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Larger Image |
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Title |
Made in Heaven. |
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Creator |
Koons, Jeff (American sculptor, born 1954) |
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Date |
1989 |
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Cultural Context |
American
North American |
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Style/Period |
Neo-Geo
Contemporary
Postmodern |
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Subject |
Posters
Billboard posters
Billboards
Advertisements
Advertising
Exhibition posters
Exhibitions
Art exhibitions
Motion pictures
Erotic films
Erotica
Sex
Relations between the sexes
Lust
Romances
Nudes
Men
Women
Couples
Spouses
Artists
Actresses
Actors
Entertainers
Posing
Lingerie
Hosiery
Underwear
Lace
Gloves
Wreaths
Shoes
Footwear
Cliffs |
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Description |
Lithograph billboard poster. "Koons followed up this poster with a series of explicit, human-scale, photo-based 'paintings' of the couple having sex. Characteristically, Koons asserted that his concerns were far removed from pornography. He had apparently gone through a moral conflict in preparing for the work, which, he claimed, would initiate viewers into the 'realm of the Sacred Heart of Jesus'. More probably he was scurrilously testing such boundaries as public/private and aesthetic legitimacy/erotic pleasure." (Caption, p.224); "If identity-related art inherited something of the modernist avant-garde's claims to moral authority, an entirely antithetical tendency emerged in New York during the 1980s. Encompassing artists such as Ashley Bickerton, Haim Steinbach, and Jeff Koons, its forms relied heavily on Duchampian and post-Pop mergers between art objects and commodities. The label it acquired around 1986, 'Neo-Geo', was only really applicable to Peter Halley, a painter who coolly readjusted formal devices from Modernist abstractions to reveal latent technocratic metaphors. Halley, however, took it upon himself to theorize the tendency, partly placing it under the aegis of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who […] perceived the ominous collapse of distinctions between 'reality' and 'simulation' as intrinsic to the market-led world of late capitalism. With 'simulation' as its core principle, therefore, this art was bound to antagonize artists and critics concerned with the 'authenticity' of identity struggles. […] Of all the simulationists Jeff Koons most offended against 'politically correct' proprieties. His blithe acquiescence to consumerism was first manifested in 1980 with the presentation of off-the-shelf vacuum cleaners, in Plexiglas vitrines, as seductive items of display in the window of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art. After a period working, appropriately enough, as a broker on Wall Street, he achieved notoriety, and considerable market success, with a series of exhibitions showing batches of work with unmistakably ironic titles; 'Equilibrium' (1985), 'Luxury and Degradation' (1986), and 'Banality' (1988). The works on show were now carefully replicated by hired craftsmen from readymade sources - Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), a porcelain figurine of the pop star with pet chimpanzee, being a notorious example. […] Koons was a connoisseur of what the artist Barbara Kruger once termed 'the sex appeal of the inorganic': he eulogized over his vacuum cleaners' hermaphroditic ability to combine phallicism and sucking operations. Wittily turning the advocacy of kitsch into a crusade, he claimed to unburden the middle class of conditioned hypocrisies of taste. In 1989 he achieved a kind of sublimity when a billboard poster appeared which, although advertising an exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum, ostensibly advertised a film of the artist in the throes of sexual passion with his new wife, the Hungarian-born, Italy-based porn-actress and artist Ilona Staller (known as 'La Cicciolina' or, in English, 'Little Dumpling')." (Excerpt, pp.223-224) |
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People Pictured |
Koons, Jeff, 1955-
Staller, Ilona |
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Location Depicted |
New York (N.Y.)
New York (State)
United States |
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Measurements |
152.4 x 228.6 cm |
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Technique |
Lithography
Printing (process)
Printmaking
Planographic printing |
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Inscription |
Top left: MADE IN HEAVEN; Lower right: Starring: Jeff Koons, Cicciolina / IMAGE WORLD, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART; PHOTO: RICCARDO SCHICCHI; Above billboard image, center: Seaboard. |
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Work Type |
Posters
Billboard posters
Advertisements
Exhibitions
Art exhibitions
Lithographs
Planographic prints
Prints |
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Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.224, fig.117) |
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Rights |
Photograph reproduced in Hopkins courtesy: Jeff Koons, New York. © Jeff Koons. |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 827-29.jpg |
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Rating |
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