Jeff Koons

Caring. Sometimes people can say that people are perfectionists. I don’t believe in perfectionism because I think that’s like a fetish. Like a dog chasing its tail. But really caring about something is a way of transcending. Through making something the best that you possibly can, you’re able to show [how you care] to people. You’re able to communicate respect to people. 
I believe that these watches are both the gesture of Hublot and myself to show respect and caring to people. They’re great timepieces. I think they’re very informative about the history of humanity. But at the same time, they’re very much about the moment that we live in. The world, the opportunities, the abundance of information that we have… I mean, this is the most exciting time for humanity, as far as dealing with change. 

I’m an intuitive artist, so I always do things very intuitively. I remember I had a show called Banality in 1988, and it was a very popular show. I remember a journalist asking me, after this huge success, if I was afraid if it was gonna leave me, and I thought, what a strange thing to ask an artist after having this huge success. And so, I thought about what I do. And the only thing I do, and I think it’s the only thing that anybody can ever do, is I follow my interests. I can’t really follow your interests. If you follow your interests and really focus on those interests, it takes you to a universal vocabulary. And in this universal vocabulary, time and space bend. And, you know, you're connected to something that’s greater than the self, and that is universal. It’s a metaphysical experience. It never fails.

The first dogs I put in my artwork were some inflatables. I remember putting that Dalmatian into one of my early inflatable pieces, but I was still kind of putting inflatables into my paintings. But then I started to depict animals in Made in Heaven series. I also did the large puppy made out of 16,000 flowers. So I love different materials because they all have an inner voice. I was able to give them a spiritual quality that would have been embedded in works that the wood carvers would make for the church in northern Italy. You would feel that a sense of working with a living material, certain spirituality, with the pieces. And working with stainless steel, I would work with it for the durability. And the abstraction of the reflection, and how it affirms the viewer. And the permanence of it… Stainless steel is like “Okay, I'm gonna stand alone.” It's an extremely durable material.

For me this is a balloon dog, it's not necessarily a poodle, but you can see it as a poodle of course. For me, I think the balloon dog is iconic because it's a symbol, which may be quite old, could be very profound within us, like a ritualistic object of understanding our interactions with the world. If we look at a balloon dog, we think about its interface, its membrane to the external world. It's like our skin. And it's right here on the front lines of interaction with life experience. It's right here, right now. But if we think about in time and in history, we can, I think, go back, and that the idea, it's a metaphor for life. We take a deep breath, 'cause we're anthropomorphic. So balloon dogs are like us. That's a symbol of life energy; deflating is a symbol of our last breath. So it is permanently inflated. So it's about the continuation of life energy. And I always envision that the balloon dog could have a tie back to palaeolithic times, when maybe somebody would look at their kill, realise the gases were inflating. And thinking, “Oh, I could do something with that membrane.” I could, and they would make something like a balloon animal, and the whole community would rally around it for a ritual, 'cause it depicts this interface, this inside outside, our whole life experiences, this membrane here, our internal being. It's kind of dense inside. There's blood, there's tissues. There's organs. And then the external world seems quite vacuous. Where with a balloon figure, on the other side, the membrane, we think of it, is being vacuous. And then all of a sudden, the external world has more density, gives us a sense of security to be more engaged with the external world. You know, this is the membrane, our skin, the interface, with the external world. We have internal membranes. We have our intestines, we have our organs. And I think that these type of inflated interfaces are a depiction of time. Human history, of ideas of memory of our history, biological memory…

I believe in acceptance and the removal of judgement, and so I've always have practised that. I think using past artworks, and as ready made, it's a way that I can show respect and homage to those artists. And I can bring those words to the attention, also to a larger public. And at the same time, I can interact with them. And also to be able to conceptually make something which can represent a dialogue that's even faster. Faster than myself and than that art. And that can represent everything. I believe a gazing ball can just represent the universe. It can represent within quantum, one of the smallest things within our being, but at the same time, it can be just the passes of the universe, and represent every day. The works get affirmed within the gazing ball, and it lets us almost use the gazing ball, so it's like a rabbit hole, to go into that artwork, and to discover the love that that artists may have, and who they may be giving it up to. You could go into a Rubens painting. I did the Drunken Silenus. You know, you'll find that he's giving an homage to Hans Holbein. All these are different ways of showing connectivity. And that's what I'm interested in. So, in a way, it's somewhat making things less hierarchical, but at the same time, speaking about something that's much greater than any of us. The whole of kind of humanity and what we can be.

Ready-mades have always been, for me, used for acceptance. It's a way to just say something's perfect and so be, and that's why everything around us is accessible. It's a vocabulary. It can be articulated. Now, there are different things we have in the world… Copyrights, trademarks, all these different things are in the world. But the idea to try to communicate to people that everything is accessible for them to be able to absorb and to interact with. It's like being able to have the most complete vocabulary to articulate. And so, from that, from a conceptual being, into actually making something is also, just tying the physical to the conceptual. I think that there is a sense of abundance in these watches and both designs, the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog, and the MP-14 Origin, I think that they have a vastness in kind of just a sense of reference, they feel that they haven't been confined to a small dialogue. And at the same time, they celebrate the crafts, the history of defining, even philosophically, of the idea of where our ideas of the world come from, our philosophies, if you deal with the idea of Aristotle and Socrates, the idea of these pure forms, like a chair being a chair, and then it's just the idea of a chair. It's all about the idea of making things. And we can feel that tie through human history. I mean, I'd like to think of these watches as having that whole history of Western philosophy. My philosophy is also very involved in Eastern thought, so that's also on the service. 

I did not think of the flag. Generally I tend to work with kind of a lot of primary kind of colours. I like the world! As a child, I would love to lay down in the backyard at home, and look at the sky and just enjoy the blue of the sky, or roll over, enjoy the grass. The green, the smell of the grass, just to enjoy the world… And so I enjoy colour. Red is a colour that tends to symbolise, the love, the body, a tie with kind of passion. In silver, there's a pure kind of reflection that tends to deal with kind of just celebrating the purity of light and the reflectivity of different surfaces, affirmation of us, and all these things are affirming us when you get an essence of your own reflection. It's that, “oh, this is about my experience, you know, it's about me. If I move a little bit, everything has changed.” Colour is a tool to try to communicate. I believe these colours are kind of optimistic.