Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons was born on January 21, 1955 in York, Pennsylvania. As a child, Koons’s father, a furniture store owner and interior designer, was directly the cause of his love for art and design. His mother was a seamstress. He first studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1976, an undergraduate degree for students seeking a professional education in the visual or performing arts. However as a senior in college, Koons took a short break from the Maryland Institute to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, while he concurrently began designing installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1977, he moved to New York City to take the next step in his career as an artist. Before he was employed by the Museum of Modern Art to work in the membership department, where he would take phone calls and inform art lovers of the best membership packages for themselves or their families, he traded commodities on Wall Street for a short time before focusing on his art career. While doing so, he began working on one of his first series of installations in 1979, taking ordinary objects found in any local stores and creating intricate installations with them. From this point on, Koons became known for isolating objects from their normal everyday context and developed them into intellectuality stimulating pieces of artwork. His works are to be found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and elsewhere.

Koons work is unique in that he takes images and banal objects from their normal setting in pop culture and transforms them into iconic pieces that question controversial issues such as sex, race, gender and fame and truths of life (emphasis on kitsch objects). Art history is also obvious throughout his work, either through his use of taking tasteless objects and transforming them in a classical form of art,  taking Baroque era style photos, or adding technical elements of 17th century French design. Through art history, and questions of today, his works seem to represent a psychological dimension that include a hidden parables of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. His form of art seems to blend pop, conceptual, craft, appropriation to create a distinct manner of expression.

Three Ball 50/50 Tank

To make each piece with full attention to details he uses computer generators and hand crafts his works. In his instillation 'Three Ball 50/50 Tank' the balls may seem to be just banal objects; however, he chose them because they are inflatable, and without air they would deflate, just as human beings need air to breathe or they will not have life. The water in this tank, although it is not noticeable to the human eye, contains no chemicals at all, in order to maintain a pure, almost womb like atmosphere surrounding the balls. The balls are summered at equilibrium, and not floating around the tank. Although this may seem as though a few basketballs were thrown into a tank of water, full attention to details and the use of computer generators and hand craft skills were necessary in designing this piece. Koons recontextualizes the basketballs, placing them inside the pure water and displaying them in a fish tank, instead of their normal placing on a baseball court or a street. Koons hires artisans and technicians to make the pieces for him instead of creating them with his own two hands; he says it is more important that the ideas come from the artist and not the execution itself. For him, the hand of the artist is not the important issue. The most interesting factor in this piece is that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman was brought in to help Koons develop the perfect layered water (heavy salt water is at the bottom and freshwater is at the top) combination in order to have the basketballs rest at the exact spot needed to create the piece. No matter his material (metal, inflatables, household objects,porcelain. glass, oil on canvas, etc.) he is able to create emotional driven pieces. The bright colored inflatable basketballs are juxtaposed against the clear glass tank filled of water; highlighting the difference between the air and the water and allowing for focus to be towards what is in the tank itself. I also think the air and water hybrid puts an emphasis on the 4 main elements of the world (fire, water, air, earth) and how although they are dissimilar they must work together in unison in certain circumstances. 

Subject Matter in Three Ball 50/50 Tank: Three buoyant basketballs involved in this piece are nothing out of the ordinary. They are typical professional balls with the labels Spalding Dr. JK Silver Series, Wilson Home Court, and Wilson Final Four all able to be read on the basketballs. The three different basketballs are equally spread apart inside of a fish tank half-filled with water. Their is a distinct water line across the middle of the tank, emphasizing the direct middle of the balls. The water is also causing a slight refraction of the balls to look like they are apart at the center. There is nothing around the piece; therefore, full focus is on the installation itself.

Medium in Three Ball 50/50 Tank: The basketballs are made of orange and brown inflatable rubber or leather material. The tank itself seems to be made of clear glass and the legs of the tank stand are black steel. You can clearly see that the balls are submerged in a liquid substance. 

Form in Three ball 50/50 Tank: The clear liquid water that the tank holds, although not noticeable to the human eye, contains no chemicals at all, in order to maintain a pure, almost “womb like” atmosphere surrounding the balls.What is very unique about this piece is that the balls are floating at perfect equilibrium inside the water. This arrangement was designed with full attention to details by the use of computer generators and hand crafted skills, as well as professional physicist brought in by Koons. The physicist was able to engineer the perfect layered water composition of heavy salt water at the bottom and freshwater at the top in order to have the basketballs rest at the exact spot needed to create the piece. The back of this piece is completely white, which allows one hundred percent clarity of the tank. It seems to me that the black trim of the fish tank, as well as the black legs all moves the eyes to the central focus of the piece, which is the basketballs in the water. 

Quotes by Koons
"Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is."

"I’m basically the idea person. I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the neces-sary abilities, so I go to the top people, whether I’m working with my foundry — Tallix — or in physics. I’m always trying to maintain the integrity of the work."

"It’s a natural process. Generally I walk around and I see one object and it affects me. I can’t just choose any object or any theme to work with. I can be confronted by an object and be interested in a specific thing about it, and the context develops simultane-ously. I never try to create a context artificially. I think about my work every minute of the day."

Quotes by others
"The water eventually becomes homogenous, causing the basketball to float, so the tank needs to be refilled each time the piece is installed. Environmental factors such as climate control and light—each of which alter the water’s temperature—and even the vibration of viewers’ feet as they move past the piece can affect the ball’s equilibrium. Even after the tank has been refilled, its solution must be continually readjusted."

"Many museums find Koons work cutting edge that some of the world’s leading museums have found themselves ill-equipped to handle them. It has been said that some of the Museums he has created installations for have spent large sums of money funding his pieces."

As critic Christopher Knight has written "He turns the traditional cliché of the work of art inside out: Rather than embodying a spiritual or expressive essence of a highly individuated artist, art here is composed from a distinctly American set of conventional middle-class values."

Balloon Dog

Play-doh

Balloon Swan, Monkey, Rabbit

Inflatable flowers

Seal Walrus Trashcans

New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue Doubledecker 

Lips

Sources

http://qz.com/235891/the-science-behind-the-art-of-jeff-koons/

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81173

http://www.jeffkoons.com/

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/jeff-koons
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/koons-three-ball-total-equilibrium-tank-two-dr-j-silver-series-spalding-nba-tip-off-t06991
http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/contemporary-art-evening-sale-n09141/lot.62.html
http://www.jca-online.com/koons.html
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/city-beat/article14450282.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/the-science-behind-the-art-of-jeff-koons/374614/
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/jeff-koons