Koons

This may be something of a first for Lunch with the FT. So improbably blue is the summer sky over central London, and so unusually warm the temperature, that Jeff Koons wants to eat al fresco. So we dispense with the troublesome business of restaurants altogether and order a picnic, which we will eat, by special arrangement, on the roof of the Serpentine gallery, in the heart of Hyde Park, where his latest showPopeye Series is on display.

We step outside the gallery’s first-floor offices, and a couple of staff enjoying a crafty cigarette come scuttling back in to give us our privacy. There are chairs, a table and a parasol already set up, as well as a sumptuous spread of healthy summer food, including roast aubergine, beef, grilled sea bass and a tomato salad. We have a personal waiter. I order a glass of white wine, Koons has Diet Coke. The scene is weirdly idyllic, hidden from public view, although we are able to observe the goings-on below.

Koons, as ever, is dressed immaculately, in a suit and tie, and perfectly manicured. He moves round the table, so that we can both shelter from the sun, and seems to want to play host. He is courteous and boyish, looking younger than his 54 years, and radiates a kind of innocent charm that makes me think of a Frank Capra movie.

Koons’s life can’t get much more wonderful. He is one of contemporary art’s most renowned practitioners, with spectacular rewards to match. He vies, as auction records tumble, with Lucian Freud and Damien Hirst for the title of the world’s most expensive living artist. In recent years, his giant, highly polished sculptures of seemingly trivial subjects – balloons, dogs, dolphins, rabbits – have been among the most sought-after art works of the new century. Two years ago, one of his “Hanging Heart” series – a magenta heart, cast in stainless steel and weighing 1,600kg – sold at Sotheby’s for $23.6m.

Critical opinion is divided, to say the least, over Koons’s work. He is castigated for the slickness of his product, and the pretentious claims he makes for it; but he is also lauded for his cleverness in combining the monumental effect of high art with the cheap pleasures of the banal. He has, according to veteran critic Robert Hughes, “the slimy assurance ... of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida”. But even this denigrator-in-chief admits: “The result is that you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.”

In the gallery downstairs, spectators are sidling curiously around the new show. There are more creations on offer – aluminium sculptures of inflatable pool toys entangled in trash cans and plastic chairs – as well as the giant Popeye paintings: busy, brash canvasses surround their eponymous hero with a wealth of extraneous detail.

I notice that all the visitors have smiles on their faces, particularly when they stop to study the sculptures, in thrall to the optical illusion that makes their hard metal finish look like inflatable plastic. I ask a gallery attendant if people want to touch them. “I want to touch them,” she says with surprising passion. This doesn’t feel like a depraved culture at play; it is, rather, as if a spell has been cast that has turned us all into five-year-olds.

Up on the roof, picking at our starters, I recount my observation to Koons. “You know, I enjoy real inflatables,” he says earnestly. “A lobster pool toy: it’s a wonderful thing, it has such a great optimism to it. But it won’t last. A real toy, within three months, would become soft. Its shape would be distorted, it would eventually lose its air. So the only way it can maintain its optimism and power is to transform it into a different material.” He makes it sound like he is performing a public service.

I remark that the innocence of the image is belied by the way his “toys” are enmeshed with other objects such as fences or trash cans. What is that all about?

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JEFF KOONS

From smalltown Pennsylvania to giant ‘Puppy’

1955 Born in York, Pennsylvania. Father ran an interior design firm.
1972-76 While still at art school, travels to New York to meet his idol, Salvador Dalí; they go to an exhibition of Dalí’s work together.
Attends the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore; also completes a year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1977 Moves to New York.
1980 First solo show organised by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, features vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas cases.
Works as a commodities broker on Wall Street. As his artistic career takes off, he hires a studio in a Soho loft, where a team of 30 staff work.
1988 Banality, featuring a life-size ceramic of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, opens simultaneously in New York, Chicago and Cologne.
1991 Marries porn star-turned-politician La Cicciolina, and creates “Made in Heaven”, a series of pornographic tableaux showing himself and his wife.
1994 Marriage ends acrimoniously; she takes their son Ludwig (born 1992) to Italy against Koons’s wishes.
1995 Marries artist Justine Wheeler, formerly an assistant in his studio.
1997 In his book American Visions art critic Robert Hughes attacks Koons as a “starry-eyed opportunist”.
1999 “Balloon Flower (Blue)” unveiled at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.
2001 Made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by Jacques Chirac.
2002 Appointed to the board of directors, International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
2005 Elected to the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.
2006 “Balloon Flower (Red)” unveiled at 7 World Trade Center, New York.
2007 Breaks Damien Hirst’s record as most expensive living artist when “Hanging Heart (Magenta and Gold)” sells to Larry Gagosian.
2008 Major exhibitions in Chicago, Berlin and the Palace of Versailles, where “Puppy” attracts controversy. Promoted to Officier of the Légion d’Honneur. Has a cameo role in Gus Van Sant’s film Milk .
2009 First solo London show at the Serpentine Gallery. Now employs more than 100 people in his studio.

“I went through a custody situation some years back with my son Ludwig, and I wanted to make a body of work that featured objects going through things, but not becoming distorted. It is important in life, when you’re faced with a challenge, not to have that cause trauma or make you lose your path. I believe in being able to keep your life energy in a very optimistic direction, not allowing trauma to take place.

“I was in Rome and saw this tree growing through a chain link fence, and I looked closely. It was interesting, but I was a little turned off by the trauma and the distortion. So I thought I could make these things, and they would go through other objects but they would maintain their course, and remain optimistic.”

This is narrated deadpan, and with evident sincerity. The child-like candour of Koons’s remarks does indeed feel like he is casting a spell. I feel, after listening to his analysis, that there is no disjunction whatsoever between the world of inflatable pool toys and the symptoms of psychic well-being. A fake lobster has become a signifier of mental resilience, suddenly invested with the moral seriousness of a Crucifixion scene.

The custody battle, after all, was palpable enough. It came after the breakdown of Koons’s heavily publicised marriage in the early 1990s to Ilona Staller, better known as La Cicciolina, porn star and Italian politician, who absconded to Italy with their son, now aged 16.

That trauma must have been very real, I say. Did he ever feel like addressing it more directly in his art?

He admits that the experience made him lose faith in humanity. “When I felt there were injustices against myself and my son, the only way I could get through it was to turn to my art, reflecting my moral position to my audience, and taking my ability to communicate with people even more seriously. I came out of it a stronger person, a stronger artist, a stronger human being.”

The Serpentine show is not Koons’s only significant London presence this year. A forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, will feature the artist’s “Made in Heaven”, a series of sexually explicit photographs that he made with his ex-wife, which scandalised the Venice Biennale, and the rest of the world besides, in 1991.

Most of us would feel a little sheepish to have those intimacies recalled; but Koons doesn’t do sheepish. “I feel very proud of that work.” he says. “It was about the removal of guilt and shame. I saw Masaccio’s ‘Expulsion [from the Garden of Eden]’ in Florence and I immediately thought I would like to make a body of work that was situated after the Fall, but without the guilt and the shame.”

Which meant that he didn’t believe in a Fall at all?

No, he says. The lesson of “Made in Heaven” was self-acceptance. “If you can’t accept yourself, how can you go on to achieve any kind of transcendence? You are distancing yourself from the concept of life and how life functions.

“There is one work, ‘Ilona’s Asshole’, which I have always particularly enjoyed.” (The photograph is as described, and also features a penetration scene, in ruthless detail). “To have the confidence to reveal oneself so intimately, to be so at ease with one’s own body. It is quite beautiful,” Koons says.

His work, he insists, is designed to appeal to everyone. “I have seen how works of art can be used against people, how they can be demanding and intimidating, by the suggestion that you can’t enjoy or understand them unless you have read this piece of literature, or know that piece of mythology. It is total disempowerment. But art has the ability to achieve the absolute opposite of that.”

But his art also made coded references that wouldn’t be understood by everyone, I say: even the seemingly innocent “Popeye” paintings were full of references to Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly.

“But you don’t need any of that. That’s my fun and my interest, but it is not necessarily the viewer’s interest. The works are totally open to the viewer. They invite the viewer in. And whatever the viewer’s history is, it’s perfect. This is a subconscious dialogue that is taking place, and the art is happening inside them. Everything of value and importance is occurring inside them.”

We talk about Koons’s most famous work, his “Puppy”, a giant, 43ft sculpture composed of 60,000 plants and flowers that currently stands guard outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He says he conceived the work in Germany. Louis XIV was on his mind, and he found himself wondering what the Sun King would be imagining as he looked out of the window. “And I thought, maybe he would want to see a sculpture of a giant puppy made out of flowers ... ”

Whoa, slow down, I say. Why on earth would Louis XIV want to see a sculpture of a puppy made out of flowers? “Because the most profound question in art is, do you want to be the server or do you want to be served? When you come home to a puppy at night, do you look at it and say, ‘Go and get my paper’, or do you roll it over and say, ‘How are you doing, boy?’ ”

The stream of consciousness is bewildering, but we move swiftly on. Koons’s loquacity means that he is barely touching his lunch.

“It has been embraced by the people of Bilbao. There are lots of weddings there. It has brought a lot of happiness to the place. And another interesting thing about it, Peter, is that it can’t be planted incorrectly. There are 60,000 decisions to be made and none of them is wrong.”

But a puppy is a puppy. I ask how he feels to have his work labelled as kitsch, a description he famously resists.

“When you use words like that, it feels like people are throwing tomatoes at me. These words reflect segregation and judgment, and I don’t believe in judgment. These images and objects are things that I am curious about. A child is open to everything, and accepting of everything. The highest state of being is acceptance. When you segregate, you create a hierarchy. But everything has its own beauty.”

Seeing the beauty in everything has made a lot of money for Koons. His well-rehearsed reaction to his work fetching such staggering prices is that he is glad it will be looked after, “because people tend to protect what they pay a lot of money for”. Other than that, he says, economic values “are a reflection of how you serve your community. I take it as an honour. When there is a time when [my works] are not seen as significant, I am sure those values will change.”

He collects art himself, much of which is in his Manhattan home. “Poussin, Dali, Picasso, Magritte, Picabia. Some Egyptian antiquities. And Manet – I have the last significant nude that Manet did in 1879. These are the things that give meaning to me. When you believe something is a masterpiece, it can change your life and the way you view things.”

He talks eagerly of a future project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in which a steam train engine will be suspended from a giant crane. He describes it for me: “It will do everything a train does – choo, choo! – and then it will get faster and faster, it will inhale and exhale and then a noise will come from its braking – hsssss – and then – whoo, whoo! – it will reach this orgasmic plateau ... ”

It is a When Harry Met Sally moment. I order what Koons is having (coffee). I say the piece feels sad to me, because the train won’t actually be going anywhere.

“And it is also a technology that is already in the past,” he adds. “It is very much a symbol. Once you are born, you are already participating in time. You have to become aware of your own mortality.”

It is, before long, time to come off the roof. Is this a great time to be producing art? I ask. “It’s a great time to be alive.”

Peter Aspden: Tweet nothings from on high

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Serpentine Gallery roof
Hyde Park, London
Picnic supplied by Ottolenghi, wine from Lea & Sandeman

Roast aubergine, fillet of beef, chargrilled sea bass, Camargue rice and quinoa salad, mixed green beans, tomato salad selection of cakes and tarts
Verget Macon Villages x 1 glass
Diet Coke x 1 glass
Total: £54.65