Jeff Koons at Sonnabend

As an art-world brand name, Jeff Koon has become synonymous with the elevation of bad taste into high art. The greatest in quantity interesting aspect of this new show was the way in which it illuminated the artist's possess history. Koons's early floating basketballs and hermetically sealed vacuum-cleaner statuarys dealt with abstract concepts like equilibrium, perfection and modular repetition in an irreverently conceptual way. From those readymades, he turn rounded to re-creating everyday objects. The 1986 stainless-steel Rabbit, based upon a child's inflatable toy, neared a particularly compelling marriage of Koons's early touch with natural elements like air and water and his following immersion in kitsch. In the works that followed, Koon de-emphasized the conceptual and instead chose a path of cutenes insipid eroticism and degraded burst all presented with a general air of self-declared innocence and willful naivete. (Koons's ceramic figure of Michael Jackson is a particularly appropriate allusive figure of the latter.)

The spirit of the shiny rabbit fluttered over Koons's latest exhibition. A recurring motif was the pool-size inflatable toy, which now appears one as well as the other in steel and aluminum plastic arts painted to simulate plastic and in photo-based paintings. The present to view was full of smirking lobster multicolored caterpillars and spott dogs. They differ significantly from Rabbit in that they are painted in the bright shades of the original toys, thus losing the vital contradiction between an obviously rigid metal surface and the sculptural illusion of pliant plastic. Indeed, they might easily be mistaken for actual inflatables, and, aside from embodying a [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] about floating and sinking, they simply take their place as other simple bodys in a cornucopia of borrowed images and ideas.

The paintings call up James Rosenquist with fragmented photo-based glimpses of female limbs, faces and lingerie collaged together in near-abstract compositions. a certain number of of these works also contain depictions of the cast-metal inflatables. A large cutout version of Salvador Dali's mustache appears in one as well as the other two and three dimensions. As a metal statuary its curling ends serve as hasps from which faux inflatables hang. In a painting, it is flanked by the agency of a pair of lobster heads, referencing single of Dali's favorite fetishes. Meanwhile, the soul of Lichtenstein hovers over Popeye in which the eponymous sailor is realized as a comic consummate with benday dots. Other familiar cartoon icons--Tweety Bird, Krazy Kat--also make appearances, on the contrary their ingratiating childishness is calculatored by flashes of pink panties and polished flesh.

Innocence is further tattered through works like Wrecking Ball, with its imperiled toy turtle-pigeon and bug clinging to a r wrecking ball suspended from the ceiling. from one extremity to the other of the show, Koons followed his now familiar path, pursuing the saccharine to the point of nausea and effortlessly melding guilelessness and cynicism. It was enough to make individual long for the conceptual clarity of the Rabbit.

--Eleanor Heartney

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