Jeff Koons, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985. Glass, iron, water, and basketball, 64 1/2 x 30 1/2 x 13 1/4 in (164 x 77 x 34 cm). The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens.
One Ball, Indeed
Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection
The New Museum
by David St.-Lascaux
A relatively new museum. An exhibition curated by America’s Superstar Soi-Disant Agent Provocateur Artiste. Works by Big Names collected by an international risk taker. Theoretically, all the ingredients for a successful exhibition.
Except that it’s not, although it is somewhat deranged, and strange, and pathetic. It being Skin Fruit – the unfortunate title unsuited for anything other than a show for tittering twelve-year olds (more on this below). One speculates that the show’s title represents an attempt to be transgressive, and the selected pieces also to be so. But it isn’t, and they aren’t. Skin Fruit isn’t Entartete Kunst; it’s mostly just entartete filth.
To begin with, the physical presentation itself, which has no flow, exacerbated by the awkward U-shaped galleries and lack of flow within the New Museum itself. One walks past a store into a small back room with a handful of random disconnects: a shiny plastic alien, a crushed bus and a pile of trash. (No names named in this review.) To get to the second floor, where the exhibition continues, one doubles back to the elevator. And so on; each floor a challenge to negotiate.
Skin Fruit is in fact somewhat cohesive, living up to its name, obsessed with the physical and sexual – body hair, entrails, genitals, lewdness and scatology. In the end, all quite banal, except to speculate what sort of an adult would wish to own a shadow puppet Janus bust made of matte-black fingered penises. Or a life-sized Jesus, nude, sucking his own footlong schlong while his likewise nude Mother Mary cups and suckles her own lactating breast (Mother and Child). Or a male peering into a telescope inserted in a female’s vagina, or… you get the idea.
Except that the antagonists in Salò aren’t presented by Pasolini as heroes to emulate. If art is a joke to be played on philanthropists and museum patrons, with artists and collectors winking/wanking pranksters, and curators serviceable villein purveyors, so be it. Newsflash: Life isn’t a thought experiment, and time spent in front of stuff like this is unrecoverable. Forbes says that attorneys from Skadden, Arps, whose Education Programs Fund (along with the Keith Haring Foundation, etc., the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund, etc.) provides endowment support for the New Museum, routinely charge a thousand bucks per hour. If you still have your ticket, you might wish to send the New Museum your bill. Trust me: Skadden would. While you’re at it, you might just ask these altruists why they’re supporting this content. Henry Miller and Marcel Duchamp (or even Hairy Who Jim Nutt) it’s not. As to its redeeming social value: the preceding clause sufficient in itself to rest one’s case.
Also troubling about Skin Fruit: Some critical responses, which range from enthusiastic to blasé, and the museum’s predictably Pollyanna-ish promotional hype. Par exemple, “breathtaking”; another, feigning boredom with the show’s predictability (“few genuine surprises”), described a giant, hairy troglodyte entitled The Giant, as “an outsize clash of culture and nature that plays on Michelangelo’s David.” (If that was the intention, Goliath would’ve been cleverer, n’est-ce pas?) Starting well with a lament about “abominable wealth,” another described the cunt telescope gouache as “terrifically accomplished.” At least one critic disagreed, calling Skin Fruit “much less than the sum of its parts… a signal lesson in the art world’s screaming need to reframe success, one overripe, blue-chip artwork at a time.”
In the museum’s own words, “It is no coincidence that Joannou’s collection developed in the cultural context of Greece, where classical sculpture defined the Western canon of anatomical representation.” Oh, please. Here’s a Mediterranean metaphor: Suetonius suggests that Nero did indeed fiddle (get it?) while the fires he had intentionally set on Rome raged. Remarkably, the museum will have a Family Program, “designed and recommended for families with children four to fifteen years old” – for this show.
In truth, there were a few benign pieces. The woman singing “Propaganda” in a major key; the undergraduate stained glasslike cobalt “Blue Damascus.” The elephant dung illustration is visually pleasant, if intellectually toxic; and “One Ball, Total Equilibrium Tank,” is cosmic, and would be terrific if it wasn’t just another lame, gonadal joke in the context of this testosteronic show (it does bestow, however, an appropriate rating).
In the end, Skin Fruit fails because of its omphaloscopic, fatuous obliviousness to the realities of the Current Era. In 2010, porn’s everywhere: it’s lost its power to shock. More important, we’ve seen real obscenity – the porn of hatred, indifference, hubris, the kind that has permanently sidelined certain self-indulgent artists, even if they, their collectors, their museum curators and some critics haven’t got the word. Given the realities of 9-11, New Orleans and Abu Ghraib, their amateur-hour, sophomoric fantasies are a flimsy embarrassment, and a distraction from merited attention to worthy works of art.
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