The moderns refresh the ancients
Just when we thought that modern architecture like the IM Pei pyramid at Louvre or the Georges Pompidou Center already peacefully coexist with the ancient in cosmopolitan Paris, here comes a big scandal over the Jeff Koons sculptures being exhibited at the 17th-century Château de Versailles.
Seventeen major works are positioned in key spaces throughout the palace, including “Hanging Heart,” which became the most expensive work by a living artist when it was snapped up for $23.4 million last November, a giant bright-red inflatable lobster at the Salon de Mars, and a three-meter-wide Blue Reflective Moon looming over the legendary Hall of Mirrors.
Although we, as well as other visitors, felt a rush of excitement at seeing these larger-than-life works of an American pop icon startlingly juxtaposed against the Baroque interiors of the palace, many traditionalists, purists and right-wing groups were apparently not amused.
“Organizing such an exhibition in the château is an outrage to the work of Louis XIV,” says Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky, chairman of the right-wing National Writers’ Union. “This project is felt by many French people to be a veritable sullying of the most sacred aspects of our heritage and identity.”
Several dozen pensioners, in fact, demonstrated outside the gates of the palace on opening day. Some, wearing gold and velvet crowns, demanded that the works be relocated to Disneyland. Edouard de Royère, chairman of the Heritage Foundation, says he has nothing against contemporary art but was “shocked at its descent on Versailles, a magical, sacred place. Any tourist that comes from China or Australia will go home with this extraordinary picture of France. Even for three months, Jeff Koons at Versailles is a mistake.”
The Château’s director, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, brushes aside the criticism. “Versailles is a living place,” he says. “One that deserves respect, but not blind devotion. The chateau is a laboratory for tastes…not something frozen in formaldehyde.”
As for the choice of Koons, often referred to as “The King of Kitsch,” Aillagon describes the artist as “cultivated,” one who took into account the artistic history of Versailles in order to assemble “a great cultural event.”
Catapulted to fame in the 1980s to the ‘90s with trompe l’oeil renditions of ready-made consumer objects and his short-lived marriage to Italian porn star-turned-lawmaker La Cicciolina, which was immortalized in sculptures of their lovemaking, the 53-year-old New York artist was unfazed by all the protests.
In typically confident and lighthearted optimistic fashion, qualities that also characterize his work, he proclaimed: “To be here in Versailles, it feels so profound, it feels so right.”
Rejecting the label “kitsch,” Koons says he wants to set up a “dialogue” between history and contemporary art as a way to encourage “acceptance of others.” To illustrate this dialogue, for example, Koons suspended an aluminum red lobster alongside the crystal chandeliers in the salon dedicated to Mars, the God of War. Graphics painted on the lobster represent flames and fire. “And so there’s this sense that if you stay in the public eye long enough, eventually that could be your fate, ” explained the artist.
Perhaps one of the most controversial is a self-portrait white marble bust of Koons, towering alongside portraits of France’s late rulers, Louis IV and Louis XVI. Seen by many as a gesture of arrogance, the sculptor insists that “it didn’t have to do with my own ego, but it did have to do with the playfulness and a contemporary monumentality.”
A gold and cream statue of Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles has affinities with Renaissance glazed sculptures and Rococo decorative style, which some critics thought made it blend with the setting. We found it just too “Jo-Ni’s” cake-ish for comfort and probably one of the pieces that should indeed have been relocated to a theme park or to Neverland. Many of the stark, metallic mundane figures, on the other hand, like the Rabbit and Balloon Dog which are based on inflatable children’s toys, contrasted perfectly with the interiors and somehow made you appreciate the classicism even more.
The most monumental, however, would have to be “Split Rocker, ” a 25-foot-high, 11-ton animal’s head created with tens of thousands of live flowering plants, positioned outside in the Parterre de l’Orangerie. Very Louis IV, when you think about it, and very over-the-top Marie Antoinette, the queen of extravagance and kitsch herself.
Makes you wonder then: What were all the protesters complaining about?
“Statuephilia” In London & Siren By Marc Quinn
Across the channel in London, another modern invasion was taking place in the hallowed halls of the British Museum, where the “Statuephilia” exhibit was attracting both the art and fashion crowd, thanks to sculptures top billed by “Siren,” a dazzling, life-sized 18k solid gold likeness of model Kate Moss, executed by Marc Quinn.
Quinn is best known for his 2005 Trafalgar Square installation of a shocking, monumental statue of Alison Lapper, a pregnant and disabled woman born with no arms and severely shortened legs; and for “Self,” a frozen sculpture of his head made from his own blood, taken from his body over a period of five months. His fascination with our attitudes towards female beauty led him repeatedly to ancient Greek art. Seeing all the Greek goddesses, he was inspired to make a sculpture of a person who’s the ideal beauty of the moment. Kate Moss is presented as a modern-day Aphrodite, a goddess of our own time and one we have mythologized, with her image becoming as iconic as the goddesses of the ancient world.
Named after the deadly marine seductress of Greek mythology, “Siren” is fashioned in a contorted yoga pose with an intense gaze. She is fittingly positioned next to the Nereid Monument, a temple-like tomb embellished with sea nymphs. Nearby is “Lely’s Venus,” a statue of the ancient Aphrodite, crouching and all set for the competition posed by the newly installed gold arriviste. So how does the present-day Aphrodite fare as the ideal beauty of the moment? The artist had the answer: “Even Kate Moss doesn’t live up to the image.”
Dark Stuff By Tim Noble And Sue Webster
Moving on to the Egyptian collection of the museum, we were attracted to a stark white background showcasing what appeared to be two heads on metal spears emanating from the ground. Upon closer inspection, the heads turned out to be amorphous heaps of debris that are actually mummified creatures collected by the artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, known for their dark and witty works addressing issues of sexuality, identity, self-representation and taboo.
The seemingly unremarkable work only acquires meaning when you see the shadows cast on the white background by a simple spotlight. There are the heads of a man and a woman in profile about to lock in a kiss. “Dark Stuff” is actually an amazing piece of silhouette work done through a painstaking assembly of materials to create vivid images of the faces of the artists. Noble and Webster’s use of mummified animals links them to their Egyptian predecessors who believed that gods can take the form of animals. Dogs, cats, birds and other creatures were bred by the thousands, mummified and sold at temples to visiting pilgrims who offered them to the gods. For the artists, breeding was not necessary: They simply waited for their cats to bring home their prey to the house — almost every day. Collecting the remains in a box that they marked “Dead Things,” they soon had a collection of a few hundred rotting creatures — mice, rats, voles, a squirrel, a toad.
Cornucopia By Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst chose one of our favorite sections in the museum, the Enlightenment Gallery, with its antique wall cases of curiosities. Among the artists-featured, Hirst is probably the most recognizable worldwide, famous for his dead sharks in formaldehyde and diamond-encrusted skulls. Despite the many forms his work takes, they all address the same concerns: “Death, the body, the relationship between the sacred and the profane, between reason and superstition.” No wonder then that the chosen gallery is a perfect fit: Hirst sequesters eight antique wall cases and fills them with 200 skulls spin-painted in shiny and bright, joyous colors.
For the artist, “The Enlightenment Gallery is a cornucopia of exciting things from both the natural and the man-made world…13th-century tiles from Maxstoke Priory depicting souls entering Heaven and Hell, collages of plants by Mary Delany, prehistoric stone axes, rich majolica ware with their tin glazes and decorative scenes, all truly fascinating.”
His arrangement exploits the evocative, ritualistic quality of such objects, and together “appear like a sinister shrine to a bloodthirsty deity and in the process offer a dark, superstitious riposte to the Enlightenment concerns — reason, collection and classification — that surround them.”
‘Mask Ii’ By Ron Mueck
Ron Mueck has always been preoccupied with scale. Small things made big or big things made small. His hyperrealist sculpture always inspires awe because
of this play on scale. Amazingly lifelike, the impact goes up a notch further because the subjects are not the same size as you usually see them in real life. His choice of gallery is also appropriate, situating his giant sleeping self-portrait head beside Hoa Hakananai’a, a monumental stone statue from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the South Pacific. It’s quite massive and awesome. The rendering is so realistic you can almost hear the head breathing. Children, in fact, are scared to go near, thinking it is a real giant’s head on the plinth.
Although Mueck, a former model maker and puppeteer whose parents were toy makers, has been criticized for making brainless art, this particular piece has an otherworldly quality that captures the imagination. Together with Hoa Hakananai’a, the two sculptures seem to speak to each other across centuries and 8,500 miles in the long history of monumental sculpture. It illustrates indeed the enduring human need to create one’s image on a grand scale. Lying on its side, “Mask II” reminds us of the fallen moai human figures found on Easter Island, reminding us of a mysterious civilization of long ago.
Case For An Angeli By Antony Gormley
Just as we were about to leave the museum, Antony Gormley’s angel sculpture caught our eye with its sweeping 8.5-meter wing span dominating the foyer. Gormley has reinvented the human image in sculpture through “the radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool, and material.”
Many of his works are based on molds taken from his own body, or “the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside.” His work tries to treat the body “not as a thing but a place and makes works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical — a trace of a real event of a real body in time.” Gormley explains that his works are not sculptures in the normal sense of being a representation of the subject. “I’ve never been interested in making statues,” he says. “But I have been interested in asking what is the nature of the space a human being inhabits. What I try to show is the space where the body was, not to represent the body itself.”
This is perhaps why “Case For an Angel I” has human, superhuman and inhuman qualities about it, which the museum considers “a symbol of triumph and our own mortality.” It does echo many works in the museum like the Egyptian statues, the Roman caryatid, Assyrian winged bulls and Christian crucifixions. Seeing these statues, in fact, as a child, was what made Gormley become a sculptor. Thus he comes back to the source of his inspiration, creating a metaphor for humanity’s capacity for imagination and creation. And inspiring other would be-sculptors and museum-goers in the process.
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“Jeff Koons Versailles” runs until Jan. 4, 2009 at the Château de Versailles; log on to www.chateauversailles.fr. “Statuephilia” runs until Jan. 25 at the British Museum; log on to ww.britishmuseum.org
