Jeff Koons

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Postmodernism as a term has been defined in various forms and actions which have taken place within the late 1960s – 68 involving political turbulence and the liberation of previously marginalised groups (Meecham, 2005) . Although many critics and authors differ on some of its most elementary principles they agree to the idea of postmodernism representing the rejection of modernist principles of logical, historical, and scientific thought in approval of ironic, experimental, pastiche and the self-conscious (Jameson, 2003) . The idea of postmodernism based on a self-conscious, ironic and experimental framework gives foundation to many postmodern art practices and principles.
Some of the variations in thought surrounding postmodern concepts …show more content…

He trained at Maryland Institute College of Art and in 1979 was employed as a Wall Street commodities broker before beginning his career as an artist. In the 1980s he became an advocate of the emerging style of Neo-Geo which was an American art movement concerned with appropriation and parody. Koons utilizes his work to reflect the commercial systems of the modern world and may have more insightful knowledge of this because of his experiences of working within Wall Street? He also referred back to the Duchampian (modernism) tradition of appropriating an object to elevate it to an art status . This can be seen in the work he did with ‘Hoovers’ and how immaculate replicas of domestic products, advertisements, kitsch toys and models show the active advocacy of a society’s limitless and overbearing consumer consumption and was quick to see the West as a society has become flattered by self-absorption and images which represented an insatiable need for glamor and commodities . In his expressions of the banal, Koons didn’t hesitate to penetrate the borderlines of so called taste, which can be seen within the simplicity of his forms and the commercialism they …show more content…

We see here the influence of Baudrillards simulacra as “The latter looks at you, you look at yourself in it, mixed with the others, it is the mirror without silvering (taint) in the activity of consumption, a game of splitting in two and doubling that closes this world on itself” . With this in mind we can see this idea present within Rabbit (1986) in that this artwork has a system of reflection in which the reflective qualities of the sculpture transfers from artwork to viewer, so that the object reflects the image of the viewer while the viewer reflects on the work of art and the reflections, thus the viewer is gently forced to become an active consumer of his work and their consumption is reflected back onto them. The game continues as one realizes the Multi-dimensional framework in Koons art by the appropriation of innocent-looking objects, which explore ideas such as sex and the banal and his employment of a large crew to assist in production of his monumental, complex works which is reminiscence of mass production in culture , the difference is he creates one item to be visually consumed by the public yet owned by only those who can afford

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