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2015-11-15
Contemporary Art

GLAZING BALL – a Contemporary Classic

by Andrea Felice

A lot of contemporary artists has look to greek and roman classical masterpieces with different approaches and media. Casts represented undoubtedly the most versatile support in this regard.

From Yves Klein to Man Ray. From Salvador Dalì to Michelangelo Pistoletto the classicism outraged, venerated, violated or praised was the direct vehicle of an artistic message that wants, somehow, free himself  from deep roots.  But we can only watch the absolute solidity of the classical forms. As stainless metal those forms and proportions are tattooed on our minds. So much solid to make beautiful and valuable the work of contemporaries who courageously looking to them for a confrontation.
We are bothered? The goal is reached. We remain admired? The goal is reached too.
It’s not a matter of taste, not a work subjectively good or bad. Classical forms in  contemporary art, pandering or provocative, never leave us indifferent.
Protected in the pure white of the plaster casts, classical sculptures lose their real history to become icons of the times. In this way they leave elegantly the word to the artist, at the same time promoting a noble line to their share.
I was always attracted and admired by the work of these artists that have used and use nowadays  the casts like a blank (but not so much) to write their own art on a different word.
Jeff Koons’s work strikes me more than others. The series Gazing Ball leaves ecstatic, bothered and admired. Different emotions captured us. I worked with Jeff koons several years ago making molds for two big sculpture groups of the Dirty series that depicted Koons and his (ex) wife Ilona Staller during an hard sexual act. It was a very interesting and curious experience. Knowing what kind of approaces Koons uses in his work I like so much the Gazing Ball series.
We are bothered? The goal is reached. We remain admired? The goal is reached too.
It’s not a matter of taste, not a work subjectively good or bad. Classical forms in  contemporary art, pandering or provocative, never leave us indifferent.
Protected in the pure white of the plaster casts, classical sculptures lose their real history to become icons of the times. In this way they leave elegantly the word to the artist, at the same time promoting a noble line to their share.
I was always attracted and admired by the work of these artists that have used and use nowadays  the casts like a blank (but not so much) to write their own art on a different word.
Jeff Koons’s work strikes me more than others. The series Gazing Ball leaves ecstatic, bothered and admired. Different emotions captured us. I worked with Jeff koons several years ago making molds for two big sculpture groups of the Dirty series that depicted Koons and his (ex) wife Ilona Staller during an hard sexual act. It was a very interesting and curious experience. Knowing what kind of approaces Koons uses in his work I like so much the Gazing Ball series.
Roberta Smith wrote on The New York Times, May 16, 2013  – “With the “Gazing Ball” series at Zwirner, Mr. Koons returns to the human figure for the first time since the works that featured him and Cicciolina, who was then his wife, in flagrante delecto. But it is idealized. Each sculpture is a blazing white plaster cast — very pure — of a Greco-Roman sculpture (excepting the odd pop culture outlier), all a bit larger than the originals.
The show resembles the plaster-cast collections that were once de rigueur at museums. It includes the “Farnese Hercules,” which is eight and a half feet tall; a five-foot bust of Antinous-Dionysus; and an inflatable snowman that is nearly eight feet tall. This work is average Koons. Not great, not horrible, but a move, a new-model Koons.
That each has affixed to it a mirrored blue ball that you might find in a suburban birdbath almost reduces the sculptures to yard ornaments, but it also gives them a visual, contemporary spark — the reflective blue is a perfect foil for the absorbent white.

With Glazing Ball the work of art is just made by the stunning idea and the blue color that comes back like a citation to the sixties Yves Klein cast sculptures already become, itself, a contemporary classic.
This series consists of hand-blown blue glass balls that are on balance, atop white plaster casts. It seems that sculptures collaborating to this game to keep the balls in balance.

I do not discuss the quality of the casts and surface details, which in some cases of them could be better made, but here plasters are just a media for the sculpture concept. Plaster casts lose their identity, both of ‘sons’ of the original and even as art objects itself. Here we no longer see the ancient work that comes to us through a background of content indissoluble, but we see only the result of thinking of a modern man. A contemporary artist  who wriggles out from the legacies of the past. He makes use provocative and exorcises the incomparable greatness of the ancients. Only in this way, the art continues and lives freely.

“I wanted to show the affirmation, generosity, sense of place, and joy of the senses that the gazing ball symbolizes.”   Jeff Koons

Man Ray – an-other Body
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