At the tel Aviv art Museum opened a retrospective of Jeff Koons “Absolute value,” things for which were given to the Museum by new York collectors Mary and Jose Mugrabi. About how to live exhibition of the genius of pop, mass culture and kitsch in the months of the pandemic, says Kira Dolinina.If this exhibition in the spring and summer 2020 in Israel was not, it had to be invented. Vernissage of the retrospective, Koons in tel Aviv was held on March 10, and after a few days the exhibition together with the entire country closed. Were only covering the city advertising pillars with posters on which the name in large letters and a textbook Kosowski bear in half of human growth, prinimali police. This couple, American and British, about the children’s and adult about sweet and pereslaschennye, about big and small, finally become the visual slogan of all these strange months. Empty city, empty beaches, shops lowered shutters, and the cheerful bear toy with toy Bobby, bloated to the point that rather frightening, and not laugh. What started as routine, a trifle, turned into a global nightmare. Small has become very large, and it’s scary.When the quarantine came to naught, museums opened, and the exhibition of Koons. In the three halls of the new wing of the Museum is located about 20 works, responsible for 40 years now much mythologized the art of Jeff Koons. Huge steel rabbit from a “balloon”, the same “Paleolithic Venus”, the Hulk in the pose of Elvis, a pair of three-meter porcelain (marble), dancers, collages, the same bear — most things made in the 2000s, but the time here is rather artificial, as if from the 1980s. Jeff Koons — all from the 1980s. Neatly trimmed with a fringe-spinner, with an honest glance, a simple American guy, in ironed shirts and often a tie, handsome, office model with wall street before the fall of the twin towers. How such could ever be in a dirty, smelly, boiling, narcotic SOHO, what’s more, there’s to become noticeable? It is, of course, by all means follow the precepts Duchamp (used a “ready-made” objects) and Warhol (multiply that everybody likes what’s popular, what recognizable), but it is important not what he was doing, and how. His main technique is to take absolutely and instantly recognizable subject and increase it a hundred times, replacing the road material. So rubber balloon becomes steel, plush Teddy — trimmed bushes, porcelain, marble, clay — stone, soft — hard, brittle, strong, funny — scary, pretty — ugly.On the one hand, it’s really about America, where even a regular glass of Coca-Cola in a cafe twice European, and a rack of ribs at a roadside diner to feed a large family from the Old world. And a huge “dolls” is also there — if they are held an infernal carnival on the platforms during any holidays? On the other hand, Koons plays on the passions are universal. He has to where already settled strong feelings. Big bear from childhood, where large soft toys seemed to be the most faithful friends. Hard twisted balloons — celebration, clown, birthday. Porcelain figurines from my grandmother’s slides or the mantelpiece. But Koons was not a Koons, one of the three most expensive living artists in the world, if not worked with much more dangerous feelings. Many of his works and show now. Ceramic Michael Jackson with a monkey whose face is just exactly the same as the musician, only in 1980-1990-x was harmless. Turning personal life (in 1991, he married Italian porn star Cicciolina) in an endless celebration of the fantasies of all men in the world, Koons himself has become a bird of Paradise of his art.Today’s retrospective without Michael Jackson and Cicciolina. Decided collectors, in the collection which stars the art market (Picasso, Hirst, Koons, 800 works of Warhol), and curators. The exhibition does not seem harsh or noisy, clean the Museum essay, I do not understand why it was so quiet, when Koons was shown in Versailles in 2008. and the “bad taste” about which so much talked aesthetes 1980-1990’s, long revised, and curse him senseless. That’s just a no-no but will flicker as the smile of the Cheshire cat, the grin forever young Koons — he laughs on us and on themselves: and the eyes from his balls to look at, it bears king Kong towering over the audience, and the pink dancers come to our world whether from a wedding cake, whether from Andersen’s fairy tales. Whether kitsch, or Susan santahouse camp, but hidden in all the meanings in quotation marks, citation, Koons makes us all Alice, in a world which, as we know, size had some value.
