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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF RUDOLF AND UTE SCHARPFF

B. 1955
LIFEBOAT

12 x 80 x 60 in. 30.5 x 203.2 x 152.4 cm.

bronze

Executed in 1985, this work is number 1 from an edition of 3 with one artist's proof.

PROVENANCE

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above circa 1986

EXHIBITED

New York, International with Monument Gallery; Chicago, Feature Gallery, Equilibrium, June - October 1985 (edition number unknown)
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Aarhus, Kunstmuseum; Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, Jeff Koons, November 1992 - April 1993, p. 13, illustrated in color (ed. 1/3, Stedelijk and Stuttgart catalogue) and cat. no. 17, p. 32, illustrated in color (ed. 1/3, Aarhus catalogue)
Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Family Values: American Art in the Eighties and Nineties, the Scharpff Collection at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1996 to 2005, 1996, p. 46, illustrated in color (detail), p. 47, illustrated in color (ed. 1/3) and p. 49, illustrated in color (installation view)

LITERATURE

Jerry Saltz, Beyond Boundaries: New York's New Art, New York, 1986, p. 4, illustrated in color (installation view at International Monument Gallery, 1985)
Jeanne Siegel, "Jeff Koons: Unachievable States of Being", Arts Magazine, vol. 61, October 1986, p. 71, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeff Koons, 1988, cat. no. 13, pp. 20-21, illustrated in color (another example)
Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and traveling), Jeff Koons, 1992, cat. no. 16, pl. 20, p. 63, illustrated in color (edition number unknown)
Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, New York, 1992, p. 57, illustrated in color (installation at the International with Monument Gallery, New York, 1985, partial view), pp. 64 - 65, illustrated in color (installation at the International with Monument Gallery, New York, 1985) and fig. 17, p. 65, illustrated in color
The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 154
Exh. Cat., Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Zeitspruenge, 1993, pp. 46 - 57, illustrated in color (edition number unknown)
Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, In the Shadow of Storms: Art of the Postwar Era from the MCA Collection, 1996 (another example)
Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Decades in Dialogue: Perspectives on the MCA Collection, 1999 (another example)
Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Age of Influence: Reflections in the Mirror of American Culture, 2000 (another example)
Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Original Language: Highlights from the MCA Collection, 2001 (another example)
Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art (and traveling), Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collection, 2001, pp. 126 - 127, illustrated in color (another example)
Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain: Selected Works from the MCA Collection, 2002, p. 6, illustrated in color and p. 168, illustrated in color (another example)
Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Jeff Koons, 2003, pp. 34-35, illustrated in color (installation at the International with Monument Gallery, 1985)
Exh. Cat., Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (and traveling), Jeff Koons: Retrospective, 2005, p. 29, illustrated in color (installation view of another example)

NOTE

Lifeboat is one of the most visually arresting, physically imposing and conceptually complex sculptures to be exhibited at Jeff Koons' first solo show at New York's International with Monument Gallery in November 1985. This seminal show brought together three conceptually interlaced bodies of work: a series of basketballs maintaining a perfect but implausible state of equilibrium in tanks of water, posters featuring basketball stars and thirdly a series of bronze casts of life-saving devices, of which the present work is the largest and most ambitious example. The strength of the Equilibrium exhibition resided in the multi-valency of its components and the dialogue engendered between them. Drawing critical acclaim and effectively launching Koons' career, the show presented a tightly choreographed group of works that were visually compelling and articulated a cogent and sophisticated visual discourse on issues of social mobility and the limitations of the urban underclass.

Earlier that decade, Koons had resuscitated the conceptual genius of Marcel Duchamp, alchemising the commonplace into the extraordinary by presenting manufactured objects on a pedestal formerly reserved for high art. The intention of these first displays of ready-mades, which included inflatable toy rabbits and vacuum cleaners, was an expansion of the Duchampian prototype. While the conceptual purity of both artists pivots on the fact that the uninitiated might not recognise the objects as art, Koons invests his objects with a deeper symbolic intention, substituting Duchamp's spirit of linguistic play with an incisive comment on capitalism's vacuous obsession with commodities. Disingenuously candid in their presentation, Koons' artistic appropriation of everyday commonplaces masks a narrative that operates on numerous levels, confronting the viewer with reflections on social aesthetics while never losing the primacy of the objects' visual appeal.

The ready-mades in the Equilibrium series, which include casts of an aqualung, a life jacket, snorkelling equipment as well as the present work, a rubber dinghy, become metaphorical embodiments of society's dysfunction. Unlike all previous series, a further conceptual dynamic is achieved in the Equilibrium series through the transformation of the object into a different material, a strategy that became a mainstay of Koons' sculptural practice. By casting a rubber dinghy, an object whose validity is founded on its buoyancy, in a medium synonymous with gravity and immovability, Koons radically alters the semiotic charge of the work. In all the series, the visual irony is most manifest in the present work: associations of salvation are dramatically subverted in a sculpture in which the life raft becomes a death trap. Koons explains the paradox of Lifeboat and another iconic work from the series, Acqualung: "This (Acqualung) is one of the bronzes that was there to seduce as a tool for equilibrium~ If you turn it around in the back you have your emergency rip cord so, if you go for equilibrium and you panic, you can resurface. Now if somebody did go for equilibrium and they had that life vest on, and for some reason they panicked but were able to get it off and resurface, then they would see the lifeboat waiting. But if they got in thinking that they had found their salvation, they would only find that there is no salvation because the bronze weighs over six hundred pounds and it's just going to take you right back down." (Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Jeff Koons, 1993, p. 67)

Beyond these extremely literal terms, Lifeboat also assumes a more symbolic significance, broaching emotive themes of cultural aspiration through a loaded metaphorical vocabulary. As Daniela Salvioni observes: "The contradiction between the purpose of the original objects -- to keep one afloat and thus preserve life -- and the massive tonnage of the actual sculptures, transforms the objects into a devastating metaphor of impossibility and unsustainability." (Ibid., p. 20). Viewed in the context of its original installation, Lifeboat paints a bleak picture of cultural entropy as the ostensibly incongruous juxtaposition of posters, basketballs and bronze casts of flotation equipment precipitates meaning. In Koons' complex visual diction, the basketballs symbolise the tools of social advancement available to the urban underclass; the posters, what Koons calls the "sirens", are the living proof that talent can democratically lead to upward mobility. Such aspirations, however, are revealed to be futile when juxtaposed with the inherently flawed survival gear. According to Koons, in his trinity of symbolism in which the hovering basketballs represent the perfect state of equilibrium, the bronzes are "the tools for Equilibrium that would kill you if you used them. So the underlying theme, really, (is) that death is the fundamental state of being." (Angelika Muthesius, Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, p. 20)

In tandem with this semiotic discourse there is a visual poetry to Lifeboat derived from the purity of its form and the craftsmanship of its fabrication. As with Duchamp's ready-mades, the functionality of the object is replaced by an abstract quality which pushes the beholder beyond the comfortable limits of what constitutes art. Profoundly conceptual, the visual paradox at the core of Lifeboat clearly illustrates the influence of the Surrealists on Koons' practice, as epitomised in Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered teacup, Object, 1936. The constant association of different ideas and objects to create new situations, the hijacking of the meaning of familiar objects and the use of metaphors, reiterates the poetics of Surrealism. Aside from any socio-political gloss, there is an aesthetic delectation in the art object per se. For Koons, the perfection of the casting was imperative and throughout his career he has demonstrated a consistent concern for the quality of material and process. There is an aesthetic pleasure in the seductive, tactile bronze surfaces of Lifeboat that capture the intricacies of detail such as the braided rope and stitched rubber seams. Despite the solidity of the bronze which sits heavily on the floor, the air pressure inflating the dinghy is distinctly palpable. It is the primacy of this visual appeal, coupled with the sophisticated semiotic charge of the work, that makes Lifeboat one of the outstanding early masterpieces of Koons' oeuvre.