The Taschen Collection: Art of our time
By Marga Paz
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By contrast, Mike Kelley has exploited the provocation of sexuality used in his works as a weapon of transgressive action that delves into the forms in which sexuality is manifested in his games with visual and linguistic vernaculars: "The two-panel acrylic paintings of Incorrect Sexual Models (1987) are just that: failed attempts at simple picturing of complex psychosexual relationships. The series depicts a reordering of the body (an attempt to improve it?), which reduces it to a symmetrical organization of paired organs: eyes, kidneys, lobed brain - all bracketed within a decorative garland of intestine. The paintings strive to portray sexual relationships as ones of symmetry and equality."
To cite the example once again of Jeff Koons: from his earliest vacuum cleaners and his works in the Banality series to his most recent paintings full of fragments of erotic advertising images, his works must be interpreted in this vein.
Despite this, the works that have generated the greatest controversy due to the interference between art and pornography have undoubtedly been those in his series Made in Heaven in which Jeff Koons appropriated images and stereotypes belonging to the imagery of pornography only to transfer them to the field of art.
This series - created for the 1990 Venice Biennale - is made up of sculptures and huge pictures in which he and Cicciolina appear portrayed in various sexually explicit postures, accompanied by all types of symbols of love and sex, including wooden sculptures, vases, angels and adorable dogs and birds. In this series, the settings and paraphernalia used came from the world of pornography, although the objective was quite different - to portray love as a type of mystical ecstasy, with rapturous celestial pleasures which would render him and Cicciolina a "contemporary Adam and Eve". The outcome was the creation of a simulation consisting of an idealized sexual universe halfway between Boucher and Disneyland, envisioned by Koons as a series of works in the "romantic baroque tradition".
In Cindy Sherman's Sex Pictures (1992), the artist's masked body - as her body had usually been used since her beginnings as an artist - is replaced by artificial limbs from articulated dummies, fragments from their naked bodies, prostheses and masks which are displayed in explicitly sexual postures that convey an oppressive feeling of distress. This portrayal of sexuality, which appeals simultaneously to the grotesque, the comic and the terrifying, constitutes a critical demythologization of the codes that structure the shaping of the female body in the collective imagination and at the same time a relationship with the mutant body from the new category of the post-human.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
By contrast, Mike Kelley has exploited the provocation of sexuality used in his works as a weapon of transgressive action that delves into the forms in which sexuality is manifested in his games with visual and linguistic vernaculars: "The two-panel acrylic paintings of Incorrect Sexual Models (1987) are just that: failed attempts at simple picturing of complex psychosexual relationships. The series depicts a reordering of the body (an attempt to improve it?), which reduces it to a symmetrical organization of paired organs: eyes, kidneys, lobed brain - all bracketed within a decorative garland of intestine. The paintings strive to portray sexual relationships as ones of symmetry and equality."
To cite the example once again of Jeff Koons: from his earliest vacuum cleaners and his works in the Banality series to his most recent paintings full of fragments of erotic advertising images, his works must be interpreted in this vein.
Despite this, the works that have generated the greatest controversy due to the interference between art and pornography have undoubtedly been those in his series Made in Heaven in which Jeff Koons appropriated images and stereotypes belonging to the imagery of pornography only to transfer them to the field of art.
This series - created for the 1990 Venice Biennale - is made up of sculptures and huge pictures in which he and Cicciolina appear portrayed in various sexually explicit postures, accompanied by all types of symbols of love and sex, including wooden sculptures, vases, angels and adorable dogs and birds. In this series, the settings and paraphernalia used came from the world of pornography, although the objective was quite different - to portray love as a type of mystical ecstasy, with rapturous celestial pleasures which would render him and Cicciolina a "contemporary Adam and Eve". The outcome was the creation of a simulation consisting of an idealized sexual universe halfway between Boucher and Disneyland, envisioned by Koons as a series of works in the "romantic baroque tradition".
In Cindy Sherman's Sex Pictures (1992), the artist's masked body - as her body had usually been used since her beginnings as an artist - is replaced by artificial limbs from articulated dummies, fragments from their naked bodies, prostheses and masks which are displayed in explicitly sexual postures that convey an oppressive feeling of distress. This portrayal of sexuality, which appeals simultaneously to the grotesque, the comic and the terrifying, constitutes a critical demythologization of the codes that structure the shaping of the female body in the collective imagination and at the same time a relationship with the mutant body from the new category of the post-human.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Taschen Collection
Hardcover 11.7 x 16.5 in., 254 pages
$ 70.00
$ 70.00
The art of a particular moment in history from a new point of view
Jeff Koons installing the work Woman in Tub for the show "Banality" at the Max Hetzler Gallery, Cologne. Foto: Wilhelm Schürmann, 1988
New York gallerist Lawrence Luhring and Christopher Wool with Jeff Koons' Pink Panther during the installation for the show "Banality" at the Max Hetzler Gallery, Cologne. Foto: Wilhelm Schürmann, 1988