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拍品專文
With its infectious, bounding energy, Cut-Out bursts with intense and concentrated optimism and happiness. Cut-Out was the first of Koons' famous Easyfun series, with which he launched himself back into the centre of the artworld fray. In fact, Cut-Out in many ways inspired the entire concept of the Easyfun works such as Hair and Loopy, as it was the first picture in which Koons truly honed the use of his multi-layered collage imagery, exploring his new super-Pop baroque aesthetic. This aesthetic was to prove so influential that Koons was later commissioned by Berlin's Guggenheim Museum to create seven similar paintings for an exhibition, the Easyfun-Ethere series. The immediacy of Koons' Pop collage, its rococo atmosphere of boundless abundance, makes Cut-Out a fun and engaging monument to the pursuit of happiness.
Cut-Out was inspired by a newspaper clip that Koons found of a fairground Cut-Out of a work-horse. Dominating the painting, this image of the horse relates to the nature of art, especially its aspects of role-play and mimesis, central issues in much of Koons' work. Here, these concepts are regarded in a direct, uncynical manner: "You go to an amusement park or a fair, there might be a board that's painted-maybe it's an astronaut-and you put your head through a cutout in the plywood, and then you're the astronaut" (Koons, 2000, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, pp. 331-32). This sense of roleplay also relates to wish fulfillment and, in particular, to aspiration--the ability to imagine oneself in a new and possibly better role, be it astronaut or horse. Certainly Koons himself has stated that this concept of aspirational roleplay is central to Cut-Out, as embodied even in the image of Mount Rushmore in the sky: "That's kind of saying, 'If you want to grow up to be President' And the cereal exploding with milk behind: that's just optimism" (Koons, quoted in Sylvester, Ibid., p. 332). In this sense, this painting is the embodiment of the American dream, and all its reassurance of the wealth and treasures awaiting us in the world.
The feeling of aspiration and reassurance that Cut-Out imparts, as well as the celebratory, intense and almost hallucinatory atmosphere of the painting, relate to and recall our own thoughts and feelings as children. There is little irony in Koons' exploration of these themes. Instead, there is fun. His Easyfun pictures recall the pleasures of childhood, condensing their intensity into a visual form. This theme in part reflects Koons' exposure to the childhood of his own son, Ludwig, during the period that this picture was executed. The Cut-Out is a fun and childish element from a provincial childhood, the cereal the staple especially of an all-American youth. These are elements from a personal mythology, but one to which anyone can relate-the epic, adult world is invoked by Rushmore, while the Cheerios have the splashing intensity of an enjoyable breakfast, adding a luscious sensuality to the picture and appealing directly to the senses. Even the seemingly random association of the various elements recalls childhood associations of pleasure and thought.
In order to present the world of experience in an intense and immediate manner, Koons has taken an iconography of everyday life. Each of the elements--the Cheerios, Mount Rushmore, the horse from a fair--recall consumer packaging and advertising in their different ways: their collage incarnation smacks of Pop, superficially recalling the work of James Rosenquist. The various components, with the laughing animal in the foreground, visually combine to echo the appearance of cereal packets in particular. Cut-Out condenses onto canvas the endless fascination that these packets hold for children, as well as the fact that these are often the first exposure that a child has to art. Koons relates the role of the cereal packet children's ability to look upon the wonders of life with unfettered awe: 'One of the greatest pleasures I remember,' he has stated, 'is looking at a cereal box. It's a kind of sexual experience at that age because of the milk. You've been weaned off your mother, and you're eating cereal with milk, and visually you can't get tired of the box. I mean, you sit there, and you look at the front, and you look at the back. Then maybe the next day you pull out that box again, and you're just still amazed by it; you never tire of the amazement. You know, all of life is like that or can be like that. It's just about being able to find amazement in things. I think it's easy for people to feel connected to that situation of not tiring of looking at something over and over again, and not feeling any sense of boredom, but feeling interest. Life is amazing, and visual experience is amazing' (Koons, quoted in Sylvester, ibid., p. 334).
Koons specifically developed a multi-layered, multi-textured collage technique to make Cut-Out stand out in such an intense, evocative way. The textures work both aesthetically and conceptually, in that in fact the entire work is almost photo--realist--the horse's paintwork is deliberately intended to resemble the blotched paintwork that a fairground Cut-Out would have. Indeed, this collage technique owes much to the source image of the work-horse: as well as being one of the integral elements of Koons invocation of the memory of a provincial child in this picture, Cut-Out's cut-out played a vital functional role in the entire collage concept of the Easyfun series. For a cut-out is a form of 'two-dimensional sculpture', a collage element in fairgrounds into which a head is inserted, the body obscured: the person, for a brief moment of levity or ambition, becomes part of a living collage. This idea of layers was to prove the central key in Koons' Easyfun works, where he has used computer technology to create the matrix for the final work, combining the elements from various images, and tampering with them (for instance, Koons added the flower in the horse's hat). From the computer image, the painting was created in oils with the help of several assistants--in fact, Cut-Out is one of the very few in which Koons actually participated in the physical process, joining his assistants, or 'fabricators' in the execution.
Cut-Out was inspired by a newspaper clip that Koons found of a fairground Cut-Out of a work-horse. Dominating the painting, this image of the horse relates to the nature of art, especially its aspects of role-play and mimesis, central issues in much of Koons' work. Here, these concepts are regarded in a direct, uncynical manner: "You go to an amusement park or a fair, there might be a board that's painted-maybe it's an astronaut-and you put your head through a cutout in the plywood, and then you're the astronaut" (Koons, 2000, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, pp. 331-32). This sense of roleplay also relates to wish fulfillment and, in particular, to aspiration--the ability to imagine oneself in a new and possibly better role, be it astronaut or horse. Certainly Koons himself has stated that this concept of aspirational roleplay is central to Cut-Out, as embodied even in the image of Mount Rushmore in the sky: "That's kind of saying, 'If you want to grow up to be President' And the cereal exploding with milk behind: that's just optimism" (Koons, quoted in Sylvester, Ibid., p. 332). In this sense, this painting is the embodiment of the American dream, and all its reassurance of the wealth and treasures awaiting us in the world.
The feeling of aspiration and reassurance that Cut-Out imparts, as well as the celebratory, intense and almost hallucinatory atmosphere of the painting, relate to and recall our own thoughts and feelings as children. There is little irony in Koons' exploration of these themes. Instead, there is fun. His Easyfun pictures recall the pleasures of childhood, condensing their intensity into a visual form. This theme in part reflects Koons' exposure to the childhood of his own son, Ludwig, during the period that this picture was executed. The Cut-Out is a fun and childish element from a provincial childhood, the cereal the staple especially of an all-American youth. These are elements from a personal mythology, but one to which anyone can relate-the epic, adult world is invoked by Rushmore, while the Cheerios have the splashing intensity of an enjoyable breakfast, adding a luscious sensuality to the picture and appealing directly to the senses. Even the seemingly random association of the various elements recalls childhood associations of pleasure and thought.
In order to present the world of experience in an intense and immediate manner, Koons has taken an iconography of everyday life. Each of the elements--the Cheerios, Mount Rushmore, the horse from a fair--recall consumer packaging and advertising in their different ways: their collage incarnation smacks of Pop, superficially recalling the work of James Rosenquist. The various components, with the laughing animal in the foreground, visually combine to echo the appearance of cereal packets in particular. Cut-Out condenses onto canvas the endless fascination that these packets hold for children, as well as the fact that these are often the first exposure that a child has to art. Koons relates the role of the cereal packet children's ability to look upon the wonders of life with unfettered awe: 'One of the greatest pleasures I remember,' he has stated, 'is looking at a cereal box. It's a kind of sexual experience at that age because of the milk. You've been weaned off your mother, and you're eating cereal with milk, and visually you can't get tired of the box. I mean, you sit there, and you look at the front, and you look at the back. Then maybe the next day you pull out that box again, and you're just still amazed by it; you never tire of the amazement. You know, all of life is like that or can be like that. It's just about being able to find amazement in things. I think it's easy for people to feel connected to that situation of not tiring of looking at something over and over again, and not feeling any sense of boredom, but feeling interest. Life is amazing, and visual experience is amazing' (Koons, quoted in Sylvester, ibid., p. 334).
Koons specifically developed a multi-layered, multi-textured collage technique to make Cut-Out stand out in such an intense, evocative way. The textures work both aesthetically and conceptually, in that in fact the entire work is almost photo--realist--the horse's paintwork is deliberately intended to resemble the blotched paintwork that a fairground Cut-Out would have. Indeed, this collage technique owes much to the source image of the work-horse: as well as being one of the integral elements of Koons invocation of the memory of a provincial child in this picture, Cut-Out's cut-out played a vital functional role in the entire collage concept of the Easyfun series. For a cut-out is a form of 'two-dimensional sculpture', a collage element in fairgrounds into which a head is inserted, the body obscured: the person, for a brief moment of levity or ambition, becomes part of a living collage. This idea of layers was to prove the central key in Koons' Easyfun works, where he has used computer technology to create the matrix for the final work, combining the elements from various images, and tampering with them (for instance, Koons added the flower in the horse's hat). From the computer image, the painting was created in oils with the help of several assistants--in fact, Cut-Out is one of the very few in which Koons actually participated in the physical process, joining his assistants, or 'fabricators' in the execution.