonous rectangle occupying the whole left portion of the real picture, and representing the back of the canvas within the picture, reconstitutes in the form of a surface the invisibility in depth of what the artist is observing: the space in which we are, and which we are. (OT 4)
Venus is the reflective space which our bodies are, multiplied and deformed by the constant work of attention, trapped in steel’s architectural absorption of an older bourgeois beauty, and alienated with a look.
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