Some people think history is confining, that it narrows us and keeps us from making gestures to the future, but I really believe the opposite. I’m interested in what it means to be a human being, to have one foot in the past while at the same time walking in the present. My interest in antiquity really comes from thinking about metaphysics, the im- mediate and the ethereal. So the connection with ancient art is operating at a very deep level for you. It’s really just a chain of chemical reactions – a floodgate opens and one molecule affects another. You know, art, like life, is completely ethereal. I believe art morphs in our genes and our DNA. I’ve always loved the connectivity of art history. I wanted to show that I have become a different person, that the viewer becomes a different person, after coming into contact with the work of an artist like Manet, and that Manet became different after encountering Goya, and Goya after Velázquez, and Velázquez after Ariadne. The ways our genes and DNA are connected parallel the connectivity of our cultural life. In my Antiquity series, which began in 2008, I wanted to show how our external cultural life emulates our interior life as well as our biology. Jeff Koons: What myth and art bring about is a sense of concreteness, a sense that we each have a self, that we are unique and have a place within culture and community. Here, she speaks with Jeff Koons about his unlikely affinity for Plato, a philosopher who scorned art and the carnal desires that define Koons’s work.īrooke Holmes: Antiquity seems to have become increasingly powerful for you over the past ten years. Her exploration sprawls into interviews with artists such as Urs Fischer, Matthew Barney, Kaari Upson, and Paul Chan. Holmes’s book forms similar transhistorical wormholes, organized neatly into chapters on time, the body, and institutions. Such a project gels perfectly with the sensibilities of Joannou, who in 1988 teamed up with Jeffrey Deitch to create “Cultural Geometry,” an exhibition that collided together the then-trendy Neo-Geo painting movement with ancient Cypriot artifacts. Its aim is to “de-petrify” the past, to melt the white marble of what we think to be classical and mobilize it in a manner that fluidly interacts with the questions of contemporary art. Her book Liquid Antiquity, created in collaboration with art collector Dakis Joannou’s DESTE Foundation, explores this fluidness of the ancient world. In fact, classicist Brooke Holmes argues that throughout the Greek canon, chaos is vaunted as an essential component of existence. But it is worth keeping in mind that the twin births of Western democracy and philosophy in ancient Athens were conjured up by a love for conflict and argument. Granted, the age of networks, drones, and fake news stirs within us a particular feeling of flux. While sociologist Zygmunt Bauman famously argued that we are living in a time of “liquid modernity,” this description can lead to the dangerous assumption that there was something solid about the past, something immovable onto which we may anchor our nostalgia.
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