JONATHAN MONK vs JEFF KOONS: INFLATED DEFLATED

If imitation is flattery, what is it called when Jonathan Monk flattens Jeff Koons' "Rabbit"? Jonathan's wit steps outside the box and does what many of us out there wish we could do, he lets the air out of an iconic piece of pop-art by the master himself, Jeff Koons.
I love both pieces, the before and the after. Many a snob has ragged on about the work that Koons puts out. Most say it's not art, but what the hell is art anyways? Art is 100% subjective. It as as the cliches reads "...in the eye of the beholder". Heck, if we're still talking about Koons' "rabbit" some 20 years later, then I'm sure that suggests that it is probably art.
Hey, I'm not a fan of watercolor flowers or an oil rendition of society's high and mighty picnicking in the countryside painted by many a supposed master 150 years ago, but I'd never in a million years say that it isn't art...it's just not my kind of art. Art is, and that's all. It just is. Like it or leave it.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY
525 WEST 21st STREET
NEW YORK, NY 1011
212.645.7335

Lifted from a Press release by Casey Kaplan Gallery*

“Appropriation is something I have used or worked with in my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now)
I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own
work. By doing this I think I also created something original and certainly something very different to what I was re-
presenting. I always think that art is about ideas, and surely the idea of an original and a copy of an original are two very
different things.” – Jonathan Monk, 2009

Casey Kaplan is pleased to present new work by artist, Jonathan Monk (b. 1969 in Leicester, England, lives and
works in Berlin, Germany), in his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, The Inflated Deflated. Previously, Monk has taken
on artists such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner, as source material
for his own artwork. For this exhibition, Monk turns his attention to the artist, Jeff Koons. By employing his own
intrinsic artistic strategies, appropriation and recontextualization, Monk presents an exhibition that appends art history
with a narrative of his own interplay between the objects and ideas of the past and his newly conceived reincarnations.
In the late 1980’s, while Jonathan Monk began art school in Glasgow, Scotland, Jeff Koons created a highly polished
stainless steel cast of an inflated, plastic bunny shaped balloon, entitled “Rabbit”, 1986. The sculpture debuted that
same year in the seminal Group Show at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in New York. “Rabbit” has become an icon of
its era. Utilizing a similar inflatable, carrot carrying, plastic toy bunny as a starting point, Monk presents his own version
of Koons’ infamous work in five different poses. Monk’s stainless steel bunnies capture five frozen moments of silent,
animated, slow deflation. With each dissipation of air, the mirrored bunny droops, folds, and gently falls from a
standing position to a reclined figure. If seen as a sequence, the sculpture ultimately comes to rest in a low, undulating
heap of metal, recalling one of Henry Moore’s classic bronze reclining nudes.
Surrounding the five sculptures are five photorealist style paintings that depict various stages of the fabrication
process of Monk’s bunny sculptures from the clay moulds to welding of steel. Through the paintings, Monk
demystifies the process of the creation of his own artworks as a conceptual component to the exhibition.
In Gallery III, the exhibition transitions from balloons losing their air to light bulbs that gradually burn out and go dark.
Monk additionally presents four wall-based, light bulb artworks entitled, “The Death of Geometric figures” (circle,
square, rectangle, and triangle). Each of the geometric signs is a mirror surrounded by ceramic white light bulbs that
recall Hollywood-style vanity mirrors, and also artworks from the 1960’s and 70’s by various Conceptual artists. As the
bulbs burn and fade to black, Monk’s signs become realized.