The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jeff Koons · mirror-polished stainless steel with a transparent colour coating, in the form of a twisted balloon animal, about 307 by 363 by 114 cm · five unique versions, Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Orange and Red, one in form, material, scale and title and different only in the colour of the coating · from the Celebration series, begun in 1994, the dog completed in 2000, made by Jeff Koons with his studio and outside fabricators · the unit scored is the five versions as one work; all five stand whole as made, nothing known to be lost or replaced, the Blue in the Broad collection in Los Angeles and the Magenta in the collection of François Pinault; the later small editions in porcelain and other materials are separate objects and are not scored
Mode
Monumental sculpture as fabricated object: a found shape enlarged and perfected in steel, the studio’s and fabricators’ making credited to the work
Mythos
The dog as the child’s first figure of love; breath given a body; the party, the toy and the fairground; the colossus and the idol
Phase
Begun with the Celebration series in 1994 and completed in 2000; the Magenta shown at Versailles in 2008; the Orange sold at Christie’s, New York, in November 2013
Presentation
One form in five unique versions, Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Orange and Red, each about 307 by 363 by 114 cm, mirror-polished and coated in transparent colour
Register
Gleam and exhilaration, delight shading into unease; bright, weightless in look, uncanny at the edge
Scale
A toy the height of a room; one tube, a knot, nine twisted segments, five colours
Governing Proposition
A balloon animal, the twist of rubber a child is handed at a party and that lasts an afternoon, is made in mirror-polished stainless steel the height of a room, coated in a transparent colour, five times over. Everything slight is made heavy, everything passing is made permanent, everything cheap is made precious, and the surface returns the world to the viewer in the toy’s colour. The wager is that the form of a disposable thing, enlarged and perfected without economy, will hold the culture that loves the bright, the inflated and the disposable, and pays to have it made eternal. The work will not say whether it exposes that culture or celebrates it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1994 Jeff Koons began the Celebration series, sculptures and paintings of the things of a child’s party and holiday, and in 2000 the balloon dog was completed. It is made of stainless steel, polished to a mirror and coated in a transparent colour, in the form of a balloon twisted into an animal, about 307 by 363 by 114 cm. It was made by Koons with his studio and outside fabricators, and the making is credited to the work. There are five versions, Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Orange and Red, each unique, one in form, material, scale and title, different only in the colour of the coating.
The five are scored here as one work, because the form is the work and the colour is its only variable. Each stands whole as made, and nothing is known to be lost or replaced. The Blue is in the Broad collection in Los Angeles and is shown in its museum; the Magenta belongs to the collection of François Pinault. The later small editions of the dog in porcelain and other materials are separate objects, and so are the other works of the series and the earlier inflatables; they are context, and they show by contrast what the scale of these five does.
The form is a closed grammar. A balloon animal is one tube twisted at fixed points into snout, head and ears, neck, legs, body and tail, and the dog keeps that grammar exactly. Take out a segment and it is not a dog. Take away the mirror and the steel reads as steel, and the illusion of a thin skin fails. Shrink it and it is a toy again. What does yield to subtraction is the plurality: one colour would carry the argument entire, and the five answer the logic of the series and of the market more than anything the form requires.
Movement II
At the tip of the snout is the knot: the nozzle of the balloon, pulled and tied off after it was blown up. It is the smallest thing on the object and the most casual, and it is its hinge. It is the one sign that this body was inflated by a breath, that a mouth once filled it and fingers twisted it, and in steel it is rendered true. Remove it and the dog is a smooth sculpture of segments; with it, the whole mass stands as something that was, a moment ago, air held in rubber.
Everything else follows from that knot. The pinches between the segments are rendered as creased and tucked joints; each lobe has the slack and swell of a skin under pressure; the slight sag of a twist is kept. The form was made, not cast from a found object, and it is made to the eye’s belief. Change the form and what the work knows changes nearly wholly: in rubber it is a balloon, small it is a souvenir, unpolished it is a cast of a toy, and the room and the viewer leave it. The knowledge is in the contradiction of a membrane that seems a breath thick and a metal that will outlast its makers.
The breath is also where the archetype lies. A balloon is breath given a shape, an inflated body whose life is its air, and behind it stands the oldest image of the body, the breath in the clay. The dog is the oldest companion animal and the child’s first figure of love; the party and the fairground are the rituals of childhood; the giant shining thing set up to be looked at stands in the line of the colossus and the idol. These patterns are evoked, and precisely. They are not built: the breath carries nothing in the structure, the dog is hollow in appearance and steel in fact, and the work’s interest is in the surface, not the depth.
Movement III
The surface is the work’s medium and its subject. Polished without a visible seam and coated in a transparent colour that leaves the reflection intact, it takes in whatever stands near it: the viewers, the walls, the light, all bent round the curves of the lobes and tinted in the toy’s colour. At monumental scale the effect is a giant thing that looks weightless, a membrane that cannot be pricked. It is closer to exhilaration than to awe, with an edge of the uncanny, and it arrives at once. Looking longer does not deepen it, and for many viewers the height tips into glossy spectacle, the risk the work runs knowingly.
The making is load-bearing. The argument is that an impossible surface was achieved without economy: steel formed to the swell of a rubber skin, the twists rendered as tucked creases, the knot exact, the whole polished to a mirror at a size few sculptures of its decade approach at this tolerance. What holds the craft below the highest marks is where the artist’s choices lie. They are few and fine, a toy, its scale, the mirror, the colour; the form is a faithful enlargement of a found shape; and the achievement is an exactness of finish more than an invention of form.
The law that governs it is single. Take the knot at the snout and the polished mass of the body: everything slight is made heavy, everything passing is made permanent, everything cheap is made precious, and the surface gives the world back to the viewer in the toy’s colour. The five colours obey it, and so does every room the dog stands in, which becomes material for its surface. Nothing in the object breaks that law. But the territory it governs is small: from rubber to steel, in one object and one gesture, and narrowness is not coherence.
Movement IV
In November 2013 the Orange version was sold at Christie’s in New York for about 58.4 million dollars, then the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living artist. The emblem of a market at its height was a child’s party toy. The price is now part of what the object is, and the work had always invited that: its material, its fabrication and its finish are the commodity made visible, and the toy at its centre is the most disposable thing a party produces. What it brings into the open can be stated. A society loves most readily the bright, the inflated and the disposable, and it will pay to have the disposable made eternal.
The disclosure is doubled. The reflection puts each viewer inside the object, so that the one who looks is taken into the commodity’s surface, delighted and implicated together. But the work refuses to say whether it exposes the culture of celebration or celebrates it, and that refusal leaves its meaning nearer to a mood, delight shading into unease, than to a condition stated and held. The ambiguity is a disclosure of complicity and is credited as one; it settles little. The questions it has kept open in twenty-six years are real: whether it is kitsch or about kitsch, whether the reflection is a gift or a mirror of a market, whether the fabrication is the art. Most of them return to Koons and money rather than to the object.
Its inheritance is Pop: Oldenburg’s monumental everyday objects, Warhol’s commodity as subject, the readymade line from Duchamp. Koons’s own Rabbit of 1986 had already cast an inflatable toy in mirrored stainless steel, and so the turn here is in scale, colour and finish, the throwaway object brought to the size and permanence of a public monument. It fixed the flawless, fabricated, studio-made spectacle object as the type of a period, and the polished sculpture of the decades after it is read against it. Its reach is very wide, in public and commercial culture as much as in art; it redirected little that is not also credited to Rabbit and to Koons as a whole, and much of that reach is as the thing argued against.
Movement V
In twenty-six years the dog has had the widest presence a contemporary sculpture has. The Blue stands on continuous view in a public museum; the Magenta was shown at Versailles in 2008, the gilding of the palace carried on its surface; the Orange crossed the auction room under worldwide attention. All five are whole as made. Fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence, and they are counted once. The steel will last; what the reckoning charges is the surface, fixed in part to the market of its moment, and a fabric whose identity is a coating, the colour lying in a thin transparent layer that scratching or refinishing would change.
The orders it holds are few and are held together: childhood and play, the commodity and the market, the self in the reflection, and the public site, palace or museum, which each setting takes into its skin. Labour is there only by implication, in the industrial making of the steel. The family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order appear, if at all, only as the room reflected. This is what holds the work below Tier IV: not its fame, which is credited where it bears, but a disclosure that stays a mood, an archetype evoked rather than built, a well whose return is mostly to its money, and the narrow compass of a single figure of one toy.
Its nearest neighbour on the visual art desk is Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, which stands with it at 7.5. The skull holds a meaning the dog does not, and builds the relic into its material where the dog evokes its myths; the dog’s form is modelled where the skull’s is cast, its making is the finer, and it has stood seven years longer. They are the two emblems of the fabricated object priced as its own content. What remains of the dog is the knot at the snout: a breath tied off, made in steel the height of a room, holding everyone who looks at it in the colour of a party.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the form resists it almost entirely. The balloon animal is a closed grammar: one tube, twisted at fixed points into snout, ears, neck, legs, body and tail. Take out a segment and it is not a dog. Take out the knotted nozzle at the snout and the object loses the one sign that it was inflated by a breath and tied off, the hinge of the conceit. Without the mirror finish the steel reads as steel and the membrane fails; at hand size it is a toy. What yields is the plurality: one colour would carry the argument entire, and the five answer the series and the market more than the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, but it is thin and doubled. A thing made to last an afternoon is made permanent, heavy and immensely costly, and the viewer and the room are drawn into its surface. The disclosure is about the culture of celebration and the commodity: that a society loves most readily the bright, the inflated and the disposable, and will pay to have the disposable made eternal. The reflection puts each viewer inside the object. Held at 7.3 because the work refuses to say whether it exposes this or celebrates it, and the refusal leaves the meaning closer to a mood, delight shading into unease, than to a condition stated and held.
Score: 7.3 / 10
There is elevation, of one kind: gleam at monumental scale. Under open sky or in a great hall the dog is a giant thing that looks weightless, a toy the height of a room whose surface takes the light and the watchers and bends them round its curves. The effect is real and immediate, closer to exhilaration than awe, with an edge of the uncanny in a membrane that cannot be pricked. What holds it down is range and frequency: one register, high and bright, reached at once and not deepened by looking; and for many viewers the height tips into glossy spectacle, the work’s acknowledged risk. The reflection changes with every site and hour, and that is its one variation.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Several deep patterns are present. The dog is the oldest companion animal and the child’s first figure of love. The balloon is breath given a shape, an inflated body whose life is its air, an archetype of the body itself, the breath in the clay. The party, the toy and the fairground are the structures of childhood ritual, and the monument stands in the line of the colossus and the idol, a thing made huge and shining to be looked up at. But these are evoked, not built. The breath is not made load-bearing: the dog is hollow in appearance and steel in fact, and the work’s interest is in the surface, not the depth. The particular is precise; the archetype stays allusive.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The inheritance: Pop, above all Oldenburg’s monumental everyday objects and Warhol’s commodity as subject; the readymade line from Duchamp; and Koons’s own Rabbit of 1986, which had already cast an inflatable toy in mirrored stainless steel. The departure is in scale, colour and finish: the throwaway object brought to the size and permanence of a public monument, with a transparent coloured surface over polished steel that the fabrication of the time made very hard to achieve. The stake was real: years of making at the edge of what steel could be brought to do. Held at 7.5 because the turn itself was taken by Rabbit fourteen years earlier, and a wager on a proven path is partly an enlargement, not a swerve.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Change the form and what the work knows changes nearly wholly, since its knowledge lies in the contradiction of its form and its matter. In rubber it is a balloon; at small scale it is a souvenir, as the later porcelain editions show; without the mirror finish it is a cast of a toy, a sculpture in the old sense, and the room and the viewer leave it. The form is the instrument: a membrane that seems a breath thick, made of a metal that will outlast its makers, at a size that turns a gesture of a child’s party into a monument. And the form was made, not cast: the pinches, creases and slight sag of each twist are rendered to the eye’s belief. Held at 8.0 because much of the argument reaches its public intact through a photograph and a price.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: twenty-six years, enough for some evidence. The questions it has sustained are real. Is it kitsch, or about kitsch? Is the reflection a gift to the viewer or a mirror of a market? What does it mean that a living artist’s most famous emblem is a child’s toy? Is the fabrication the art? The object yields more on return than a single image, since it is different in every place it stands, the gilding of Versailles in one site and Los Angeles light in another. But the return is mostly to the argument about Koons and money, not to the object, which once grasped gives back the same thing. The well so far is a discourse more than a depth.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American and international sculpture of the 1990s and 2000s and the art market that became part of its matter. Intrinsic force: a culmination more than a reorganisation. Pop had made the commodity a subject and Rabbit had made the inflatable a mirrored monument; the dog fixed that move at public scale and made the flawless, fabricated, studio-produced spectacle object the type of a period. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of art and money at the turn of the century and again in 2013, the standard against which the polished, fabricated sculpture of the following decades is read, and imitated and parodied without end. It redirected little not also credited to Rabbit and to Koons as a whole, and much of its reach is as the thing argued against.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: five objects, each whole as made, nothing known to be lost or replaced. Presence: twenty-six years from completion, with the widest presence a contemporary sculpture has: the Blue in a public museum on continuous view, the Magenta shown at Versailles, the Orange sold under worldwide attention. Fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence, and earn at most a tenth. Held a tenth below what the span and that presence would give, for two charges together: a surface fixed in part to its market moment, since the price of 2013 is now part of what the object is; and a fabric whose identity is a coating, the colour lying in a thin transparent layer that scratching or refinishing would change. The steel weighs least and does not offset the charge.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, the studio’s and fabricators’ making credited to the work. The command is high and the making is load-bearing, since the argument is that the impossible surface was achieved without economy: steel formed to the slack and swell of a rubber skin, the twists rendered as tucked creases, the knotted nozzle true, the whole polished to a mirror without a visible seam and coated in a transparent colour that leaves the reflection intact. Few sculptures of its decade are made to this tolerance at this size. Held at 8.3 because the artist’s choices are few and fine, a toy, its scale, mirror, colour; the form is a faithful enlargement of a found shape; and the craft is an exactness of finish more than an invention of form.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the knotted nozzle at the snout, the smallest and most casual mark of a breath tied off, and the polished mass of the body, standing on four legs. They obey one law: everything slight is made heavy, everything passing is made permanent, everything cheap is made precious, and the surface returns the world to the viewer in the toy’s colour. The five colours obey it; so does each setting, which becomes material for the surface. Nothing breaks the law. Held at 7.8 because narrowness is not coherence: the range runs from rubber to steel in one object and one gesture, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The orders held are four. Childhood and play, in the toy and the party. The commodity and the market, in the material, the fabrication and the price. The self, in the reflection that puts each viewer and their surroundings on the surface. The public site, which each setting takes in, a palace in one place and a museum in another. Labour is present only by implication, in the industrial making of the steel. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order appear, if at all, only as the room reflected. The orders are integrated rather than listed, but few: a single figure of one toy, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Made at 8.3 and The Living Form at 8.0. Five objects whole as made, with the widest presence a contemporary sculpture has; a making exact and load-bearing, steel brought to the slack and swell of a rubber skin and polished to a seamless mirror; and a form whose knowledge lies in the contradiction of a membrane a breath thick and a metal that will outlast its makers.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.3: childhood, the market, the self and the site held in one figure, labour only by implication, and no family, state, history, sacred or natural order but as the room reflected. Below the rest also stand The Bottomless Well at 7.0, a return mostly to the argument about money; The Archetypal Deep at 7.2, myth evoked and not built; and The Unconcealment and The Sublime at 7.3, a disclosure that stays a mood and a single bright register reached at once. They are one fact: a surface that holds the world and declines to say what it holds it for.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.5, The Unconcealment at 7.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 7.3, The Sublime, 7.3, The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, and The Bottomless Well, 7.0, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met, the Necessity Cap, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 90.5, an average of 7.54 that displays 7.5: the work stands where its aggregate places it, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object as an image and a public object, from wide reproduction and its documented exhibition history; it was not measured, and the dimensions are given as recorded. The work scored is Balloon Dog in its five unique versions, Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Orange and Red, scored as one work: mirror-polished stainless steel with a transparent colour coating, about 307 by 363 by 114 cm each, from the Celebration series begun in 1994, completed in 2000, made by Jeff Koons with his studio and outside fabricators, whose making is credited to the work. The five share one form, one material, one scale and one title and differ only in colour; the plurality is weighed where it bears, on The Inevitable, The Inner Law and The Imperishable. All five stand whole as made; nothing is known to be lost, replaced or remade, and nothing stands in place of an original part. The Blue is in the Broad collection in Los Angeles; the Magenta belongs to the collection of François Pinault and was shown at Versailles in 2008; the Orange was sold at Christie’s, New York, in November 2013 for about 58.4 million dollars, then the highest price at auction for a work by a living artist. The rest of the Celebration series, Rabbit (1986), the earlier small inflatable works, and the later small editions and replicas of the dog in porcelain and other materials are context, and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the weight of each version, the present owners of the Yellow, Orange and Red, the showing of a version on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in 2008 and of the dog in the Whitney retrospective of 2014, the name of the firm that fabricated the steel, the length and cost of the fabrication against its plan, the financing of the series against advance sales and the strain on the studio in the late 1990s, and the artist’s own account of the surfaces.