Justine Koons: Archaeology of the Self

By William J. Simmons

Justine Koons has been reticent, judicious. It does a disservice to the complexity of her absence to call her shy. She is not emerging; she has not been blissfully gestating like Botticelli’s Venus. Instead, she has gone her own way. She has been getting ready, and now more than ever we must embolden those who have yet to be heard. It’s time. Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn narrates the first chapter: “We are curious. What has Justine Koons made? The self-contained wife and partner to Jeff Koons, and consumed mother of six (almost adult) children, has a secreted vibrant studio practice. For years there were whispers of clay sculpture. I felt my temperature rise from a shared picture—finally, of a blue torso of Venus—irresistibly covered in carved replicas of toys, shaped cookies, and beads. Here is where our story starts…”

In the summer of 1995, Justine Wheeler left her native Johannesburg for a vacation in the States. An art school graduate and curator—she organized an exhibition of iconic artists like Kara Walker, Cecily Brown, and Lisa Brice in 2000—she used the opportunity to make and look at art. In a method reminiscent of Barbara Kruger’s Picture/Readings series (1978), she photographed the exteriors of homes and the objects folks displayed in their yards. Everything was in flux: the art world was mounting challenging debates about identity while the wider culture, as examined in Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1991), left activists wondering, as they would soon wonder again, how to preserve their hard-won gains. That fall, she met her soon-to-be husband Jeff Koons and, to quote David Lynch, started “the art life.”

Justine Koons’s art life has been lived not only as a muse and inspiration, but as a playful and rigorous experimenter whose investment in the stories we tell and retell speak to the collective power of art. Yet the fruits of the art life take a moment to ripen. We only just got Brat Summer, but Charli XCX has been in the game since 2008! And now Justine Koons is making her solo debut. She has been working away like the rest of us, not waiting, just continuing audaciously to do without an ideal audience in place yet. She has been accumulating, recording, producing, observing, celebrating, acting as a muse who is both Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1647–1652)and Ace of Cakes (2006–2011): curating, fabricating, theorizing, communing with the divine, working in both quietude and alongside the demanding cries of children in the span of the same day. She has been a reference; she has created her own references. She is both public and private, somewhere between fable and autobiography.

Like Warhol, Koons is reticent, and we might demand answers. The only answer Koons might supply is permission to rifle through it all without any explanation, offering this: “The layering of these pieces contributes to what I think of as a personal archaeology, a journey to uncover what lies within, hidden beneath the mass of accumulated experiences.” Myths, both personal and cultural, give shape to those accumulated experiences. As retold by Koons, they are always emerging, evolving, disappearing, only to jump back into the cultural consciousness once again. They wantonly move between silence and laughter meant to gather us around Justine, the storyteller. Even though myth aspires to be a universally understood language, it is also fleeting and intangible exactly because it oscillates between public and private interpretations. Justine Koons’s Kunstkabinett recognizes the messy nature of myth, an inherent game of telephone played across time and culture. For Justine Koons, reticence is an invitation. “I prefer if people create their own myth rather than revealing too much of myself.” Yet she is undoubtedly a part of the myth—not underneath it, but within it. Justine Koons is a mythmaker.

Koons is always finding ways to create new myths, once only shared with family, and now shared with us. Throughout the years, she has made elaborate, personalized cakes for every family occasion. Consider her Cake (2024) and Cake (Rosette) (2024), which, according to Koons, refer to our self-mythologies: “The cakes are richly decorated and adorned thought bubbles. They represent the duality of our interior lives and public projection. It’s a balancing act—juggling domesticity with the entanglement of shared experiences and relationships.” Myths exist to be shared, and Koons’s myths have finally found their pedestals, their stages. Her myths are confections to be enjoyed, stories to be told, retold, and told once more. The telling only happens when she is good and ready. It’s about time.

William J. Simmons is a writer based in California. He is the author of Queer Formalism: The Return and Love and Degradation: Excessive Desires in Queer-Feminist Art.

For additional information on this exhibition, please contact Jackie Greenberg ([email protected])