MADE IN HEAVEN: CICCIOLINA & JEFF KOONS

Jeff Koons has always taken pop culture and melded it into gallery "camp". When he married Hungarian-born Italian porn star Cicciolina (ie Ilona Staller) in 1990, his uninhibited wife became something of a muse. Though they had a language barrier, he was completely fascinated with her. Koons did an entire series depicting himself and Cicciolina in rather explicit poses. Unlike the typical hotel room backdrop of typical pornography, Koons made magical backdrops inspired by fantasy art for these photographs, the kind of whimsy that complimented Cicciolina's pixie porn persona. The photographs became the basis for the series Made In Heaven, many which were studies Koons used to make sculptures of him with his wife. The photographs associated with the collection are BEAUTIFUL and rarely compiled into one viewing space.


The couple eventually had a son together and when they divorced, there was an intense custody battle. (It is worth mentioning that in court Koons argued that Staller would be an unfit mother because of her career in the sex industry, which was the very appeal of the series that he collaborated with her on). And in the aftermath of this, Cicciolina is wise but scorned to some degree: "I would like to be a wife who had been married to the same man for 30 years with lots of children and grandchildren around. Instead, I am a woman alone... I did what I did, and I'm happy about it. But all the men around me exploited my sexy nature to take me to bed or to make money. As if sexual libertinism inevitably implied the absence of love and of sensitivity. I am a very romantic person, but nobody ever realized it...." (quote from The Independent) Cicciolina was attracted to Koons "artistic" personality and they both saw that porn could be art, a concept she still supports according to an interview she did in 2006.

Softpedia: Do you think pornography can be art?
Cicciolina: Why not? There are some artists who use porn as art.

Softpedia: Could you trace a line between porn and art? What is the difference, where does porn end and art start?
Cicciolina: Let's talk on this example. There is an image of someone sucking a banana. It is, undoubtedly an erotic image. But when multiplied in thousands of posters and prints and when used in a commercial, it suddenly becomes not at all pornographic and widely acceptable. I mean, people would look at it and not feel offended at all.

Softpedia: How do you feel about some new art house movies that use explicit sexual images and are generally accepted as art? I mean, let's say Bertolucci's latest movie - "Dreamers".
Cicciolina: Oh, come on. There's nothing new about this usage of porn. There were some directors that used the collage technique and some of the parts of their movies were 100% porn. Yet the movie was art, wasn't it?




Koons is showing his Retrospective (including photographs and sculptures of Made In Heaven) at the Whitney Museum of American Art.