Talk to anyone who has met Jeff Koons and they are likely to say pretty much the same thing: “What's with this guy — is he from Mars?'' Maybe he is.
At least, extraterrestrial origins might be the best explanation for his art. It is so compellingly, engrossingly strange that no other account fits.
Even though Koons is one of the most famous and popular artists on this planet, familiarity doesn't make his work any easier to get a handle on.
His objects, from stainless-steel bunnies to hand-carved wooden cherubs, refuse to comply with any of the normal ideas — normal, Earthly ideas — about what art should be and how it should work.
Where many of today's best artists risk retreading well-trod ground, Koons takes us somewhere new. Whether we enjoy being there is almost beside the point.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago recently opened the first-ever full-scale Koons retrospective — hard to believe, given that, at 53, he has already been a major art-world figure for about a quarter of a century.
The Koons show fills two hangar-size spaces. All dividing walls have been removed, so now it is Koons, Koons, Koons, as far as the eye can see.
That is the perfect way to see him. It lets us feel the unified, out-of-this-world sensibility that has governed his entire career.
It is not that the pieces Koons has made over the past three decades look all that much alike.
He started out taking store-bought vacuum cleaners and presenting them as sculpture, soon joined by basketballs suspended in aquariums.
There were also replicas of rubber dinghies and aqualungs, cast in Old Master-ish bronze. In the early 1990s, he showed giant, intimate photos of himself with his wife.
More recently, Koons has completed simulacra of shiny toys and Christmas ornaments and gems, enlarged to monumental size in gleaming stainless steel.
And he has shown copies of children's inflatable pool toys — dolphins, lobsters and turtle-headed swimming floats — cast in aluminum and painted so they cannot be distinguished from the original objects.
But the thing about all this variety is that it doesn't leave you contemplating each of Koons's very different pieces.
Instead, it invites you to take in the whole project and admire how he has rewritten all the rules of art — all the traditions and conventions that usually give art order and meaning — according to his own eccentric take.
Koons's eccentricity isn't the standard insane-bohemian kind. Quite the opposite: In person and on video, the man comes off more as an attractive, tidily dressed actuary than a raving Van Gogh.
But there is something slightly off about his manner and his ideas on art and life. He is like a space alien who has spent long years studying how to be the perfect, harmless Earthling but can't quite get it right.
Koons, the Stepford Artist, spouts such a quantity of absurd, Pollyanna clichés — “the people who are involved in the art world really first and foremost care about people'' or “when someone views a work of art ... it is always about them, about their potential'' — that it is hard to remember that he is the guy who posed for intimate photos with his wife.
The work Koons makes is similarly skewed. It misunderstands the usual artistic norms.
And it is this misunderstanding that makes Koons's work so potent and different from anything else that is out there. Many artists act like Martians. Few make art so novel it could have come from Mars.
Koons comes off as a kind of art-world Don Quixote, unwilling to deal with what the world around him, and the images in it, normally mean.
And that includes the “beauty'' and pleasure to be found in consumerism and consumer products.
Koons admires basketballs and fish tanks, even if he refuses to be limited by what they normally are used for; he refuses to segregate them into separate categories.
He doesn't see why he shouldn't use his artistic licence to bring them together — in order, he claims, to talk about our society's pursuit of perfection.
(The floating balls, suspended in the middle of the tanks, are supposed to stand for that perfection.)
But let us go back to Mars for a minute.
Imagine a kind of Martian cargo cult, where ordinary pictures and objects from Earth have reached that planet, and then been used — or rather, misused — as sacred art.
So on Mars, pornography becomes a vehicle for romantic sentiment.
An ephemeral blow-up lobster seems so precious that it gets immaculately reproduced in everlasting cast aluminium.
(Maybe the fact that pool toys need to float gets lost on a planet where all water is frozen.) And then there is the blow-up Mylar bunny that gets cast in mirror-finished stainless steel: As reworked by the Martian Koons, Bunny has lost all the good humour of the original toy and now feels like a totem for some sinister rabbit ritual.
The labour and expense that go into making each of these objects give a sense of the heartfelt importance attached to them.
They have an almost votive quality, as though that labour has to serve a higher end than simply making functionless art.
The famous Balloon Dog, Koons's 12-foot-tall replica of a knotted balloon animal, feels as though it is meant to be worshipped, not just contemplated.
It is as though we are seeing objects from our own everyday world transported to a place where they have been reused to different ends, then brought to us again without a key to their repurposing, leaving us with no choice but to use them as art.
Almost every object is like a Duchampian ready-made, but at many unearthly removes from its original function.
It is as though Duchamp's urinal-become-fountain-become-sculpture were uncovered eons from now and reused yet again to house a sacred relic.
Then buried. Then presented as ancient art. The object's artistic value might have been preserved, even increased with time and its reuses, but its meanings would have become so layered that they could never be deciphered.
It is said that art can take you outside yourself. Koons makes art that transports you 100 million miles.
A retrospective of Jeff Koons's works is on at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, until September 21.
