With his characteristic playfulness, Jeff Koons creates an assemblage of art history and personal memory in Lobster Log, 2003-2012. The work is a cadavre-exquis made of polished aluminum, wood, and steel, consisting of the front half of a lobster-shaped pool toy, a tubular pool float, and a log in place of a tail. Suspended from the ceiling by a red chain, it is as if Lobster Log swims through the air, wearing a pool floatie through a sea of Surrealist references and Koons’s own artistic motifs.

 

Inflatables have been a staple of Koons’s art practice for decades, since the artist’s first Inflatables series of the late 1970s, which placed inflatable vinyl toys in dialogue with mirrors. Later bodies of work have brought inflatable and mirror together in one object; the artist’s famous sculptures in the forms of inflatable objects—toys, pool floats, and balloons—reflect the viewer and their surroundings in their highly-polished painted steel surfaces. Lobster Log is a trompe l’oeil inflatable object—or rather, an assemblage, in the absurdist lineage of Marcel Duchamp, that merges transformed readymades and everyday objects in unexpected combinations.

 

Lobster Log belongs to Koons’s Popeye series, a body of work named for the macho comic strip character, Popeye the Sailor Man, and defined by its pool party iconography and assemblage technique. Koons explains that, for the Popeye series, he chose to combine pool floats with readymade objects (such as the log in the present work) in order to “give the inflatable a cultural history… a sense of a past, something to have a relationship with.”ⁱ Given that Koons views inflatables as anthropomorphic objects, it follows that the inflatable’s cultural past in Lobster Log aligns with Koons’s own childhood memories and art historical influences.ⁱⁱ

 

As a child growing up in Philadelphia, Koons encountered Duchamp’s assemblage and readymade work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the age of seven.ⁱⁱⁱ He also recalls the pool float as a “liberating” object from about the same time in his childhood, as it enabled him to swim without his parents’ assistance. However, Koons troubles a directly nostalgic reading of Lobster Log in material terms, as, by casting his lobster and inner tube in aluminum, he “liberates” them from any practical floating ability—Lobster Log would sink at any pool party, and yet, Koons suspends the object in midair. The viewer confronts this cognitive dissonance in the bold installation of Lobster Log.

 

 

A sole reading of childhood innocence and play, however, stands in contrast with Koons’s assertion that “there is a huge sexual fetish thing on the Web for pool toys.”^iv The lobster, too, is a sexually charged object in Koons’s interpretation, and so its presence as a pool toy in Lobster Log is doubly loaded. For Koons, the lobster, itself an aphrodisiac dish, is a symbol of both male and female sexuality. He explains that the creature’s arms are “very strong, but they could be fallopian tubes and its body could be the womb. If you look at its tail, it’s almost like a stripper with a boa doing a feather dance, and also has tentacles that look like Dalí’s mustache.”^v Salvador Dalí, one of Koons’s favorite artists, and a direct artistic antecedent to the Popeye series, used the lobster as a symbol of erotic desire in his work.^vi Lobster Log perhaps most closely parallels Dalí’s absurdist assemblage, Lobster Telephone, 1938, in which, as Terry Riggs wryly notes in his description of the piece for the Tate Modern, “the crustacean’s tail, where its sexual parts are located, is placed directly over the mouthpiece.”^vii

 

Like Duchamp and Dalí before him, Koons is aware of the seductive power of the fetish object—in both the sexual and consumerist connotations of the term. Lobster Log fuses multiple, overlapping meanings of desire, freedom, and play together in one object; the Popeye work is a keen deployment of what Arthur C. Danto—with Duchampian punning—calls Koons’s “Pop-eye.”^viii

 

 

ⁱ Jeff Koons, quoted in Julia Peyton-Jones, et al., Jeff Koons: Popeye Series, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2009, p. 69.

ⁱⁱ Ibid., p. 70.

ⁱⁱⁱ Koons, quoted in “Jeff Koons on his teenage meeting with Salvador Dalí,” Phaidon, Jun. 24, 2019, online.

^iv Koons, quoted in Sarah Thornton, 33 Artists in 3 Acts, W.W. Norton, New York, 2014, n.p.

^v Koons, quoted in “’It’s Somebody Having Sex’: Jeff Koons Bares the Subtext of His Art in Brussels,” The Huffington Post, Oct. 15, 2012, online.

^vi Terry Riggs, “Lobster Telephone,” Tate, Mar. 1998, online.

^vii Ibid.

^viii Peyton-Jones, et al., p. 31.