Is Jeff Koons America’s Most Religious Artist? 

This article appears in the columns section of frieze 239, ‘Re-evaluations’

It was during the 2000s that I realized Jeff Koons was, and perhaps continues to be, the most religious artist that the United States has ever produced. If people consider Koons at all, they tend to think of him as a pop artist. But his fascination with working tells another part of his story. No one I recall in contemporary art makes a fetish about how hard they work the way Koons does. He openly talks about the ridiculous amounts of effort it takes to make a piece, because it must be flawless. It’s as if there’s a natural and abiding relationship between what’s beautiful above all and the endless labouring it takes for anything beautiful to appear.

Doesn’t this strike you as the aesthetic of the Protestant work ethic? What is this notion of beauty through perfection achieved by way of never-ending toil if not the sensuous expression of that ethic? It’s interesting that this aesthetic is expressed not at the level of representation (virtually none of the work Koons produced during the 2000s makes any explicit religious references) but in his process: his relentless pursuit of the perfect combination of colours, the absolute best shine, the obsession with microscopic details that confer upon the work an aura of otherworldly transcendence.

I know that not everyone who is religious views success and worthiness as emblems of blessedness which can only be gained through unrelenting hard work. It’s a particularly American cast of mind. Koons was certainly an emblem of artistic success in the 2000s. And I think his latent religiosity made his work particularly appealing during a period of American history in which  the country was trying to reassert its socio-economic power and cultural brand on the world stage.

After 9/11, the grief and uncertainty made the moment ripe for the retelling of a story my country likes hearing about itself: that America is sanctified by divine right to conquer and prosper and has earned that right through ceaseless labour. This story of ‘manifest destiny’ was reinvented and retold in the aftermath of that fateful day through the waging of senseless wars abroad, the paranoid domestic policies that terrorized citizens at home, and the economic frameworks that privileged a kind of predatory exuberance verging on madness. What was all the chaos for? Living through it, I thought it made America look like a country desperately trying to right itself after tragedy. With hindsight, I now see that it was the consequence of a decades-long religious revival.

Idols of the old orientation are beautiful in their own way. Let them shine in the hearts and minds and collections of the believers

Those who believed in the story were ‘saved’, ‘protected’, even celebrated; those who didn’t believe, or imagined America was more than this story, were left behind, condemned as un-American, or worse. This is why I think Koons is pre-eminently a religious artist: he made work for the believers. The pageantry and monumentality of his art glorified their beliefs and cultures in proportion to the scale of their own self-certainty. Because that’s what Abrahamic religions that serve nationalist purposes excel at: armouring people with an outsized sense of certainty about themselves and their place in the world.

After the 2000s, I think the story lost some of its lustre, although the revivalism never stopped. There is simply more social and psychic space to openly consider the idea that living to work isn’t the best or most interesting way to live. The very notion of what work is for is being questioned today. The fact that fewer and fewer people believe in religion hasn’t ushered in a new secular age, as far as I can tell. But maybe an enduring disenchantment with worshipping work can?

Kenosis is an ancient concept that describes how a person finds a radically new orientation toward all that exists, by way of an outpouring and self-emptying that makes room within to entertain novel levels of awareness. This new orientation is how a person finds the existential strength to be genuinely present for themselves and others, and to meet what the day truly demands. When work is worship, a person is fixed in the old orientation. All the senses atrophy from working, and are too dulled to grasp anything other than what is certain to capture a person’s attention: the biggest, the brightest, the loudest, the shiniest, what they already recognize as being good and true. Idols of the old orientation are beautiful in their own way. Let them shine in the hearts and minds and collections of the believers. As for the rest of us, maybe we can leave this kind of idolatry behind, and make our way elsewhere.

This interview first appeared in frieze issue 239 with the headline ‘The Apostle’

_{Main image: Jeff Koons, Apollo Kithara, 2019–2022. Courtesy: © Jeff Koons Studio, New York and DESTE Foundation; photograph: Eftychia Vlachou}