Rail: I have to ask a question, did you conceive that this, this would have this effect as you started working?
Koons: You know, Joachim, I’ve been doing this silver/aluminum material for a long time! I did it in my “Antiquity” series, my “Popeye” series. I’ve been doing it for a long time, but we really try to get the most active quality. I’m going to show this Carracci, this Spranger, this Carracci. This is a Carracci. A lot of these Carracci come from a series, it’s called “Lascivie.” It’s like a love poem. How would you say?
Rail: Is it Vesuvius? It’s a volcano.
Koons: When I was talking about Titian, I’d always love Nymph and Shepherd (1570–75) that’s in Kunsthistorisches, the fine arts museum in Vienna. I have a “Gazing Ball” painting that I made of that painting that I keep in my dining room kitchen. And I realize my interest in this painting is that this is real high level. This is the epitome of high-level pastoral poetry. I look at Titian, and I wonder, “Oh, why do I love this so much?” And I didn’t realize that the dialogue is really the highest point of value and sophistication of understanding dialogue and the essence of something, at the same time, it is completely accessible—just the feeling, sensation. Just the wonderment of light and reflection, the basic needs of humanism, but at the same time, involved in the mathematics of pastoral poetry and the connectivity.
People love narratives; I love narratives. I always try to be involved with narrative because they tell a story. And we as humans, we love stories because we love the sense of connection. How one thing can be connected to another thing, and that can be connected to something else. This information chain is what creates a story. So I love the idea of connectivity, and for me, a body of work like this celebrates connectivity. It celebrates the accessibility. I mean, I really have tried. It’s not playing down. It’s not making work that plays down to the contrary. It’s work that tries that on, whatever again, whatever place somebody is within their life, that they can find an entrance in, and that you just take it from there.
Rail: I’m speechless, Jeff.
Koons: I don’t know if you can see this. Let me turn on the lights. This is Phyllis riding Aristotle—
Rail: So, this is wisdom fighting versus…?
Koons: Phyllis—that name is used a lot in pastoral poetry—incarnates pure sensual pleasure. In medieval European legend, Phyllis was considered to have been a mistress to Alexander the Great. Aristotle, the great philosopher, was Alexander’s tutor and had warned his student against the dangerous lascivious powers of Phyllis. She was extremely beautiful, though, and she swore that she would not only succeed in seducing Aristotle, but also reduce him to humiliation by riding him like a horse. So this is a story about beauty, desire triumphing over intellect.
Rail: My first degree was in philosophy. We would read Aristotle in Greek for our punishment. [Laughter.]
Koons: I love Led Zeppelin. And if you think of a song like, “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” it has all this wooing and all this love of feelings and sensations—you have all these extremes of pleasure. And it leads to the ultimate question: what’s most beneficial way for one to live one’s life? It’s great to have feelings and sensations. But you have a responsibility to yourself to understand those feelings and sensations—
Rail: The split of the personality according to Freud: the id, the ego, and the superego. Basically, the id is the pure, instinctual, pleasurable sexual joy, but it has to be reined in for us to function in society.
Koons: Within the whole “Porcelain” series, the different groups kind of change roles; I have mythic nudes, I have lovers, and I have animals, and they all change roles throughout the series. Different exchanges go back and forth between the groups: you could have deer kissing each other, just as the lovers do—I see them take on these interchangeable roles. I have kissing lovers, the figures, humans, but then I have the animals that are kissing lovers, too. You know, the stag is licking the top of the doe. And so there’s this role change that goes back in place with nature and the violence, the violence of the fox and bird. You also have, like the Carracci, there’s this role changing. We have mythology, Three Graces. And I have mythic nudes, I have my animals, and I have the lovers, and there’s this—
Rail: This is the first time, Jeff, I’m thinking so much about Freud while looking at your work. I’m thinking of the book that Freud published in 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, right after World War I, a period of utter self-decimation for humanity. There he introduced the concept of the death drive (Thanatos) as inseparable from the sex drive or love drive (Eros). We see throughout this exhibition an extraordinary alliance of love and violence. This is a very large aspect, it seems, of the “Porcelain” series.
Koons: You know, Plato would say that the first thing that you have to deal with in art is size. It’s the first thing that I’ll deal with. So I did Diana in plaster and glass 2013 with a gazing ball, then came her stag and her dog. So, you have that moment when a nymph recognizes Actaeon; Diana’s looking the other way. But then when she finally looks right, and Actaeon gets turned into the stag, his dogs hunt him down. So this is there.
Rail: This is just incredible. There’s the relationship of the painting and the sculpture, I’m tempted to say that you’ve never sewn it so beautifully, and it’s talking about connectivity. They seem to be engaged in dialogues with one another in very profound ways. Technically speaking, do you consider the paintings as part of the “Porcelain” series?
Koons: Yes, these are the “Porcelain” series. I have been thinking for quite some time how to bring them together. It was very important to me that I could show all of it together. Everything is dependent on its environment. So, the sculptures will be reflecting these paintings. And when the viewer enters, they’re reflecting you
Rail: It’s clear you spent a lot of time thinking about this show.
Koons: Absolutely. The reason I have the painting in this location, also behind the stag and dog, is the color in the room. Otherwise, it’s just reflecting the white walls. For me, this is all very much of the moment. The gestures can be read as a symbol; they connect to the type of energy that is happening now. For me, when I was talking about narrative and connectivity, that’s what I love.
I mean when I had my first art history lesson and went to art school, I had no idea what art was, but I took lessons from the time I was a kid, and I was always considered very good at it—that I could draw and create any illusion, I could paint portraits and still lives—I wasn’t really prepared for anything other than to go to art school. So when I had my first art history lesson, and the art history teacher brought up the Édouard Manet painting Olympia (1863), and what some of these images may have meant in nineteenth-century France: the black cat in the corner, the offering of the bouquet of flowers, the woman lying in the position referencing Francisco Goya’s work, and I tell you, I felt like the luckiest person in the world, because it became clear to me that art can empower. That art is something that can connect me to philosophy and theology and aesthetics, physics—all the human disciplines.
Rail: The fact that connectivity is simply inherent in art…
Koons: Like our synapses, the connections of information create the concepts for anything. But when you think about how some people talk about time, that there’s nothing other than now, but any type of connectivity is actually out of the moment, in some way—
Rail: It transcends the moment, perhaps?
Koons: Yes, because the connectivity is what really makes everything so rich, so joyous. It gives us so much opportunity to be able to appreciate and to want to become, to transcend, and to find more areas of interest. So for me, an exhibition like this opens doors. It opened doors for me. I hope that viewers feel that stimulation, that connective energy. It’s like tapping into the essence of their own potential, that feeling of—
Rail: It’s elating. The word “elating” comes from Latin. Elating is to elevate yourself above yourself. I think that’s what you’re doing, which is incredible. We have worked together on many shows, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a totally seamless harmony and dialogue between sculpture and painting.