For the first part of this project we were asked to read an article by Marx, The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof (Marx, 1867), and then to consider ways in which this may help us to understand the art market. In this second part we are asked to consider the work of Jeff Koons and similar artists and again to look at some questions.
Does Marx’s article The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof (Marx, 1867) go any way to explain the sort of work made by artists such as Jeff Koons?
My research into Koons led me in two different, albeit interlinked, directions with regard to this question and the one that follows it. Firstly how he fetishes everyday objects in his work and secondly how his work itself becomes fetished within the art market.
As one aspect of his work, Koons takes everyday consumer objects and glorifies them, giving them a high cultural and status value which is completely disproportionate to their use value (Wood 2004, cited in Pooke and Newall, 2008:167), demonstrating classic cases of commodity fetishism and underlining Marx’s ideas. Koons’ treatment of brand-new vacuum cleaners in his body of work The New provides a good example; the encasing of the machines in acrylic under fluorescent lights connotes a display in a department store rather than as an installation in an exhibition. The desirability, the exchange value of the vacuum cleaners is thus enhanced whilst their use-value is diminished, denied even, with Koons saying that ‘when they do function, they suck up dirt. The newness is gone. If one of my works was to be turned on, it would be destroyed!’ (Koons, cited in Kresser, 2010).
Gibbons (2005) introduces us to other artists with a similar stance who have taken ready-made commodities and presented them to an audience as works of art. Haim Steinbach takes consumer objects (such as boxes of washing powder seen here in Supremely Black (Steinbach, 1985) and displays them on shelves thus echoing the shop/department-store connotation delivered by Koons. The title itself also makes us also think of advertising, desirability and status value, which whilst creating an illusion (we are talking after all about three boxes of washing powder here) encourages fetishism. Sylvie Fleury is another artist discussed by Gibbons (2005:70) who describes her work as being underpinned by ‘pleasure, desire and fetishism’. Through their artistic presentations, all three of these artists call attention to the desirability of everyday consumer goods rather than their usability, thus fetishising them and moving their exchange value far away from both their use-value and the value of the materials and labour through which the goods were made.
Find some examples of Jeff Koons’ work and read up on Koons.
I must admit that whilst prior to this project I had heard of Jeff Koons, I was not familiar with his work. Having now looked at some of his artwork online I must say that the majority of it (with the exception of his balloon animals which I find fun) does not really appeal. However, having researched the man and his modus operandi I now have a sneaking admiration for the way he has perceived how he can use the mark-to-market mentality of the fickle and often pretentious art market for his own gain whilst also seemingly to mock the establishment.
Working often in series, Koons is known for his big and brash work with an eye for taking everyday items and making them into works of art. A former commodities broker, he has taken his knowledge of how the markets tick and used it to work the art market to his benefit. From a capitalist point of view, who can blame him? A lot of his work is light, often called banal by his critics, and yet sells for extremely high prices, the latter assisted by his marketing strategies and his promotion of himself and his work to wealthy collectors and investors. The more money a Koons piece sells for, the higher the value attributed to his other works, thus creating an upward spiral. As Swanson (2013) puts it:
‘The circle of collectors and dealers is so small and so awash in cash that the process can seem to an outsider a bit like a rigged game, in which a bad deal can be considerably more valuable than a good one. If you buy a giant balloon toy for $30 million, you may have spent a few million more than you had to or even expected to; but you’ve set the value of that work and also elevated the value of all of the balloon toys in your collection. Which is especially good, since there aren’t very many people who can afford to spend $30 million on a giant balloon toy, and those who can tend to take pleasure in cornering a market’.
Meyer, cited in Swanson (2013), underlines the innate need of certain strands of society to possess, to own what they consider to be a prize.
‘ “The desire that Koons creates with people is very much about possession,” says Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. “It’s about owning it, ingesting it. It’s proto-sexual. The ability to have the physical proximity to this object” ‘.
This desire to own a Koons, to be a part of the Koons’ ‘brand’ has led to Koons being able to pre-sell his work, thus avoiding the financial difficulties he encountered earlier on his career – we are told that he nearly bankrupted himself on occasions due to the high production costs of his pieces before he ‘(re)discovered – and perfected – a whole new art: the art of selling to collectors objects which don’t actually exist. Over and over again.’ (Salmon, 2014)
To me there is an irony in much of Koons’ work; by using everyday objects as subjects and I feel that he is challenging the fetishism of consumer goods and their mystification whilst at the same time benefiting from the same commodity fetishism that he deliberately creates.
Moving on now to some examples of Koons’ work, it is immediately apparent he is a prolific artist – his website lists twenty-eight series of work and the scope of his output is vast and wide-ranging.
Woman in Tub (1988) is a porcelain sculpture. Part of Koons’ Banality series, it is in essence a crude sexual joke with Koons explaining “There’s a snorkel and somebody is doing something to her under the water because she’s grabbing her breasts for protection. But the viewer also wants to victimize her.” (Koons, s.d., cited in Art Institute of Chicago). Whilst this work follows Marx’s model of commodifying and fetishing everyday objects, the sexual connotations described by Koons loop us back to Fenichel and his essay The scoptophilic instinct and identification (Fenichel, 1999); the viewer is drawn to gaze intently at the sculpture and to devour it with their eyes.
Balloon Dog (1994 – 2000) is my favourite Koons work as I find it fun, colourful and unpretentious. In fact I smile every time I look at it. Forming part of Koons’ Celebration series, it is a sculpture made of mirror-polished stainless steel and was created by Koons in five different versions; blue, magenta, orange, red and yellow. (Christies, 2013). Balloon Dog (Orange) is probably the most well-known of the series having sold for a record $58.4m at Christies in New York in November 2013 (ibid.). Unlike Woman in Tub (Koons, 1988) where the viewer’s gaze devours the sculpture, the shiny mirror surface of Balloon Dog reflects the gaze and the viewers movements and indeed, in their Lot Notes for Balloon Dog (Orange), Christie’s (2013) write that ‘perhaps in establishing this psychological mirror Koons is proposing that it is our emotional and intellectual responses that are the true the concealed soldiers of this Trojan horse’
Three Ball 50/50 Tank (Spalding Dr. J Silver Series) (1985) forms part of Koons’ Equilibrium series and is a three-dimensional installation consisting of three basketballs floating in distilled water in a plexi-glass container on a steel display unit. Similar to the vacuum cleaners featured in The New (Koons, 1979-1987), Koons has taken familiar objects and re-presented them in an aesthetic context whilst rendering their original purpose completely useless. Once again Koons provides a good example of the fetishing of commodities by giving these everyday objects an elevated cultural status, commenting on consumer culture.
Find a couple of examples of artists who work in a similar way to Koons.
Andy Warhol
O’Hagan (2009) tells us that ’ever since Andy Warhol, the worlds of art and finance have been inseparable’. A ‘pop artist’, Warhol was arguably the first artist to take everyday objects and fetishise them by turning them into works of art, with his installation of thirty two Campbell’s soup cans, each one on its own individual canvas, being one of most well-known works. Although working from a slightly different angle than Koons – he did not turn familiar, banal items into large sculptures – Warhol is similar to Koons in that he fetished everyday objects and in turn his own work was, and still is, fetished in the art world. As Damian Hirst puts it, ‘Warhol really brought money into the equation. He made it acceptable for artists to think about money. In the world we live in today, money is a big issue. It’s as big as love, maybe even bigger.’ (O’Hagan, 2009)
Takashi Murakami
Dubbed ‘Japan’s Andy Warhol’ (Pilling, 2015) due to his interest in merging art and commerce along the lines of mass production, Murakami references contemporary Japanese pop culture to make high end – and very expensive – art (see some examples here). Murakami is well-known for his signature ’Superflat’ style which is defined as ‘combining the flatness of commercial graphic design and the hyper-sexualised cartoon characters of Japanese comics with the aesthetic concerns of fine art’ (Kendzulak, 2013)
Exploring the concept of ‘Superflat’ further, Sharp (2006) tells us that
‘Superflat merges art with the commercial forms of Japanese popular culture, and secondly it refers to an aesthetic and genealogical connection that Murakami identifies between the two-dimensional conventions of Japanese painting and contemporary expressions of Japanese popular culture’
Whilst Superflat is a post-modern art movement founded by Murakami in the late 1990s I am reminded of Clement Greenberg’s comments on flatness in art in his essay ‘Modernist Painting’ (Greenberg, 2003) which I looked at earlier in the course. Whilst Greenberg is purely concerned by the physical properties of art rather than its cultural aesthetic, he argues that in order for each particular art to be considered ‘pure’ it needs to eliminate from itself any effect borrowed from another medium and demonstrate what is unique and irreducible to itself. For painting, this means understanding what is unique to painting, namely its flatness, the flat surface of the canvas. ‘Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else’ (Greenberg, 1960, p.775)
Working with fine arts media, Murakami is often linked with Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst and acknowledges their influence on his career:
‘The theme my generation explored was the relationship between capitalism and art. In that sense I couldn’t use that many narrative motifs … So Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and myself, we were trying to link art, which fundamentally has no value, with capitalism and to show how it can be seen as valuable’
(Pilling, 2015).
Murakami however took the idea of art as a commodity, as a brand, one step further with his collaboration until recently (July 2015) with the luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton (Ghorashi, 2015). Talking to the New York Times in 2007, Paul Schimmel, then chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, commented that
‘One of the most radical aspects of Murakami’s work is his willingness both to embrace and exploit the idea of his brand, to mingle his identity with a corporate identity and play with that,’ … ‘He realized from the beginning that if you don’t address the commercial aspect of the work, it’s somehow like the elephant in the room.’
(La Ferla, 2007)
One common denominator of the three artists discussed above is that they separate the fabrication of their work from its conceptual production; to various extents they all use (or, in the case of Warhol, used) assistants to either produce or aid in the production of their work with the artists themselves seemingly more established as the managers, marketers and creative ideas (O’Hagan, 2009). This demonstrates that the exchange value of these artists works in Marxist terms lies in the fetishing of the brand’ rather than the amount of labour used to produce them.
My thoughts:
Out of all the projects to date I found this one to be the most interesting by far and I got happily side-tracked down all sorts of different avenues before reeling myself in and making myself focus. This was the first project that involved research into artists and the art world which helped as did the subject matter; working in finance where until recently I used to help fund the acquisition of ships (the large ones that transport commodities such as coal, iron-ore, wheat and oil from one part of the world to another) I’m used to the capriciousness of the commodity markets and enjoy following the way they work.
I am starting however see the usefulness of the previous projects and how what we are learning is beginning to contribute to the overall picture of where I think we are going; in other words I am starting to see light at the end of the tunnel and the fog that surrounded the first projects is starting to lift. Certainly I found myself looping back to Greenberg’s ‘flatness’, Fenichel’s writings about the gaze and scopophilia and Freud’s ideas on fetishism as well as having Marx’s theory on base and superstructure in my thoughts.
I need to be aware though, particularly given my time restraints for the completion of this module, that there is a risk that I will explore too much at the expense of focussing on the questions asked, something that certainly happened with this project. I enjoyed all my research and learning in this project but going forward I need to stay on track a little more and focus on the task set.
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Understanding Visual Culture 