The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jeff Koons · mirror-polished stainless steel, cast from an inflatable vinyl toy rabbit, 104.1 by 48.3 by 30.5 cm (41 by 19 by 12 in.) · a standing rabbit with raised ears and a blank face, holding a carrot to its chest at one side, the seams, pinches and valve stub of the inflatable kept in the steel · from the Statuary series, shown at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, in the autumn of 1986 · the unit scored is the edition of three casts and an artist’s proof, scored as one work; all four stand whole as made, nothing known to be lost, replaced or refabricated, and nothing stands in place of an original
Mode
Sculpture as fabricated object: a found inflatable cast and polished in steel, the readymade made by fabrication instead of by choosing
Mythos
The faceless idol, holding its attribute against its body and set up for veneration, built by the polish and the blank head; the hare of fertility and the moon, the trickster, the Easter rabbit and the bunny evoked
Phase
Made in 1986 for the Statuary series and shown at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, that autumn; derided as kitsch in the late 1980s; the cast from the collection of S. I. Newhouse sold at Christie’s, New York, in May 2019
Presentation
An edition of three casts and an artist’s proof, each 104.1 by 48.3 by 30.5 cm, stainless steel in one material, mirror-polished, unpainted
Register
Cool gleam and a small numinous chill in a thing made to be cute; pleasure and unease together, given at once
Scale
One figure the height of a child of four or five; a body, two ears, a carrot, a blank face, the seams and the valve, and a mirror
Governing Proposition
A vinyl toy rabbit, the cheapest thing in the shop, filled with breath and made to sag and be thrown away, is cast in stainless steel and polished to a mirror, its seams, pinches and valve kept exactly. It stands a metre high, holding a carrot to its chest, and where its face should be there is nothing: only the viewer, bent across a gleaming head. The provisional is made permanent, the soft made hard, the cheap made precious, and the one who looks is made part of the object. The wager is that a single conversion, carried out without a mark of the hand, will hold what a consumer culture wants and what it is. The work will not say whether it exposes that wanting or monumentalises it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1986 Jeff Koons, born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955, made Rabbit for the Statuary series, shown at Sonnabend Gallery in New York that autumn. It is stainless steel, polished to a mirror and unpainted, cast from an inflatable vinyl toy rabbit, 104.1 by 48.3 by 30.5 cm, 41 by 19 by 12 inches: about the height of a child of four or five. A rabbit stands with its ears raised, holding a carrot to its chest at one side. Its face is blank, with no eyes and no mouth. The seams, pinches and slack of the inflatable, and its valve stub, are reproduced in the steel.
The edition is three casts and an artist’s proof, and the four are scored here as one work, because each is the same object. All four stand whole as made in 1986; nothing is known to be lost, replaced or refabricated, and nothing stands in place of an original. Their dispersal is weighed under presence and nowhere else. The vinyl toy from which the form was taken, Koons’s Inflatables of 1979, the other sculptures of the Statuary series, the Macy’s parade balloon of 2007 and the later versions and merchandise are context, and the later ones are reception.
The parts are few, and each is required. Take away the seams and pinches and the steel forgets the toy, becoming a stylised rabbit, a modernist animal. Take away the mirror and it is a cast of a toy in grey metal, a souvenir of Oldenburg. Take away the blank face and the reflection has nowhere to put the viewer; take away the carrot and the figure loses its one gesture. What gives is the choice of toy, since another inflatable could have carried much of the argument, and the necessity is of a single idea, which the object fixes more than compels.
Movement II
The work’s first fact is a mark of the cheapest manufacture. Down the sides of the body and over the head run the seams where the vinyl was joined; at the neck and the roots of the ears the skin pinches; low on the body is the stub of the valve through which the toy was filled. A thin skin, slack and creased, has been reproduced in steel so that every one of these is held, and then the whole has been polished to a mirror without softening them or leaving a weld or a mark of the hand. The result reads as weightless and as solid at once.
That double reading is what the work knows, and it lives in the material. In vinyl it is the toy. In bronze or marble it would be a monument to a toy and would lose the joke of breath; painted, it would lose the mirror and with it the viewer; without the seams it would lose the record of what it was. Only polished steel holds all of it together: weightlessness rendered as weight, a cheap thing made at the cost of a precious one. The steel is a hollow cast of a hollow toy, emptiness made solid that remains empty.
The making is load-bearing, because the argument is that the cheap thing has been made perfectly, and it is credited to the work as fabrication. What holds it below the highest marks is where the artist’s choices lie. The form is a cast of a found shape, not modelled; the choices are few and exact, the toy, the steel, the polish, the blank face, the carrot kept. The same fact limits the living form: the shape is found, not made, and much of the argument reaches its public through photographs and a price.
Movement III
Where a face would be there is nothing, and the nothing is the work’s instrument. Bend toward the head and what looks back is the viewer, curved across a polished surface; step back and the belly holds the room and its people. Looking at the rabbit is looking at oneself wanting. The face of the toy has been replaced by the face of whoever stands before it, and so the object is never the same twice: it holds whatever room and whatever viewer it is in.
Lit, the blank head reads less as a toy than as a helmeted figure, an astronaut or an idol with no face. In a gallery the object is brighter than anything near it, and its flawlessness has the quality of a relic that could not have been made by hand: a small, cold, numinous chill in a thing made to be cute. It is one effect, given at once and not deepened by staying. The sheen is the height, and the sheen is also what many viewers read as the showroom; there is no terror in it and no grandeur of scale.
The rabbit carries old figures, the hare of fertility and the moon, the trickster of folk tale and cartoon, the Easter rabbit, the bunny of the men’s magazine, and the object leaves most of them as allusion. What it builds is the idol. A faceless, gleaming figure holding an attribute against its body, as a saint holds a palm, set on the floor to be looked at, is the structure of a cult statue, and the carrot, held like a microphone or a sceptre, makes the toy a performer. The mirror makes the worshipper visible in the idol. That much is made by the polish and the head; the rest the viewer brings.
Movement IV
In May 2019 the cast from the collection of S. I. Newhouse was sold at Christie’s in New York for 91.1 million dollars with fees, then the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living artist. The sale confirmed one of the work’s meanings more plainly than any essay: that the cheapest thing in a consumer culture, a toy filled with breath, is the shape of its desire, and that wealth will make that shape permanent at any cost. The price is presence and it is part of the discourse; it is not reach and not proof of permanence.
What the work uncovers can be stated, and it holds. But the work does not settle whether it discloses or merely enacts. It reflects consumer longing without placing it, and the condition it brings into the open is mostly the condition of taste and the market, real but narrow. The questions it has kept open for forty years are real: whether it critiques consumer desire or monumentalises it, and whether the artist’s refusal to say settles the matter or evades it; whether it is kitsch, and whether the knowing reproduction of kitsch is a different thing; how it stands to Brancusi, Duchamp and Warhol’s soup; and since 2019, price as content. Much of that discourse concerns Koons and the market more than the object.
Its field was New York art of the 1980s, its commodity art and Neo-Geo. The inheritance is Duchamp’s chosen object, Warhol’s consumer image, Oldenburg’s soft versions of hard things, Brancusi’s polished bronze and the stainless steel of Minimalism. The turn was to make the softest and cheapest thing hard, mirrored and permanent, without irony in the finish: the reverse of Oldenburg, the readymade made by fabrication instead of by choosing. Koons’s own Inflatables of 1979, real toys set on mirrors, and Luxury and Degradation of the same year prepared it; the move into permanent polished steel is this work’s. It drew derision for a decade, and it became the emblem of its decade’s sculpture, the founding object of the polished balloon animals, and the reference behind the fabricated pop object of the next thirty years.
Movement V
Forty years after its first showing the work is whole in all four objects, and its fame grew rather than faded after the decade that made it, which is the evidence that it has outlived its moment. Stainless steel is about as durable as sculpture is made, though a mirror finish shows every scratch and fingerprint and needs care. The charge the reckoning keeps is that its argument is still bound in part to the market that made it famous.
The orders it holds are few, and they are held in one gesture: commerce and consumption, childhood, sex at one remove, the viewer and the self in the mirror, and industry and labour by implication in the fabrication. No person, no family, no history but the decade’s, no state, no nature and no sacred order except as the idol is felt. This is what holds the work below Tier IV: not its fame or its price, which are credited where they bear, but a disclosure that enacts more than it places, a single cold register reached at once, an archetype built only as the idol, and the narrow compass of one figure in one material. The figure describes the form.
Its nearest neighbours on the visual art desk are Koons’s own Balloon Dog and Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, which stand at 7.5. The dog came after it and is the larger, the coloured and the harder made, but Rabbit had already cast an inflatable in mirrored steel: the swerve and the reach are the rabbit’s. The skull, which holds a deeper myth, is its heir in fabricated luxury. Above it stands Duchamp’s Fountain at 8.0, the readymade of which it is an heir and not the origin. What remains is the valve stub in polished steel: the mark of a breath, made to last, with the viewer’s face where the rabbit’s should be.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the parts are few. Remove the seams and pinches and the steel forgets the toy: it becomes a stylised rabbit, a modernist animal, and the argument that air has been made permanent goes. Remove the mirror and it is a cast of a toy in grey metal, a souvenir of Oldenburg. Remove the blank face and the reflection has nowhere to put the viewer. Remove the carrot and the figure loses its one gesture, the thing that makes a toy a performer. Each part is required. What gives is the choice of toy, one source among several, as Koons’s own Inflatables show. Held at 8.0: the necessity is of a single idea, which the object fixes rather than compels.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What it brings into the open can be stated. That the cheapest thing in a consumer culture, a toy filled with breath, is the shape of its desire, and that wealth will make that shape permanent at any cost. That a mirror puts the viewer into the object: the rabbit’s face is the viewer’s face, bent over a polished belly, so that looking at it is looking at oneself wanting. That emptiness can be made solid and stay empty, a hollow cast of a hollow toy. These are meanings, not moods. Held at 7.6 because the work does not settle whether it discloses or merely enacts: it reflects consumer longing without placing it, and what it uncovers is mostly the condition of taste and the market, real but narrow.
Score: 7.6 / 10
There is elevation, cold and of one kind. The mirror takes the room and bends it, and the blank head, lit, reads less as a toy than as a helmeted figure, an astronaut or an idol with no face: a small numinous chill in a thing made to be cute. In a gallery it is brighter than anything near it, and its flawlessness has the quality of a relic no hand could have made. What holds it lowest of the eleven axes above The Encompassed is range and frequency. The effect is one effect, given at once and not deepened by staying; the sheen is the height, and the sheen is also what many viewers read as the showroom. There is no terror and no grandeur of scale: the object is a metre high.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The rabbit is an old figure: the hare of fertility and the moon, the trickster of folk tale and cartoon, the Easter rabbit, and in Koons’s America the bunny of the men’s magazine. The choice of animal evokes these, and the object leaves most of them as allusion. What it builds is narrower and its own: the idol. A faceless, gleaming figure, holding an attribute against its body as a saint holds a palm, set on a floor to be looked up to, has the structure of a cult statue, and the mirror makes the worshipper visible in it. That structure is load-bearing, made by the polish and the blank head. Held at 7.2 because the particular toy acquires its archetype mostly through what viewers bring.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The inheritance is Duchamp’s chosen object, Warhol’s consumer image, Oldenburg’s soft versions of hard things, Brancusi’s polished bronze and the stainless steel of Minimalism. The turn is to take the softest, cheapest object of the toy shop and make it hard, mirrored and permanent, with no irony in the finish: the reverse of Oldenburg, and the readymade made by fabrication instead of by choosing. It put the language of luxury manufacture at the centre of sculpture. The stake was real: the steel was costly, and the reception of the late 1980s was largely derision, the charge of kitsch carried for a decade. Held at 8.0 because the turn was prepared, by Koons’s Inflatables of 1979 and by Luxury and Degradation of the same year, and because it rests on Duchamp and Warhol rather than turning from them.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and what the work knows changes almost wholly, because its knowledge is in its material. In vinyl it is the toy; in bronze or marble it is a monument to a toy and loses the joke of breath; painted, it loses the mirror and with it the viewer; without the seams it loses the record of what it was. Only polished steel holds all of it at once: weightlessness rendered as weight, a surface that cannot be looked at without being looked into, a cheap thing made at the cost of a precious one. The blank face is form as instrument, the place where a face would be becoming the place where the beholder’s appears. Held below the top because the shape is found, not made, and much of the argument travels through photographs and the price.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: forty years, and the return has been sustained. The questions have held. Is it critique of consumer desire or its monument, and does Koons’s refusal to say settle the matter or evade it? Is it kitsch, and is the knowing reproduction of kitsch a different thing? How does it stand to Brancusi, to Duchamp, to Warhol’s soup? What does a mirrored object mean for the viewer who completes it? And since 2019, price as content. The object itself gives something new on return, because it is never the same twice: its surface holds whatever room and viewer it is in. Held at 7.8 because much of the discourse concerns Koons and the market more than this thing, and the object, once grasped, adds reflection rather than meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of New York art of the 1980s, its commodity art and Neo-Geo. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation, not of what a work can be, which was Duchamp’s, but of what a sculpture can be made of and look like: the consumer object rendered by industrial and luxury fabrication with no trace of the hand, offered for pleasure and unease at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the emblem of its decade’s sculpture and the founding object of Koons’s own polished balloon animals, and it stands behind the fabricated, mirrored, studio-made pop object of the next thirty years, in Murakami, in Hirst’s luxury objects and in many lesser imitations. That reach is real but runs largely through Koons and the market.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole in all four objects as made in 1986, nothing known lost, replaced or refabricated. Presence: forty years, continuous since its first showing at Sonnabend, and its fame grew rather than faded after the decade that produced it, which is the evidence that it has outlived its moment. Fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence. Fabric: stainless steel, about as durable as sculpture is made, though a mirror finish shows every scratch and fingerprint and needs care. Forty years give 8.6 as the usual figure. It is held there and not a tenth higher, though the presence is wide, because the argument is still bound in part to the market that made it famous.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, the fabrication credited to the work. The task was hard and is met exactly: to take a thin vinyl skin, slack and creased, and reproduce it in steel so that every pinch, seam and wrinkle of the inflatable is held, then polish the whole to a mirror without softening those details or leaving a weld or a mark of the hand. The result reads as weightless and solid at once, and that double reading is the making’s achievement. The making is load-bearing: the work’s argument is that the cheap thing has been made perfectly. Held at 8.1 because the form is a cast of a found shape, not modelled, and the artist’s choices are few and exact: the toy, the steel, the polish, the blank face, the carrot kept.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the valve stub and the seams, the marks of the cheapest manufacture, and the mirror surface, the mark of the most costly finish. They obey one law, which is conversion: the provisional made permanent, the soft made hard, the breath made metal, the cheap made precious, the viewer made part of the object. The carrot, the blank face and the scale make the same move, and none breaks it; the object’s later life, from parade balloon to record price, follows the law too. Held at 8.1 because narrowness is not coherence: the range from seam to mirror is real but small, one figure in one material, and the law, once seen, governs a short territory.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders held are few and held in one gesture. Commerce and consumption, in the toy and in the cost of the steel. Childhood, in the toy and the Easter rabbit. Sex, at one remove, in the bunny. The viewer and the self, in the mirror, which draws the room and its people into the work. Industry and labour, in the fabrication, by implication only. They are integrated by the surface, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no history but the decade’s, no state, no nature, and no sacred order except as the idol is felt. A single figure a metre high: the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Living Form at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2. Four objects whole as made after forty years, their fame grown after their decade; a form whose knowledge is in its material, a breath made metal and a surface that cannot be looked at without being looked into; and a reorganisation of what a sculpture can be made of and look like, the emblem of its decade’s sculpture and the reference for the fabricated pop object after it.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.3: commerce, childhood, sex at one remove and the viewer in the mirror, held in one figure, with labour by implication only and no person, family, state, nature or history beyond the decade’s. Above it, The Sublime at 7.0: one cold gleam, given at once and not deepened. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.2: the faceless idol built, the hare and the trickster only evoked. Then The Unconcealment at 7.6: a disclosure about desire and the market that enacts as much as it places. They are one fact: a single conversion, carried out perfectly, in a narrow compass.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.0, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, both 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 93.3, an average of 7.775 that displays 7.8: 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, well as an object and in its reception, thinly on its fabrication and on the present condition of each cast; it was not measured, and the dimensions are given as recorded. The work scored is Rabbit, 1986, by Jeff Koons, in its edition of three casts and an artist’s proof, scored as one work: mirror-polished stainless steel, cast from an inflatable vinyl toy rabbit, 104.1 by 48.3 by 30.5 cm (41 by 19 by 12 in.), from the Statuary series shown at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, in the autumn of 1986. The four objects are one object in form, material, scale and title; their dispersal is weighed on The Imperishable only. All four stand whole as made; nothing is known to be lost, replaced or refabricated, and nothing stands in place of an original. The cast from the collection of S. I. Newhouse was sold at Christie’s, New York, in May 2019 for 91.1 million dollars with fees, then an auction record for a living artist. The vinyl toy from which the form was taken, Koons’s Inflatables of 1979, Luxury and Degradation, the rest of the Statuary series, Balloon Dog and the Celebration series, the Macy’s parade balloon of 2007 and the later versions and merchandise are context, and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title; no statement of the artist’s about the work is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the present collection of each cast and of the artist’s proof, the gift of a cast to a museum in Chicago and its earlier showing there, the foundry and fabricators of 1986, the financing of the work, whether it was first shown in a group exhibition that gave Neo-Geo its name, and the present condition of each cast.