Jeff Koons V The Guerrilla Girls.

It was really interesting to view such opposite artists as Jeff Koons and the Guerrilla Girls.

I was very pleased to actually have met in person and be able to have a chat with the Guerrilla Girls at Tate Modern. Firstly on Tuesday I went to the new Damien Hirst Gallery in London to view the exhibition by Jeff Koons.

It's a dramatic new building (see pic above) that has just won a big award, not far from Vauxhall station and Waterloo, I took N 77 bus from Waterloo to get there, really easy.

I viewed the ground floor rooms first where there were encased hoovers, some hung on the walls, one on the floor see pic above, this is  Jeffs Koons's take on iconoclasm and religious relics; if you don't have religion what you are left with is a commercial object with no intrinsic value: the Hoover as the religious icon, an unpoetic clinical object, art as provocation. In this way his show inside the Damien Hirst Gallery makes sense. The encased hoovers, underlit, were next to a bronze of a snorkel, a dysfunctional piece  as it had lost it's original purpose being so heavy made out of bronze it would make you sink. It would kill life.

In the following room there is the big balloon monkey, it's a stainless steel cast, rather monolithic where you can see yourself reflected on it. It's a huge hands off object, not  made by him with his own hands, it's about commodities, it's not a religious item but it makes you think that the artist is not there to make but to be an entertainer, it's a perfect artificial piece of work. 

In the next room there was a large ball with eggs surrounded by two large photographs of Jeff Koons having sex with his ex wife Ilona Staller=Cicciolina. In the photograph he is on top of her, depicting the dominance of men over women, we have had centuries of this shown in artworks and Jeff Koons is still promoting the male gaze by representing the sexual objectification of women which is demeaning of women, it's a distorted view of women's sexuality. I found this quite ironic, amusing even, bearing in mind Jeff Koons's personal private experience with Cicciolina, the fact that he tried to change her into the role of wife rather than pornstar. I wonder if he pays her any money for still using the same image of her in galleries? The ball of eggs is rather a comic piece, the eggs don't look like eggs, they are artificial, it's all rather disturbing, absurd, a dysfunctional piece about fertility; also one could associate the ball of eggs, with a breakfast cereal bowl due to it's shape, it's kitsch, it makes you think about the point of separation between high art and low art.

Upstairs  there are more sculptures, all artificial again, souvenir miniatures made bigger and placed on a plinth like you would do with a Donatello. What do you do with souvenir miniatures in real life? You put them on a mantlepiece, you play with them, they are generally private possessions in someone's house, so by putting them on a statue publicly in this way is playing God with them. The bust of the woman on the plinth is made of stainless steel , again it's a commercial material, it's not porcelain, he is taking the worst of kitsch and elevating it to the level of a Donatello sculpture.

In the next room there are what look like inflatables hanging from the ceiling but if you look closely you see actually that it takes a lot of work and a lot of people to make them look like that as they are painted aluminium casts and they would have to be hand painted not by him but by other artists working for him, a painstaking job. The whole exhibition spells big money, lots of people working for him, you can see this again in the last exhibition room where there was a giant play dough sculpture, and again it was perfect, artificial. His work is not - as some people have said - playful and light hearted, it is actually distopian and contrived with a kitsch comic aesthetic.

Overall the gallery itself is a great space with a cool restaurant, bar and a wall cabinet full of medicines, it is called the Pharmacy and again spells big money.

I took a bus and with the rest of the group went to Tate Modern. The skyline along Tate Modern has changed a lot for the better; I remember when it used to be a really run down area but now it's all gone upmarket.

Photograph by Mirta Imperatori

The Guerrilla Girls were on the 6th floor of the new building at Tate Modern which is a bit of a maze in itself. When I arrived on the 6th floor I really didn't know what to expect, and the first thing I saw was the department of complaints see pic below, I soon figured out that I had to write something on the boards to complain about, which I did easily. It was actually interesting reading other people's grievances, and how the board of grievances evolved. 

Photograph by Mirta Imperatori

Most of the complaints were about inequality, there were lots of complaints by women artists saying that it is a lot harder for women to get chosen in the arts still today, older women feeling invisible in society, not getting jobs, that life in London is expensive see pic below. It is rather shocking actually how women in society today are still running behind.

Photograph by Mirta imperatori

I wrote one complaint about how many companies still don't employ disabled people. I found the whole experience simple and very powerful. I sat on the tables and I wrote down my complaint, then I stuck it on the board and somehow I felt relieved, comforted, after I did it, it relieved me of my complaint, it was empowering. Other people as well were smiling when they wrote down their complaint, like their concerns have finally been noticed, they have been given a voice. It's interesting that as a society we are very opinionated but this exercise rather showed us that we feel generally voiceless and trapped in a system that is hard to change. 

Photograph by Mirta Imperatori

I was also very lucky as I had a chat with the Guerrilla Girls who were wearing gorilla masks pic above. I asked them what got them started on this and one of them said that they felt very angry and they wanted to take some action. She said emphatically to me this was not an exhibition, not an artwork, we are into action and in provoking audience participation. They also told me that at the beginning they were worried of not many people turning up, but on the first day of the opening people wrote a lot of complaints on the board. I found one particular complaint about one guy very funny as he said: he couldn't understand why the Royal Academy was showing so many of Hockney's latest portraits, he said: they are awful; and another person replied they should give more space to emerging artists. The act of writing a complaint also opened a door to discussion as several people were discussing other people's grievances and what we can do about them.
While Jeff Koons still objectifies women in his work, the Guerrilla Girls seek to empower women.
If you want to know more about Jeff Koons check:

http://www.jeffkoons.com and to find out more about the Guerrilla Girls go to:
http://www.guerrillagirls.com/#open