"[While Duchamp used] ordinary, everyday objects, with little association beyond their predominant function in the world outside the purview of art—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a urinal...Koons uses objects that are already a little closer to art, or at least to design."
Polished to a lustrous shine and coated in iridescent purple, gold, pink, and blue, Swan (Inflatable) is a sparkling exemplar of Jeff Koons’s career-long reinterpretations of images and objects associated with banality, childhood innocence, and pervasive consumerism. Working in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, Koons is the inimitable twenty-first century interrogator of paradigms of popular taste and widely regarded as one of the world’s most important living artists. In the present work, Koons appropriates the form of an ordinary pool float and deifies it to an object of high art. Swan (Inflatable) follows on the heels of Koons’ iconic Celebration series, joining the playground that is the artist’s sculptural output, inhabited by his famed puppies, rabbits, dolphins, and lobsters. In its witty synthesis of art and kitsch, sincerity and irreverence, purity and perversion, Swan (Inflatable) embodies the clever contradictions that constitute Koons’s conceptual project.
Standing at three feet tall, Swan (Inflatable) boasts the extraordinary technical precision of Koons’ stainless steel sculptural practice, which he began developing decades earlier. In collaboration with physicists and engineers, Koons’ achieves a sense of weightlessness in his metallic creation that defies its medium. Despite the ostensibly simple adoption of the pool float’s image in the present work, every detail has been meticulously accounted for: from the valve and manufacturing label of the pool float, to the gleaming tiara, to the ripples which suggest the form has only recently been filled with air. Koons’ familiar chosen subject, with its saccharine palette and hyperbolic gloss, recalls fond memories of chlorinated pools, suburban summers, and store-bought accessories. His appropriation of a toy from adolescence—one readily purchasable and available in bulk—and subsequent manipulation of it into an adult-scaled sculpture is a decidedly Duchampian gesture. Unlike Duchamp, however, who tended to use "ordinary, everyday objects, with little association beyond their predominant function in the world outside the purview of art—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a urinal...Koons uses objects that are already a little closer to art, or at least to design." (John Caldwell, "The Way We Live Now," in Exh. Cat, San Francisco Museum of Art, Jeff Koons, 1992, p. 10) The iconography of childhood and its associations are preserved, monumentalized, and effectively immortalized.
Through the immediate recognizability of the source material, the viewer is invited to ponder the emotional investments and universality of experiencing youth. These poetics of memory, however, are not only for recollects ion’s sake. By simultaneously presenting such a familiar form while perverting its structural composition, Koons questions the associations and assumptions made by each viewer and comments on American material culture, the nature of objecthood, and the fetishization of consumption. The gleaming reflectivity of Swan (Inflatable)’s surface furthers such introspection: “I’ve always enjoyed a reflective surface because of its connection to philosophy,” Koons said on his Swan sculptures, “If you look at philosophy, the word that’s used most often is ‘reflect.’ So that’s what pulled me to reflective surfaces. It’s a surface that affirms the viewer, that affirms you, that everything is dependent on you. And the surface also reflects everything else around you, everything else that’s possible at that moment in t.mes .” (Koons quoted in "Jeff Koons on His Five Most Ambitious Unrealized Projects," Artsy, 2 April 2018, (online)).
“I’ve always enjoyed a reflective surface because of its connection to philosophy. If you look at philosophy, the word that’s used most often is ‘reflect.’ So that’s what pulled me to reflective surfaces. It’s a surface that affirms the viewer, that affirms you, that everything is dependent on you. And the surface also reflects everything else around you, everything else that’s possible at that moment in t.mes .”
A winking postmodern commentary, Swan (Inflatable) draws upon its inherent artificiality and commodity status and is playfully riddled with contractions and transformations. Technical excellence, mundane subject matter, and a dichotomous marriage of “high” craftsmanship and “low” popular culture make Swan (Inflatable) the epit.mes of Jeff Koons’ celebrated practice. Swan (Inflatable) dissolves the boundaries between reality and artifice, luxury and vulgarity, and art and commodity, leaving the viewer to gaze into its mirrored wings and wonder what the swan might tell us about art, society, and ultimately, ourselves.
