Subtitles section Play video
-
[Jeff Koons: Versailles]
-
When you deal with the type of Baroque, Rococo architecture,
-
there's tremendous aspects of the symmetrical and the asymmetrical
-
and aspects of power.
-
Then there's a sensuality.
-
You have this kind of very ethereal, spiritual transcendence
-
that's in this type of architecture.
-
But you also have this sense of transcendence through sexuality.
-
In 1992, I did a piece called "Puppy".
-
And "Puppy," a large floral sculpture made out of 60,000 large flowers--
-
I conceived that piece really thinking of Louis XIV.
-
That's the type of work that Louis would have the fantasy for.
-
You know, he'd wake up in the morning,
-
he would look out of his schloss window, out of his palace,
-
and think, you know, "What do I want to see today?"
-
And, you know, "I want to see a puppy,"
-
"and I want to see it out of 60,000 plants,"
-
"and I want to see it by this evening," and, you know,
-
"go to it."
-
And that he would come home that night, and you know, voila, there it would be.
-
The really kind of surprising, wonderful parts of Versailles are how,
-
you know, wherever the king or the queen would move,
-
their environment would change with them.
-
So, if a king would walk through the gardens,
-
all of a sudden the fountains would start to flow
-
as he would walk in the different areas.
-
And then as he would leave an area, the fountains would be turned off,
-
and they’d be turned on in an area that he's proceeding to.
-
Or the same could happen with all the plants,
-
and all the flowers.
-
You could go to bed one night and your whole garden outside the palace,
-
everything’s red; every flower is red.
-
And you wake up in the morning and, during the night,
-
hundreds of gardeners changed every plant and now every plant’s blue.
-
And that's Versailles.
