Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate July (also, it seems, National Avocado 🥑 Day, so you might consider feeding your tiger some guacamole); tomorrow the rabbits bound in to inaugurate August

Today the tigers bring us an artist from my home county: Kathy Aoki, an artist I posted about back in 2019, in (as she put it in a comment on this blog yesterday) the before time. With an extraordinary project so far spanning three years, mounting an exhibition in each of those years: Koons Ruins — a project that’s simultaneously funny and disturbing, deconstructing the masculine swagger of  Jeff Koons by counterposing a monomaniac Koons-hating woman to it.

To give you the flavor of the project, just one item:

(#1) KA, Buried Bourgeois Bust, a glimpse of a decaying copy of the marble statue Bourgeois Bust – Jeff and Ilona by Jeff Koons (1991)

And its model:

(#2) The original statue (copies in a number of museums), celebrating Koons’s marriage to porn star Ilona Staller

The Koons Ruins project. From KA’s site for the project:

Koons Ruins (2022 – present)

Imagine an art collector [Dorothea James] whose hatred for Jeff Koons’ art leads her to take destructive action…

She acquires Koons’ works, sequesters them on her estate, and subjects them to accelerated degradation. When she dies, her estate opens to the public as “Koons Ruins.”

This narrative, conceptual series reveals the history of Koons Ruins, integrating fiction and art history through a feminist lens. Past installations [all in northern California] took on the form of ersatz visitors centers with prints, oil paintings, sculpture, interactive learning panels, a peephole diorama, and even a gift shop.

— Koons Ruins at the James Estate (New Museum of Los Gatos, 2022)

— Kathy Aoki (B. Sakata Garo Gallery, Sacramento, 2023)

— Koons Ruins: Discovery Zone (West Valley College, Saratoga, Feb–Apr 2024)

KA’s ancestral portrait of Dorothea James:

(#3) A properly reverential likeness of the deranged project’s driving force

And one more decaying Koons:

(#4) KA, Balloon Dog, with barely anything of the well-known Koons original still visible

About KA. She’s an associate professor of studio art at Santa Clara University. From her Wikipedia page, about her pre-Koons projects:

Aoki’s work explores “gender, beauty and culture consumerism.” While she says that her work is feminist, she wants viewers to “feel comfortable” with her work “so that they want to stick around and get the message.” Her work often contains pop-culture themes, such as incorporating elements from anime and manga or by referencing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Battle of Kawaii). She has also parodied superheroes and public service messages in her work. In combination with her popular culture themes, Aoki has created the “role as ‘curator’ of the fictitious Museum of Historical Makeovers” for herself, which allows her to examine consumerism and beauty in a humorous way. Aoki also collaborated with composer Judith Shatin on the 2001 piece Grito del Corazón, inspired by Goya’s Black Paintings.

The first time she created a “Museum of Historical Makeovers” in 2009, she created works that superficially resembled actual artifacts until they were examined more closely. Works based on Ancient Egyptian art elevates pop-music stars like Gwen Stefani to roles as pharaohs, with fake hieroglyphs for words such as hip-hop and MP3.

And then in my 5/19/19 posting “Great twerks of the 19th century”, on the print (She) Twerkin’ / Dance Styles of the 1800’s by KA:

(#5)

 

This entry was posted on July 31, 2024 at 8:19 am and is filed under Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.