“My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves and to have confidence in themselves – to enjoy life, to have their life be as enriching as possible, to make them feel secure – a confidence in their own past history, so that they can move on to achieve whatever they want” Jeff Koons

“I find that the work for myself is more and more minimal. I’ve returned to the readymade. I’ve returned to really enjoying thinking about Duchamp. This whole world seems to have opened itself up again to me, the dialogue of art”
Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons has an unrivalled ability to both visually amaze his audience while also combining humour with the philosophical. This has come to characterise his acclaimed multi-disciplinary and richly layered body of work over the past three decades. Seal Walrus Trashcans, from his series Popeye begun in 2002, is full of not only art historical references but also cultural subversions and commentaries. Popeye features both paintings in which images from Koons’s own photos, sensual imagery and magazines are remixed into a playful composition, and sculptures in which inflatable pool toys are juxtaposed with found metal objects. As an integral part of the Popeye series, Seal Walrus Trashcans encapsulates Koons’ major themes such as the interplay between childhood innocence and adult sexuality, the bridging of low and high art, the representation of kitsch within the avant-garde and, most significantly, the fragility and ephemeral nature of life.

A hyperreal surrealist masterpiece, Seal Walrus Trashcans depicts two brightly coloured inflatable sea animals wedged into trashcans. Deceiving the eye and brain, the seal and walrus are each a facsimile of an inflatable plastic swimming pool toy that Koons has cast in aluminium and then meticulously painted to reproduce both the colours and texture of the original down to every ripple and soft crease around each seam. Then, in an innovative and technically masterful twist never seen before in his work, Koons has entwined, as if entrapped, each of the assisted readymade toys into a true ready-made, an unaltered trashcan of the kind seen on New York City sidewalks. A first reading of this absurd montage would suggest that the inflatable swimming equipment references and celebrates the banal, everyday consumption of the American middle class with its cheap plastic squeezable toys that populate every communal swimming pool during the carefree summers of America’s suburban heartland. Yet this seemingly happy, cookie cutter society is only superficially so, their smiles like those of the seal and walrus are only painted on. Entrapped by metallic mesh which physically pierces their bodies, the trashcans suggest a physical and physiological violence, a sinister and cynical sense of exclusion and defence, the darker, sombre side of Wisteria Lane.

As Koons himself admits, the referential glut owes much to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist movement. Of the Popeye series the artist has said: “I find that the work for myself is more and more minimal. I’ve returned to the readymade. I’ve returned to really enjoying thinking about Duchamp. This whole world seems to have opened itself up again to me, the dialogue of art” (the artist, in H.W. Holzwarth, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2009, p. 504). Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Bicycle Wheel, an assisted ready-made like Seal Walrus Trashcans, most immediately comes to mind as a point of reference. The flamboyant Salvador Dalí and his preoccupation and fascination with sex, lust and desire and the psychological emanations of ordinary objects are also suggested here by the phallic seal and walrus which each emerge from a pit like trashcan. The contrast between the softness of actual pool inflatables and the hardness of the aluminium in which Koons has rendered his trompe l’œil, this dichotomy between femininity and masculinity, are opposing and contrasting sexually driven forces constantly at play in Koons’ sculptures.

Looking at more recent art history, Andy Warhol and Pop art are a clear and inescapable influence on Koons who is often referred to as a ‘neo-Warhol’ for the way he iconizes popular culture. But while Warhol’s subject matter was pop celebrity, Koons deals with suburban banality. And just as Warhol paid tribute to the genius of the industrial designers responsible for the original Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans by turning them into works of art which are indistinguishable from the real thing, so Koons chooses to reproduce cheap pool toys in hard metal because he finds distilled in them all the freedom, fantasy and unselfconscious joy of childhood.

As a testament to the complexity and depth of each of his major sculptures, the resulting unexpected juxtaposition conjures up an orgy of meanings drawn from Surrealism’s tenets. The children’s inflatable toy which normally signifies buoyancy is rendered useless by the material in which it is executed and by its entrapped nature. Yet, despite their trapped state, the bright and cheerful sea creatures grin broadly with their big soft eyes suggesting a child like optimism and happiness, the same innocent, unbridled joy seen in Koons’ earlier Celebration series. Koons himself has always described these inflatables in a positive light lauding their life saving capability. However, like the warning against the lure of social mobility found in Equilibrium, the Popeye sculptures carry a hidden message. Ultimately, you can go through things in life without trauma. You can go through difficulties but still maintain your course, maintain an optimism.

“A real pool toy will deflate quickly; it will maybe last a couple weeks, but eventually it’s going to start to get softer and will deflate and lose its form. It isn’t going to be able to survive. It has more to do with preserving it than the weight of it. There’s a certain sense of weight with it, going back to Rabbit or other pieces, but it’s not something that I’ve been so focused on. I think it’s more about building it to survive.”