Citizen Koons – a week in Berlin Pt. 1

Monday
A week of myriad art events in Berlin started with the opening of Meyer-Riegger Gallery’s new space on Friedrichstraße. The white rooms present the kind of mix between spacious and low-key that feels appropriate for starting in Berlin – with an emphasis on displaying the art rather than the gallery staff. Jonathan Monk’s take on Kippenberger’s Dear Painter Paint Me cycle of 1981, first shown in Berlin at the time and painted by a professional billboard painter, was to use one image from the series – Kippenberger wearing a Stetson cowboy hat – to be reproduced by several Chinese copy painters; a kind of infinite regress. It must have been the lovely crowd of artists mostly (and not only the ones associated with the gallery – I had a chat with Uwe Hennecken and Corinne Wasmuth, but also Michael Stevenson, Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek, and Rainer Ganahl) that all the more threw into relief that Monk’s idea was a little thin, and flattened out over two rooms on top. Unfortunately thus work by the promising Prague artist Eva Kotátková (see my Prague report Pt.1) was squeezed in the space in-between, making it appear as if her work was all about little surrealist, angst – if virtuoso – drawings of children, when in fact it’s more complex and performance-based. She should get a chance soon, with more space, to correct that image.

Tuesday
I stayed at home with the kids because my wife went to the opening of Ingeborg Wiensowski’s new art space in Lützowstraße (we can’t, and don’t want to, have a babysitter every night!). Had a friend over and watched CNN about the presidential campaign, drinking Asbach Uralt. Thus also missed the opening of Christoph Schlingensief’s (Der König wohnt in mir, The King lives in me) show at Autocenter  (more about this in German here). Schlingensief has dealt openly and frankly with the devastating diagnosis of lung cancer which lead to one of his lungs being removed earlier this year; he has done new filmic installations since, this one having being first shown in Kunstraum Innsbruck.

Wednesday
Press Conference Jeff Koons at Neue Nationalgalerie. Eleven works from the ‘Celebration’-Series on display in Mies van der Rohe’s black-framed glass box: the huge, shiny chrome, cherry red balloon poodle towering at the entrance, the valentine’s day heart hanging at the back, the tulips, the easter egg and several others in-between. The press conference was endless, since a Paul Klee show was opened simultaneously, and since Peter-Klaus Schuster, director of the Prussian Heritage Museums, is soon to retire and thus had to praise his cycle of exhibitions ‘Kult des Künstlers’ (Cult of the Artist, which includes Beuys, Warhol, Koons, Klee, and several more shows) which given Schuster’s artfully self-confident style should rather be called ‘Cult of Schuster’. Koons, of course, sat through the whole thing smiling his winning smile until it was, finally, his turn. He praised the institution, he praised Mies’ building, and German Wheatbear. Then a shift in register, as sudden as it was smooth: he compares the clarity of his work to the clarity he expects his last breath on the death bed to have (you can see this ca. one minute into this). Is this just a clever way of shoring up work that is about glistening surface with metaphysical profundity? Maybe. But if you take it serious for a moment, not least given the artists’ neat as a pin look, you immediately have to think if Citizen Kane, or rather, Koons. The ‘rosebud’ last word, uttered in reminiscence of a happy childhood memory traumatized by later loss. It’s against the background of this secret that in Orson Welles’ classic, the protagonist goes from being caring to being ruthless. The difference is that in Koons, there is no underlying psychological drama, no ‘inner struggle’ that would explain the work. It’s neither caring nor ruthless to start with. Instead of a traumatic void, there is just void, weightless, yet encased in tons of pristinely polished material. Koons often characterizes his work as being about taking away fear, and allowing for dialogue. He can smile that unassailable smile – half botox half guru – that underlines the point. Yet you can’t have a dialogue with these sculptures that are smiling at you like child monsters. Thus, they exaggerate the social experience that anyone knows who has ever felt dumbstruck by encountering an obsessive monologist claiming to be all open for dialogue. What does the poodle want to tell me? Woof? Wrong Question. The point is not to expect Koons’ ‘Celebration’ pieces to be about ‘critical’ questions when his work was always about side-stepping the bourgeois posture of ‘critical distance’. Rather, one needs to remember that his earlier pieces Rabbit (1987) and Puppy (1992) were much more successful in achieving what these works only claim to achieve, and not just because they were earlier. Rather than just inflating dimensions and perfections, they played with these parameters. The one meter chrome balloon rabbit is small enough to remind you of the human scale of an astronaut’s visor reflecting a whole universe. The puppy is twelve metre high, but cancelled out this intimidating height with the gaiety of its surface being made up with cute, living potted flowers. One could speculate about Koons’ having lost this gaiety through the divorce drama with Cicciolina, which started the year Puppy was realized; and about his lost son from that relationship, Ludwig, to whom the Celebration series is expressly dedicated. But other than being one possible factor explaining a certain conceptual stagnation in Koons’ work, this is not his “Rosebud” mystery. Koons’ work is neither about grievance or triumph, but about a strategy of gratification: the creation of unassailability through outdoing oneself and others, in a way that is as bacchanal as it is controlled. Unassailability however that fails to test itself with ideas and changes of direction eventually turns into rigor mortis. As opposed to Citizen Kane, the trauma is not of the past, but of a possible future.

(Thursday/ Friday/ Saturday to follow.)