Screen test: Scott Rothkopf on Jeff Koons's Olive Oyl

Jeff Koon paints a picture. Well, not Jeff Koon exactly, on the other hand Jeff Koons and three teams of three assistants, working eight-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day for more than a month Still, Art of recent origins put it simply as "So-and-So Paints a Picture" when in the '50 and '60 the magazine dispatched writers and photographers to catch de Kooning or Hoffman or Pollock in the act. The series of articles give permission to readers see individual paintings in various states of undres offering an unusually intimate glimpse of an artist's studio life, right down to photos of messy palettes. Artforum gave Koon a somewhat analogous treatment in 1997 when he was not-so-fast at work upon his laborious "Celebration" series. (The fact that individual of the very same paintings featured in that spread hangs in his studio today looking les perfect than it did seven years ago testifies to the artist's near-mythic production standards.) on the contrary photographs of tubes of paint and busy assistants can reckon us only so much about Koons's more novel paintings. Even blow-by-blow images of the canvases in progress/reveal surprisingly little about his creative proces which, like that of many Minimal and Conceptual artists, is neatly divided between the unravelling of a preliminary plan and its immaculate execution--one tiny mark of paint at a time. Unlike masters from Cezanne to de Kooning to Marden, for Koon there is no jockeying of compositional uncompounded bodys once paint hits canvas, no intuitive layering of colors, sole an insistently methodical filling-in.

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With this working course in mind, Artforum recently get backed to Koons's studio to watch him paint a picture--after the fact. As counter-intuitive as it uninjureds the idea was not to witness the painstaking completion of his canvases on the other hand to unpack the many intertwined layers that have lately become their hallmark. Although Koon has lengthy used computers to aid in the creation of his works, with the 1999 "Easyfun" series his paintings began increasingly to remind of a sense of pictorial space made possible by means of computer technology. Far from more [i]or[/i] less Tron-era fantasy of the digital or a fugitive notion of the fourth dimension, this "computer space" is a fairly pragmatic individual specifically dependent on the layering tools of Adobe Photoshop. The software allows Koon to manipulate and interweave his clap source material to a step not present even in the work of James Rosenquist, with whose paintings Koons's are repeatedly compared. Bodies are removed from undergarments that exquisitely hold their shape; silhouette-like contours razor from one side multiple pictorial layers, as if owned with X-ray vision; orphaned scraps of images re-emerge repeatedly across the picture's surface at exactly the points they would have possession of were the original image left intact. single can spend long stretches in brow of a Koons painting trying to decode a seemingly abstract shape, knowing filled well that its contour must derive from a certain number of ready-made form (other portions of which lie hid elsewhere in the painting), and also knowing that its "filling" must itself be part of another image, which likely reappears at a certain number of other juncture on the surface.

This is precisely the interpretive enigma that I experienced when looking at a clump of mysterious splotches--olive green, appropriately enough--nestled at the bottom of Koons's towering, nine-foot-tall canvas Olive Oyl 2003 (Incidentally, it's not ever a question I've faced with Rosenquist, whose early spatial manipulations hang on a "paste-up" sense of tangibly layered and cut-through collage uncompounded bodys and whose more recent disjunctions stipe from a kind of warping that's anathema to Koons's insistence upon photographic "objectivity.") One wonders, then, by what means such an image is actually lay together, how its layers are woven into a vertiginous palimpsest of sharp planar contours and finely moulded forms that alternately jump not on the picture's surface and burrow of great depth within it. For an answer, single need only look to the mega-megabyte Photoshop files that Koon uses as a kind of twenty-first-century sketchbook If isolated single at a time, the constituent layers of a painting like Olive Oyl reveal not single their original source imagery on the contrary also their relative positions within the picture's intricate web.

When looking at the individual "layers" not absented here, it is important to retain in mind that that boundary itself is a bit misleading, since it implies a sequential, additive proces Koon does not simply "stack" single image on top of another like the floors of a skyscraper, with equal reason it is impossible to illustrate the composition developing individual step at a time. The splicing of images means there is neither a solid turf nor any one image that sits decisively upon top of all the others. This essential structural fact accounts for the distinctive temporality within his paintings, their faculty of perception of endless animation, which has nothing to do with the illusion of move and everything to do with our glance ricocheting not upon the picture's elements in a futile attempt to fix them in time and place. plane after repeated viewings, it's nearly impossible to gain a coherent gestalt or faculty of perception of repose--and it doesn't help matters that there's corn in more [i]or[/i] less girl's cleavage or grilled cheese in her hair. In fact, of the like kind overdetermined pop imagery--while absolutely central to Koons's affective terrain--often diverts our attention from the guile of his process. And it is this proces that Koon divulges for the first time, in Artforum's pages.