Jeff Koons: BMW Art Car

Jeff Koons and the 17th BMW Art Car at Tour Eiffel in Paris, 2010. Courtesy BMW

There’s a montage in the film Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) that combines all the cinematic analogies used to skirt around the depiction of an orgasm – the blooming of a flower, the erecting of a totem, an explosion, fireworks. Listening to Jeff Koons mindfully explain the ideas behind his brightly lined and rather dashing paint design for the BMW Art Car is a similar experience. At no point does Koons refer to the sperm motif daubed just above the manufacturer’s logo on the bonnet. A logo which, if the car wins when it is raced at the Le Mans 24-hour rally this week, will be the first thing to inch over the finishing line: an easy similie for the race every sperm attempts, the race of life to meet its egg-bound fertilisation. Yet he alludes to the transcendent emotions of winning constantly.



“This design is about the achievement of winning”, Koons explained to me after the car’s unveiling at Centre Pompidou last week. “It symbolises the force of life, the microsecond of creation and that moment of achievement”. Koons is the latest in a long history of artists approached by the German car company to design an exterior for one of their vehicles, which remain as collectables and not widely commercially available. Arguably, however, he is the first of the seventeen artists to address the idea of speed in the design’s formal construction. Ernst Fuchs in 1982 and Ken Done in 1989 both added the suggestion of flames ripping along the car’s side, but these chime more with ideas of rebellion and freedom inherent in the automobile’s social history than speed per se. The first ever artist to be commissioned, Alexander Calder in 1975, patterned the exterior in the livery of a track car, but this lacked the suggestion of visual blur that characterises the Koons paintjob. Perhaps surprisingly, most of the previous art car artists – among them Roy Litchenstein in 1977, Robert Rauschenberg in 1986, Sandro Chia in 1992 and David Hockney in 1995 – have eschewed any direct comment, treating the form as a sculptural, moving, canvas.

Koons had an opportunity to race his car – a MG GT2 to be exact – around a test track, and describes the sensation, with an almost aggressively sexual overtone, as “like being slammed up against a wall”. Take a look at the publicity shot at the top of this article and tell me the choice of location does not have some kind of phallic impetus. Yet Koons denies that the project presents an overtly masculine dominance on the idea of speed, endurance and machine. “The energy this car deals with makes reference of both the male and female. It is about creation and the pushing against obstacles of physicality. This pushing and perseverance is seen as masculine, but I think it in something that both sexes endure. Consequently I’ve used some non-traditionally masculine colours within the design, the deep pinks for example”.

There is a perhaps more telling aspect to the project that successfully counterbalances accusations of over-expressed masculinity within idea of the sexualized automobile though: when asked if the car had been titled Koons says “I didn’t want to give it a name, because the car is a symbol of that moment of inception”. The design then places the car, and the idea of racing, into the more prosaic precinct of sex as a biological, familial, act. This is an older Koons talking, (currently expecting the birth of a new son); than the man of Made In Heaven (1989 – 1991) fame. The car was unveiled to the grandiose strain of Led Zeppelin’s Bring It On Home (1969) which could be read as a war cry within the sport/masculine/power mode, especially given the line “Baby, baby I'm gonna bring it on home to you. // I've got my ticket, I've got that load”, but actually transpires as a fairly sweet ode to the comfort of family, even the troubled one of the song (the band played it at drummer Jason Bonham’s wedding reception for example).

BMW board member Ian Robertson had said that the brand “sold desire”, and this stance can easily be connected with the festishised shiny objects that Koons is best known for in his wider practice. Yet he rejects that he is merely plying the audience with another overly valued consumerist object, albeit one that somewhat loses the irony that might be recognised in the Inflatables (1979) and Popeye (2003 – 2008) series. Instead Koons cites Luxury and Degradation, a series of paintings of New York subway adverts he worked on in 1986 as being the main influence in agreeing to the commission. “People have an awareness of how luxury can debase one’s consciousness, but that consciousness is an internal one. It does not lie in the external object itself. The car fits with this, it’s what one projects onto the object that I’m interested in. For me the car represents community, life, family, this is what I’m aiming to project with my design”.