Air, Holes, Six Friends
after Jeff Koons’s Hulk (Friends)
Leo Bussi
I used to tell artists that I was obsessed with Jeff Koons, mostly to get them to talk to me, which is a habit of mine: saying something about myself before it’s true, so that eventually it becomes true. Jeff came into my life through work. I was twenty-two, shelving books at the Glasgow School of Art Library, a job I’d lied to get (generously aided by a librarian friend who acted as my reference and vouched for a version of me that didn’t exist yet), and I still only actually got it because the person they originally chose backed out, a fact my new colleagues, some strange, made sure I knew. Call it a Spare induction. That whole period was lonely in the specific way your early twenties are lonely: a box flat on the edge of the city, 6 a.m. bus rides, nothing to do but read and write once the upstairs staff cleared out by 5 p.m. It’s a period I’m still writing out of. Three nights a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday—till 8 p.m., an art-school library that emptied early and I could do what I wanted.
Thus began an eclectic and joyful autodidactic art education: I read about Mike Kelley, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, David Hammons, Lee Lozano, Glenn Ligon, Yvonne Rainer, Prunella Clough, Laurie Simmons, Derek Jarman, Anselm Kiefer and Robert Gober—plus whatever else was on the shelf, printing manuals, a history of the Glasgow scene, anything. The material world ushered in and Jeff tumbled out. I was shelving one evening when I picked up the catalogue for Jeff’s exhibition Easyfun-Ethereal. I already knew that Jeff’s work was the kind the artists I admire would look down on, creating a kind of aesthetic triangulation of judgement: I look up, they look down and Jeff and I look at each other. But the paintings inside did something I hoped my poems would do. Glossy lips floating over a pastoral field; corn kernels strung like rosary beads or rendered data points; fruit erupting into painterly arcs whose artificiality was so complete the line between liquid and virtual began to dissolve. Not just desire as an entry point into the aesthetic, but desire staged as a kind of consumption you could watch yourself performing. Funny and stupid, oscillating between depraved self-congratulation and the fullness of everything. In the middle I saw a way out of what I was feeling and it was inexhaustible: an image made of pixels from other images, like one of those kitschy Facebook posts, now unified behind a singular prophetic message: this is what feeling will look like.
A vision of abundance so total it starts to resemble emptiness. And he was right. Everyone my age had already absorbed the montage-voiceover version of the present: pills, Facebook, AI, avatar sex, slop, Dean Kissick, repeat, the whole circling drain of main-character exceptionalism, crisis treated as a mood you opt into rather than the condition of being alive. Jeff managed to bypass that and it was a relief to encounter him. I came home that night to speak to my friend Honor, who I’d met at university studying creative writing. She was the much better poet of the two of us, but I was better at meeting people, a fact I forced myself to believe leveled our relationship to one another. I could never tell if she also believed this. I showed her the book and we spent hours discussing what the paintings meant, how they could act as a kind of poetics and what the value was in our doing that. From then on, I sought Jeff out and used him as a way to write my poems. He became my constant ekphrastic subject.
Ekphrasis, to my mind, has always been a species of desire, which, in the words of Andrea Long Chu, is “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. These desires may be real or imagined, concentrated or diffuse, but in all cases, the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force.”[1] That hollowing out is what I go looking for every time. Which is finally where we can talk about the piece I’ll be calling Inflatable Hulk throughout, officially titled Jeff Koons’s Hulk (Friends) (2004–2012), and why it’s so important to me.
There’s a real risk that Hulk is too available as symbol to work as one anymore, so I’ll brandish my James Schuyler flag first: “All things are real / no one a symbol.”[2] Which is to say I want to consider Inflatable Hulk as real and not a symbol, even as I spend the rest of this walking steadily in the opposite direction.
Inflatable Hulk has no interior except pressure. What appears solid is continuously maintained by invisible systems: air, holes, spectatorship. A kind of holy trinity of daily activities. What I’ve always liked about this piece is that (1) it’s inflatable and (2) it works candidly and surprisingly well as an articulation of transmasc aesthetics. I like that it scrambles its own forms of attention, so that when I identify with it I can’t always tell if I’m looking at myself from outside or from in.
The body’s all surface tension: cartoon muscles stretched over nothing. Which is probably why it reads as accurate to masculinity, especially the trans kind—having to keep an identity inflated in a culture that wants bodies to declare themselves violently and beyond ambiguity. The saddest thing about him is also the funniest: he’s still trying to be convincing. The clenched fists, the rage-bait grin, the superhero proportions imported from decades of steroidal American fantasy. But the plastic folds. The feet buckle inward. I see this desire for masculinity to constitute itself as citation, as something collectively fantasized and therefore collectively revisable. And I want that too, which is why the vinyl matters so much. Not because it punctures the fantasy of strength (though, of course, it does) but because it renders strength atmospheric.
There’s an easy reading of this piece that I wrote myself into when I first saw it: a hero simply is himself, emphatically and forever. Trans masculinity introduces time into the picture. The body becomes narrative instead of monument. Inflatable Hulk is just like the rest of us: air must be pumped into him, mouths must wet his holes, his face moves from inflation to deflation throughout the day. Maybe why I like this piece so much is because it forces me to imagine Jeff Koons actually inflating him, which gets us to homoeroticism fairly directly, the kind of inevitable next step to articulating transmasc desire. The body of a cis man (although I’ve always thought Koons’s face to suggest some transsexual inclinations) breathing air into the image of a trans one. That need to be witnessed by someone is exactly what’s waiting for him on his own shoulders.
What, to my mind, makes the sculpture excellent, the “home run,” to borrow something Inflatable Hulk would say, are the small inflatable creatures crowded onto his shoulders, evidence that the fantasy of masculine singularity was already compromised by attachment. We know they’re his friends because the title says so. Without them, he’s a boring, legible joke about strength and emptiness. With them, he’s social. "I is another." What is there, finally, but other people. They aren’t trophies or enemies or sidekicks. They seem closer to feeling, lingering selves, incompatible aesthetics carried forward. A turtle, a pink bug-eyed thing, some unidentifiable pastel animal: they belong to the world of children’s media, cheap pleasures; gimmicks that somehow aren’t. Mostly though they contaminate the fantasy of coherence he’s trying to perform. And because they are also inflatable, they mirror him back. Their difference is in scale, not structure. The heroic body and cute accessory are made of the same thin material, sustained by the same invisible pressure. Which suggests something I’ve rarely seen articulated so clearly in an art object: masculinity isn’t achieved by purging softness or absurdity but by carrying them visibly, however awkwardly, into the performance. They’re also his first audience, perched there watching him be watched. That same need to be seen with others rather than alone is what sends me back to my own history of watching people watch art.
My favorite kind of ekphrastic writing is the distracted kind: desire plus a real suspicion of grand emotion. As a kid on family holidays I’d be in some sweaty, over-touristed museum arguing with everyone in my head, convinced that I was the only one having the correct aesthetic experience: thirty minutes standing in front of a single painting, muttering angrily every time a tourist wandered past to photograph it and move on. I cared more about performing aesthetic experience than having one. I thought it made me a romantic, an intellectual. I was always half-watching myself, as though it were a five o’clock shadow you can’t stop seeing. Which is why I love Thomas Struth’s photos of people in museums so much. What Struth does, like the final dying breath of a patriarch, is reintroduce photography’s oldest promise: they’re supposed to return us to ourselves.
What you actually see in his pictures isn’t “peopled museum interiors,”[3] to use Peter Schjeldahl’s description, so much as people looking at art. And that alone undoes most of the exalted assumptions that constitute aesthetic theory, which has a hard time finding anyone actually experiencing the sublime or whatever else falls under the umbrella term of profound aesthetic experiences. What the photographs tell us is that the whole encounter is banal and sweaty, and mostly we’re looking at each other through the work rather than at it. That shift is historical, obviously—paintings used to hang in churches and palaces, mediated by religious or royal authority, meant for isolated, quiet contemplation. In the modern museum, the public mediates itself.
So the Struth photos confirm what I already suspected, the open secret buried in half the theory written on this subject: we’re more interested in looking at each other than at the art, more interested in talking about it than seeing it. Janet Malcolm gets at this in her New Yorker profile of Struth: “These show what we see when we walk into a museum gallery: people looking at paintings. We only secondarily see the pictures themselves.”[4] His museum series works as a record of contemporary aesthetic experience, one filled with chaotic school trips, the tourist uniform par excellence. We keep assuming we’ll always look at art the same way, but we won’t. These photographs feel urgent now for exactly that reason: a record of how we look, and a preview of how the next generation almost certainly won’t. The most honest thing I can say is that looking at Inflatable Hulk made me want to talk to someone. Made me feel like I was in two places at once.
Click the link below to view the artwork
References
[1] Andrea Long Chu, Females (London: Verso, 2019), 11.
[2] James Schuyler, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 85.
[3] Peter Schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988–2018 (New York: Abrams Press, 2019), 324.
[4] Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (London: Granta, 2013), 56.
