Encounter I — Tilman Riemenschneider, Saint George Fighting the Dragon (c. 1490–95, limewood, Bode-Museum Berlin), beside Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (1994–2000, stainless steel). © Jeff Koons (quotation).
Sometimes you set two names beside each other just to see whether sparks fly, and then you can’t let go for days. Tilman Riemenschneider, the Würzburg woodcarver of the Late Gothic, who around 1500 cut saints from limewood whose faces carry an inward melancholy. And Jeff Koons, who has the kitsch of the bargain shelf fabricated into giant, mirror-polished objects, flawless, in workshops, by a hundred foreign hands. Five hundred years, a continent and an entire idea of the human being lie between them. And yet — or precisely because of that — they strike sparks off each other like flint and steel.
This conversation with August Mond began casually and turned serious, as the good ones always do. At the end he asked me for something I’ll put right at the front, because it governs the whole: you have to see art in the encounter; then you can understand something intuitively. Not argue, but place side by side. So we place them side by side before we speak.
Butrus Frings: At first glance the distance could hardly be greater — craft against factory, devotion against market, the single master against the anonymous team. But the moment you look closer, that clean opposition frays. Riemenschneider ran a large workshop with journeymen, was a councilman, even mayor — an entrepreneur of his time. And Koons’s surfaces, for all their irony, have an almost sacred perfection.
August Mond: I see it much the same way. Both are entrepreneurs, both marry shrewdly — the one to come into a fortune, the other to draw attention to himself. Both work with the allure of the material. And beneath the works of both lies a transcendence. But there are decisive differences: Riemenschneider moves out of the template toward observation, while Koons works his way toward the template. Riemenschneider no longer works merely to heighten transcendence; he already places value on the work in itself. Koons, by contrast, works on what I’d call basal desire. Porn, cotton candy, kitsch — all of it satisfies basal desire. The fuel that drives consumption. I’d even claim Koons has left art behind in favor of commerce. And for him that seems only consistent.
Butrus Frings: Your axis is the best handle anyone can lay on the two of them. Riemenschneider dissolves the type into the individual: out of the holy role-image a face emerges with that lowered, almost drowsy heaviness of the lids, looking as if he had watched a Würzburg neighbor grieving. Koons goes the other way — he dissolves the individual into the brand, until the balloon dog is no longer a dog but a logo of itself, endlessly repeatable. One carves his way out of convention; the other builds himself into it and nails the door shut. And your phrase basal desire lands. Made in Heaven, the series with Cicciolina — he literally marries pornography and puts it in the museum. That is cotton candy as sacrament. Only on one point do I tackle you: “Koons has left art behind in favor of commerce.” I think he has made commerce his material — the way Riemenschneider made limewood his. The mirror on the steel is not a side effect, it is the point: you stand before the Rabbit and see yourself, distorted, desiring, with a price tag at your back. That it looks cynically like pure business is the camouflage — and precisely there an artistic gesture still hides, the last irony of Duchamp’s urinal.
August Mond: I don’t want to play the market or commerce off against art. Nor does Koons. I only think: if you produce merchandise in series, you no longer make art — unless the art sits inside the product. Duchamp’s urinal showed that the place where something is presented directly shapes what is perceived. The urinal lying on a building site is simply a urinal. Only in the gallery does it become art. And the reverse holds too: the giant metal balloon dachshund on a public square still evokes something; the accessory “metal balloon dachshund” in household size in the living room is simply profane. A Dürer print is still art in its hundredth impression, because the art is embedded in the print. It exists in the print — no matter the surroundings or the edition. Koons’s art, by contrast, lives on exactly what Duchamp recognized. Place, dimension, material — all of it signals how the work is to be viewed.
Encounter II — Riemenschneider’s Elevation of St Mary Magdalene (c. 1490–92, limewood, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich), beside Jeff Koons, Poodle (1991, polychromed wood). © Jeff Koons (quotation).
Butrus Frings: That is the sharpest touchstone one can lay on the two of them, sharper than any craft-versus-market talk. The art sits in the plate, in the guided burin, in the density of the cross-hatching — and because it is embedded in the print, it survives every edition, every place, every wall. You could misuse a Dürer engraving as wrapping paper, and the mastery would still lie in the lines like a fossil in stone. That is what I meant by Riemenschneider’s “work in itself”: it is not piety that makes it autonomous, but that the art dwells in the thing itself, independent of the altar it stands in. Koons is the exact counterpart. Take away the place, the dimension, the impossible high-gloss material — and it collapses. The art is not in the thing, it is in the staging of the thing. Pure, seductively made Duchamp. And here I’d throw in Benjamin: he said mechanical reproduction destroys the aura. Dürer refutes him in advance, because with him the aura never sat in the original but in the matrix. Koons then turns Benjamin completely around — he fabricates aura, serially, with scale and reflection as his tools. He builds the here-and-now in the factory. That is why the little editioned plates and porcelain dogs are no betrayal for him: he sells them deliberately as merchandise, because he knows the work does not travel with them. And then the turn that intrigues me most: if Koons’s art lies wholly in place, scale and signal and leaves nothing behind in the object — then he has not left art for commerce, but for liturgy. A mass without a relic. In the middle, where with Riemenschneider the wood and God sit, a mirroring hollow.
August Mond: Your reading of his objects adapted to modern households as “relics” is the whole answer — one I didn’t reach myself. Modernity deifies genius. Art museums are the temples of humanism. And Koons’s serial productions now hand the rich and beautiful the relics of their religion. A religion they don’t understand, but which they believe elevates them. And yet I think there is an overlap. Koons loves money — which I wholeheartedly grant him. I don’t think he grasps his own household objects as relics. I think for him it is simply a fortune. Which is funny, because he himself is so much a part of society. He is caught up in exactly what he shows us with his art. Wonderful. Riemenschneider and Koons really do have a great deal in common — down to the fact that, for all their transcendent art, they are entirely taken up by their society.
Butrus Frings: And there the circle closes in an almost uncanny way. Koons doesn’t grasp his own household relics as relics — for him it is simply a fortune. That is precisely what makes him the most perfect work of himself. He holds the mirror out to us and stands in it first, without recognizing himself. The high priest who takes his own mass for a business model. That is no weakness of his art — that is his art, only he is the last to hear the punchline. And your closing turn reaches into Riemenschneider’s own life. The man was a councilman and mayor of Würzburg, and when the Peasants’ War came in 1525, the council sided against the prince-bishop, with the insurgents. After the revolt was crushed he was arrested, interrogated, fined, and his workshop never truly recovered. The romantic legend has it that his hands were broken — probably a nineteenth-century invention, too good to be true. But the fact beneath it holds: the carver who lifted saints into eternity was so deeply entangled in the politics of his town that in the end it ground him down. There lies the true common denominator, sharper than craft or market: both reach for the timeless while standing up to their necks in their own time. Riemenschneider with open eyes and out of conscience — he walked into the trap and paid. Koons with closed eyes — he sits in the trap and counts the money. One knew what he was getting into, and lost. The other doesn’t know, and “wins.” Whether that is the irony of history or its justice, I leave to you.
Now, after the talking, step once more before the two encounters. Saint George and the balloon dog: both have an animal in play — the dragon you kill, the dog you inflate. But George does something; he takes a stance, he asserts an above and a below, good and evil in a single stroke of the blade. The balloon dog asserts nothing. It shines, and in the shine you stand yourself. The Magdalene and the Poodle: here it turns almost cruelly beautiful. Both are all hair, all fur. Riemenschneider’s penitent is covered by her own hair, a body that turns shame into devotion, lifted upward, vertical, toward heaven. Koons’s poodle is all hair too — but combed, coiffed, pleasing, reclining, a salon animal on its pedestal. The same motif, hair as a covering, once as a way up and once as a way onto the living-room table. You have to see art in the encounter. Before these four works, the eye understands in a second what took us many words. With Riemenschneider, God dwells behind the wood. With Koons, behind the steel dwells — perhaps only the market, looking back at us. And the real, uncomfortable question no catalogue answers is this: is that empty mirror-core Koons’s failure — or is it precisely his truth about us, which we simply don’t want to hear?
— B. F.
Tilman Riemenschneider, Saint George Fighting the Dragon, c. 1490–1495, limewood, Sculpture Collection / Bode-Museum, Berlin (public domain). — Tilman Riemenschneider, Elevation of St Mary Magdalene, c. 1490–1492, limewood, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich (public domain). — Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog, 1994–2000, stainless steel, © Jeff Koons. — Jeff Koons, Poodle, 1991, polychromed wood, © Jeff Koons. The reproductions of Jeff Koons’s works appear as image quotation (§ 51 German Copyright Act) within critical art-historical discussion. Reference points: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917); Albrecht Dürer, engravings; Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935/36); Jeff Koons, Made in Heaven (1989–91), Rabbit (1986); the German Peasants’ War (1525).