Interview

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Just a few months ago, the art world watched in shock and awe as Damien Hirst skipped his gallery to hold a mammoth auction of his own work in one of the ballsiest and most successful displays of showmanship since Jeff Koons made life-size porcelain works of himself going at it with his then-wife Ilona Staller, a.k.a. La Cicciolina, back in 1989. Nearly 20 years later, long after that marriage went south and Staller fled the United States with their son Ludwig, Koons has moved on to a new plane entirely. A rare show of his "Celebration" sculptures opened in October in Berlin; one of his enormous "Balloon Flower" sculptures is the first piece of public art at Ground Zero; and his immense 161-foot-tall train-from-a-crane is on track, so to speak, to be built at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Most fascinating of all, this all-American artist enthralled (and roiled) la France this past fall when his first European retrospective went on display at none other than the Palace of Versailles, making him the first contemporary artist to be given such royal treatment. Sitting down in his amazingly colorful candy factory in West Chelsea, New York, Koons talks about how he hates the word kitsch, finds irony useless, and loves the films Bambi (1942) and Goldfinger (1964). And while the boy from the Rust Belt is as American as a Hershey's Kiss, it turns out he has more in common with Louis XIV than with Henry Ford.

DAVID COLMAN: How did the Versailles show come about? Was it generated by you?

JEFF KOONS: No. Several years ago, a friend of mine, Jérôme de Noirmont, who's a gallerist in Paris, said, "Wouldn't it be great to make an exhibition at Versailles?" And I said, "That would be great." Because when I made works like Puppy or Split-Rocker, those large floral sculptures, I always thought that they were the types of works where Louis XIV would wake up in the morning, look out his window, and fantasize about making something like that-you know, he'd want to come home that evening, and there it would be. So it turned out to be a treat to have that take place. We talked about it for years, but actually when Jean-Jacques Aillagon, who was the minister of culture and communication in France, became president of the Château de Versailles Museum, there was discussion about incorporating contemporary art into Versailles during the year. And so Jean-Jacques said, "Let's invite Jeff." But there's been this underlying idea for the last couple of years among some friends in France that it would be great to show my work in Versailles.

DC: In some ways it seems so perfect for Versailles, and in some ways it seems so completely wrong. You know I say that with love. But it has this great monumentality and reflection and this over-the-top ornamentation that is so perfect for the environment, and yet at the same time it's so American. Obviously these adjectives are open to discussion . . .

JK: I think that it worked kind of perfectly. I'm interested in sensuality. I'm interested in power. I'm interested in the kind of polarities and equilibriums that take place within sexuality and philosophy and sociology. So in Versailles, in this type of setting, you have a place that is about absolute control, where everything has been thought about.

DC: Which is very Koonsian, I must say.

JK: Well, certain aspects of it-I like to pay a lot of attention to things. There's another aspect that then comes along, which recognizes that even when you exist with all of this control, there are certain areas where you do, in the end, have to give it up.

DC: I don't believe you ever give up control.

JK: Well, in these sculptures, like Puppy or Split-Rocker, there is a point where you do. Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

DC: So what was the reaction? I heard there were some French people who thought, Oh, this American person shouldn't be showing at Versailles, blah blah blah. They go off on that tangent pretty quickly.

JK: I heard about these things and didn't get so involved in that dialogue other than to let people know that I just wanted to make something very positive at Versailles. But walking through the exhibition after it was installed, I noticed that some of the guards would be walking around huffing and puffing, you know, "How can this be here?" They were upset by it. But actually people say that in France it's really having quite an impact. They're getting very large crowds coming and that it's somehow hit a nerve within French culture where they can have a dialogue about contemporary art and historical works and the decorative arts of the past.