Zeitgeist Art

I finally caught up with the much-lauded Sigmar Polke exhibit at MOMA.   It was interesting for me from a cultural and political viewpoint, but as a whole it didn't do much for me.   When I go to see a major retrospective of an artist's life work, I
 usually have the expectation that I will see a kind of narrative of artistic ideas and development.  Sometimes you see a gradual evolution of a style; sometimes you see a initial burst of creative energy and not much else afterwards.  With Polke, I sense a constant, everpresent urge to invent, and to invent some more, to try this and try that.  Sometimes the results are fascinating; other times, of no interest.  Why do artists think that their unedited, hand-held-camera home movies are of artistic significance?  I don't know.   But some of the later experiments with different media are wonderful, though I am not sure about the "radioactive paint".   The other interesting thing in the exhibit was the extent to which Polke's work involves the culture and political narratives of living in Germany in the later 20th century.  Hippies!  Protests!  Orgies!  Drugs!  Nepal!  etc.  etc.

Normally I would avoid Jeff Koons like the plague, but our friend David convinced us that we should go see it. So we did, and I am glad we did.  It is one thing to see photographs of shiny dog ballon sculptures, and another thing entirely to see them in person.   To begin with, though, we were astonished to see long lines outside the Whitney to get in to the show.   Lots of families with young kids, tourists, etc.  Who knew?  Well, duh, kids like ballon sculptures.  (Hoping they don't wander in to the "pornographic" part of the show, expicit images of Koons having sex with his ex porn-star wife.)
 
Anyway the show begins with vacuum cleaners and florescent lights:

We are in some kind of Duchamp/Warhol ready-made territory.
Then basketballs suspended in water:

Then he starts to go deep into exploring bad taste, kitsch, etc, etc.  This doesn't really interest me.   There's stuff about his childhood and sex life and things like that.

The show starts to get interesting when he starts becoming obsessed with materials and reproductions and scale.   For example, he has taken some sort of cheap plastic gorilla toy (King Kong?), carefully measured it, and enlarged it to a huge size, and then reproduced the exact look of the toy in granite(!).   Thus reversing the usual process of granite monument to plastic reproduction.   This is rather perverse, but fascinating.
The head (the statue is about 7 feet tall):

He does the same thing for Play-doh.   I would have loved to listen to the teacher explaining to the kids why they were sitting in front of a giant mound of simulated Play-doh.  (Not to mention that the kids are dressed in Play-doh colors...)

 A Hulk statue (bronze), infused with organ:

Then there are all those shiny things:

Part of the dog balloon statues, immaculately cast in polished bronze:

(It's worth noting that photography is seemingly encouraged; in contrast to the Polke exhibit at MOMA, where it was strictly forbidden.)

The exhibit ends with Koons riffing on classical art, thus we get a Venus statue, in shiny blue metal.  I'm not sure what I think about the whole enterprise; compelling, in some ways, but you end up with a kind exhausted feeling afterwards.

In fact, I went to the fifth floor afterwards, where, after so much glitz, it was a relief to encounter a whole room of Agnes Martin "white" paintings.

Or, if you prefer, Ad Reinhardt in black:

This is the last show in the Whitney before it gets handed over to the Met.  I remember hearing a world premiere of an Elliot Carter quartet in one of the galleries.   I wonder what will happen to the Simonds "Dwellings" installation, which has been there forever?