DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY: FABRICATING DESIRE IN THE WORK OF MARCEL DUCHAMP AND JEFF KOONS María Emilia Fernández When one undergoes the examination of the shop window, one also pronounces one’s own sentence. In fact, one’s choice is “round trip.” From the demands of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows my choice is determined. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window. The penalty consists in cutting the pane and in feeling regret as soon as possession is consummated. —Marcel Duchamp1 70 It seems strange to think that a passage written more than a century ago remains just as relevant today. The shop window dilemma has become inescapable; a customized experience so thoroughly informed by our wants and needs that we sentence ourselves with every online search. The demands that Marcel Duchamp experienced in front of a shop window in 1913 have moved beyond department stores and arcades to the media, evolving into personalized advertisements and one-click purchases, but the feeling that one’s choice is determined has not. Now, as then, if consumers want to avoid feeling regret, they must exert maximum composure and refrain when looking at objects seemingly within arm’s reach. This continuity is especially relevant when considering Duchamp’s work alongside that of Jeff Koons. Although many decades apart, both artists questioned the concepts of taste, value and authorship in relation to art, yielding new ways of thinking of the socioeconomic forces at play in industrial and consumer society. If Duchamp were alive to witness consumer culture in the digital era, he probably would not have been too surprised by the degree art has become implicated in contemporary economies of desire. During a conference in 1961, the artist remarked on how, “through their close connection with the law of supply and demand, the visual arts have become a ‘commodity’,” concluding that “the work of art is now a commonplace product like soap and securities.”2 1 2 Marcel Duchamp, A l’infinitif, ed. and trans. Ecke Bonk, Richard Hamilton, and Jackie Matisse (Northend: The Typosophic Society, 1999), 5. Marcel Duchamp, “Where do we go From Here”, 1961. Symposium at Philadelphia Museum College of Art, March 1961. First published in the Duchamp issue of Studio International, 1975. Apparently leading on from this, Koons’s artistic production has aimed to decode why and how consumer objects are glorified, pointing to their ubiquity and status as cultural mediators. By aligning everyday goods, kitsch trinkets, household appliances, children’s toys, icons of pop culture and advertisements with representations of the history of art, Koons advocates for a wider understanding of what culture means, and what happens to the self in the complex process of commodity acquisition. Consumer goods reflect and shape people’s desires, as does art. Whether you consider it trying and arduous or pleasurable and uplifting, shopping is an act through which one constructs oneself. The products one buys come to stand for who we are or who we hope to be, molding one’s identity in a process defined as much from the outside as from within through displays of taste. As discussed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “taste is the basis of all that one has—people and things—and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others.”3 What we see as our preferences are the result of educational and cultural capital, as well as access to economic resources. Early twentieth-century museums played a key role as educators of the public, nurturing and refining people’s taste. By practicing the art of comparing, distinguishing, and selecting between aestheticized objects, spectators went on to graduate from these schools for consumption.4 However, this changed with the advent of big department stores, which were appearing at the same time as Duchamp introduced his first readymades in the early 1910s. As noted by art historian Helen Molesworth, these shops destabilized the position of art institutions within society, disputing their supremacy to dictate the discourse and formation of taste.5 Duchamp’s contribution came at a key moment, as museum and shop displays began to echo each other, vying to address their public. In choosing a bottle rack or a snow shovel from among other objects for sale to become a readymade work of art, he pioneered choice as a form of artistic labor, albeit a provocative one that had yet to be legitimized. 3 4 5 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 56. Helen Molesworth cites Bourdieu in her discussion of taste and its implications for consumer culture and the formation of the self. See “Rrose Sélavy Goes Shopping,” Appearance Stripped Bare. Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even, ed. Massimiliano Gioni, exh. cat. (New York: Phaidon, 2019), 17. Dorothea von Hantelmann suggests this connection in her essay for the exhibition catalogue, “Secular Spirits: Production, Consumption, and Transcendence”, Appearance Stripped Bare, 41. Museums train people in experiencing aesthetic differences; they refine their ability to compare and to differentiate between objects. She references Boris Groys’s notion of museums as “pre-schools for consumption”, Topologie der Kunst (Munich, Vienna: Hanser 2003), 47. Helen Molesworth goes on to write a detailed account of the relation between museums and department stores at the beginning of the twentieth century in relation to Duchamp’s work. Molesworth. “Rrose Sélavy Goes Shopping”, 17. 71 Duchamp claimed his readymades were chosen on the basis of complete visual indifference, usually preferring utilitarian objects that seemed to lie beyond the quarrels of good and bad taste. In comparison, Koons appears to select those which have a particular appeal, often striking a sensitive or nostalgic chord in his audience while also invoking a reflection on status, class and social mobility. His readymade-informed gestures adopt and expand on Duchamp’s explorations in a lineage marked by Andy Warhol and his glorified reproductions of soup cans and Brillo boxes as its intermediary point. Against this backdrop, Koons is no longer trying to define the boundaries of art but rather engaging with commodity culture as a portrait of society, investigating what its products can tell about who we are and who we aspire to be. 72 Raised in his father’s furniture store, Koons was exposed to the commercial aesthetics involved in the presentation of objects for purchase, a knowledge of “colors and textures: things that affect the way you feel” that he would later perfect and incorporate in his own work.6 This was the case in one of his earliest series, The New (1979–87), which presented vacuum cleaners encapsulated in fluorescent-lit Plexiglas containers. These works come across as relics of the consumerist American Dream, at its apex in the 1950s, and which lived on in the ideals of middle-class American families three decades later.7 In this commercially produced imaginary, the vacuum cleaner was one of the symbols of the modern ‘‘democratic’’ home. Carried straight from the warehouse into their transparent mausoleum, set inside a white cube, Koons’s vacuum cleaners remain pure and untouched, virgins unable to draw their first breath. The fact that these electrical appliances appear almost anthropomorphic within their cases can be read in the context of advertisements in the 20th century, and more specifically to the resurgence of surrealist-inspired imagery in ads during the 1980s, when Koons first began producing works. Publicity for new technology and computers, cigarettes and fashion, envisioned products as though they were alive, in a kind of animism that has since been amply exploited by marketing strategies to project notions of class and affluence. The association of commodities with aspirational desires has a long history, but one of its turning points can be found in the rise of mass consumerism between 1890 and 1920, which gave birth to the invention of the trademark. 6 7 Jeff Koons, “‘What Inspires Me Is Feeling’: Jeff Koons,” Art in America, June 18, 2014, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/jeffkoons-muse/. Koon’s first solo exhibition in 1980, The New (A Window Installation), reconfigured a window of the New Museum in New York as a storefront. The installation overlooking Fourteenth Street could have easily been taken for a commercial appliance store exhibit featuring the latest Hoover vacuum cleaners. Not unlike the artists’ signature on a work of art, the application of a company name to a product guaranteed its authenticity while also creating a particular identity connected to it, complete with slogans and fictional characters, or in current marketing language, a brand narrative that evokes a lifestyle.8 Duchamp’s famous purchase and subsequent exhibition of Fountain (1917), can be seen as a game played with the trademark and the problematic idea of a branded choice offered by mass consumer culture.9 Fast forward almost a century and one finds Koons expanding on the appropriation tactics inaugurated by the readymade, focusing on commodities and their erotic appeal on the viewer-consumer. After The New, Koons moved from using actual goods to replicating everyday objects marked by their decorative inclinations—inflatable toys and bar accessories cast in stainless steel, tchotchkes faithfully reproduced in porcelain and polychromed wood. Rabbit for example, from the Statuary series (1986), is an accurate facsimile of the original, a self-appropriation of a readymade toy he used in the Inflatable series from 1979. The polished-steel surface of this facsimile is so perfect it could serve as a mirror; a copy that retains an element of illusion, so exact that it can only remind us that what we have in front is the representation of a representation of a real bunny.10 Moreover, its surface includes the public in its reflection, making them one with the work, or in Koons’s own words, “it’s about using the public as a readymade”.11 This might explain why some of his most iconic works are those which show us to ourselves. This special talent is one shared by Joe/Narcissus, the protagonist of Hans Richter’s surrealist film, Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947). The ambitious project included the participation of artists such as Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Duchamp, among others. In this experimental film, Joe looks into a mirror and discovers he is able to see his dreams and enter his subconscious. Having seen inside himself he realizes he can do the same for others; he abandons his life as an artist and becomes a dream-therapist. Duchamp’s dream sequence for the film, in which he collaborated with musician John Cage, shows the poetic inner life of a gangster, whose subconscious conjures up Duchamp’s own optical experiments or rotoreliefs, along with a real-life Nude Descending the Staircase, No. 2 (1912) as seen through a 8 9 Molesworth, “Rrose Sélavy Goes Shopping”, 18. In exhibiting Fountian, the urinal’s value as art was left to the various legitimating actors at play: on the one hand, the board of the Society of Independent Artists, who initially rejected the work, and on the other, the spectator, whose aesthetic training was divided between the museum and the department store. 10 Scott Rothkopf, “No Limits,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, ed. Rothkopf, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum, 2014), 20. 11 “Interview: Jeff Koons—Anthony Haden-Guest,” in Jeff Koons, ed. Angelika Muthesius (Cologne: Taschen, 1992), 21. 73 prism.12 Read alongside Koons’s practice, this segment of Dreams that Money Can Buy speaks to the intricate connection between one’s own image reflected in the mirror and the intimate aspirations one projects unto that reflection: illusions that are mostly affordable and within reach of the masses, but that can be easily manipulated by other interests. 74 Standing in front of the mirror-polished surface of one of Koons’s sculptures, viewers find their needs and wants magnified, confronted with their own desires but also with those of others around them.13 These over-scaled representations of familiar objects inspire a slightly surreal feeling, one that is both mesmerizing and uncanny, as though they had been conjured up from a dream. This effect extends to works with no mirror-like surfaces such as PlayDoh (1994–2014) or Gorilla (2006–2011), monumental replicas of children’s toys. These gigantic works in turn find a fitting counterpoint in Duchamp’s miniaturized artworks included in his Boîte-en-valise (1935–41). In producing this portable museum the artist treated his own work as a collection, as a readymade. The set included small-scale reproductions of sixty-nine of Duchamp’s works, among which was his own air-filled work par excellence, Air de Paris (1919). Interestingly, the Boîte also held a unique hand-colored original—a contradiction in the modes of production embedded at the heart of each suitcase. This large edition of over 300 copies was almost intended as a product, meant to reach many more people than his full-sized readymades ever could. Duchamp’s portable retrospective internalized and expanded the operations of the readymade, exploring the dilemma of the original and the replica. This debate continued to be at the crux of his practice; by 1964 many of the original readymades had been lost, so Duchamp decided to have them refabricated. Using measurements extracted from photographs, each was painstakingly reconstructed by Arturo Schwarz, an art dealer in Milan, with the artist’s supervision.14 These editions reversed the notions of authorship, taste, technique, and aura posed by the readymade “originals.” They returned the readymades to the realm of industry, while paradoxically transforming them into sculptures in the more traditional sense, furthering the same questions they had posed half a century earlier. 12 Full film available here: https://archive.org/details/dreams-that-money-can-buy 13 The spectator completes the work with his reflection, and in doing so becomes in part author of the work. Embracing the viewer’s contribution in the creative act was also vital for Duchamp, who described there are two poles in the act of creation: “the artist on one hand, on the other the spectator who later becomes posterity” (Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act, 1957) He believed that in deciphering and interpreting the work, viewers contribute to the creative process. 14 This move was coherent with the readymade’s essential “lack of uniqueness,” as described by Duchamp in 1961, for “the replica of the readymade delivering the same message” becomes a vehicle, escaping artistic intentionality. Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’” reprinted in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (1973; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1989). The re-made readymades obscure the material and social conditions of their production; they become pure image, signs that are ever more present as echoes. This argument has also been posed in relation to Koons’s work by art historian Isabelle Graw, who aligns these traits with what Karl Marx described as the commodity fetish, an object that reveals no sign of the social process or the history of labor involved in its production.15 Koons’s objects have a wondrous, almost magical character, from which all evidence of handiwork, or human error, has been meticulously effaced. Paradoxically, the invisibility of human labor in his works is the result of many hours of designing, manufacturing, and polishing to perfection. What began with the replication of an existing readymade has scaled up to ever-more sophisticated technological processes in the artist’s pursuit of other-worldly precision.16 To some extent, Koons’s media persona comes to animate his works, instilling them with the living labor that is untraceable in the object itself. He follows in the paths of other artists, not least those of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Martin Kippenberger and Andy Warhol, who cultivated a public identity that could accompany and even enrich their works. Duchamp’s name, as well as his alter-egos, R. Mutt, Rrose Sélavy, and George W. Welch, were instrumental in making up for the loss of the aura that came with the enhancement of the commodity aspect of the work. By playing with the use of pseudonyms he both contributed to and undermined the artist-celebrity figure that could endow artworks with credibility and trust. In the last twenty years of his life Duchamp went as far as to rent a second studio where he would welcome friends and journalists, so that he could continue work on his last major work, Étant donnés (1946–66), without anybody suspecting anything, and keeping up the image that he had completely given up art.17 Koons has constructed his persona through works such as The New Jeff Koons (1980), the artist’s kindergarten portrait, or the series of ads in various art magazines published in 1988, which promoted him in four different 15 “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of the labor.”. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 1, sec 4: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ ruhle/1939/capital.htm as quoted by Isabelle Graw in her essay “Life as a Resource: Mythologization, Self-Marketing, and the Creation of Value in the Work of Jeff Koons,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, 230–232. 16 It is not an overstatement to say that in this process he has pushed the limits of technology and industrial production. Some of his projects can only be finished as technology catches up with the studio’s needs, which explains why certain series take years to develop. Art historian Michelle Kuo has posed that, as examples of “infinite customization”, Koons’s works allow us to see the future of commodities, beyond what we are able to conceive of today and hinting at what the near future might bring. Michelle Kuo, “One of a kind”, in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, 252. 17 Elena Filipovic, Marcel Duchamp: A work that is not a work “of art” (Buenos Aires: Fundación Proa, 2008). Accessed online at https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/04/68554/a-museum-that-is-not/ 75 Hollywood-style images marked by a mix of confidence, irony and humor. In this sense, the need to promote the self alongside the work of art could be seen as symptomatic of the degree to which our present economy fuels a distorted perception of social interaction. Such self-marketing seems to foster what Marx identified as “material relations between persons and social relations between things.”18 In this phantasmagorical relation between people and commodities, things appear as though invested with life, calling out one’s name through the shop window. The same is true in the artworld, where people value and consume not so much the actual product but its brand name, not so much the artwork but the trademark of the artist.19 This demand to perform and market oneself applies to everyone, not just to artists or creative agents. Most visitors on their part are eager to self-promote through selfies and photographs of Koons’s emblematic works, as well as of Duchamp’s canonized readymades. Cellphone cameras, social networks and other means of contemporary image production and distribution support this exigency to publicize one’s thoughts and desires, which are then transformed by marketing strategies into perceived needs. It is this longing, and not satisfaction, that dominates in advertisements—simultaneously inviting and denying what one aches for in these products. 76 The failure to comply with the expectations of consumer culture can result in angst and guilt. These anxieties stem from feeling one’s taste does not fit the norm, or one is not able to afford to be who one wants to be, or rather who one’s been told one should be. In this respect, Koons has repeatedly asserted that his work aims to remove any guilt or shame from the viewer’s experience. In his own words, he has tried “to make works that just embraced everybody’s own cultural history and made everybody feel that their history was perfect just the way it was.”20 These declarations and optimistic mantras show just how far we have come from Duchamp’s warning about the feeling of regret that might assault us if we dare reach for satisfaction. The fact that Koons proclaims guilt can be avoided, and that we should cultivate self-acceptance, signals an important evolution in capitalist critique. However, it is hard to know for certain where Koons stands in relation to issues of class and wealth distribution. Is he trying to democratize art spaces with exhibitions that appeal to the elite as well as the masses? Or is he taking advantage of his marketing success to promote artwork in the luxury mar18 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 1, sec 4: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1939/capital.htm 19 Many critics have made this point, including Hal Foster in “The Future of an Illusion, or The Contemporary Artist as Cargo Cultist”, in Yve-Alain Bois, Thomas Crow, Hal Foster, David Joselit, Elisabeth Sussman, Bob Riley, Endgame: Reference and Simulations in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Boston: MIT Press, 1986), 112. 20 “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas” in Jeff Koons: Retrospective, ed. Merit Woltmann, exh. cat. (Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museet, 2004), 67. ket? After all, Koons has used his name as a brand, collaborating with Louis Vuitton in a series of luxury bags, and designing a limited-edition case for Google’s Nexus phone, just to mention a few examples. The artist’s indefinite stand is telling of the ambiguity that pervades the neoliberal economy of signs, aiming for universal appeal. Koons’s sustained conversation with Duchamp’s readymade as seen in this exhibition provides us with an opportunity to examine the relations that are on display in the market and which we perform, compliant with the demands of commodities. When confronted with the work of these two artists viewers’ reactions unfold on a wide spectrum, from awe and admiration to disdain and contempt. But the hostile, at times defensive reaction these artworks inspire, might allow us to cast doubt on the exploitative conditions inherent to the current economy. To see oneself looking in the mirror-polished steel surfaces of Koons’s sculptures is also to observe the conventions and contradictions of the system in which these works operate. By framing these questions within a reading of Duchamp and Koons’s practices, the exhibition reflects on the evolution of a key aspect of the modern world over the last century: the fabrication of desire, and how it produces, and distracts from, the self. In a sense this exhibition pries open a space where these tensions can be negotiated before stepping out into the real world. By diverting our attention from the object of desire to its context we stand to learn about ourselves, about our needs and wants, about the dreams that money can and cannot buy. 77