Jeff Koons

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above in July 1987

New York, International With Monument, Group Show, June - July 1985 (Three Ball 50/50 Tank series) 
New York, C&M Arts, Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years, April - June 2004, pl. 3, pp. 25 and 83, illustrated in color (edition no. 2/2)

Jeanne Siegel, "Jeff Koons: Unachievable States of Being," Arts, October 1986, p. 71, illustrated in color (Three Ball 50/50 Tank series) 
Exh. Cat., Newport Beach, Newport Harbor Art Museum, OBJECTives: The New Sculpture, 1990, p. 86, illustrated (Three Ball 50/50 Tank series) 
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 61, illustrated in color (Three Ball 50/50 Tank series) and p. 155 (text)
Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, pl. 7, p. 59, illustrated in color and p. 65, illustrated in color (Three Ball 50/50 Tank series in installation at International With Monument, New York, 1985)

This work is in excellent condition. Very close inspection shows a minute hairline ½" curved scratch towards the bottom left side of the back left foot. There are a small number of linear hairline indentations to the upper part of the metal casing which are inherent to the nature of the material. Fluctuations in the installation environment may result in inevitable evaporation of the distilled water.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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One of Jeff Koons’s most iconic and instantly recognizable works, Three Ball 50/50 Tank (Spalding Dr. JK Silver Series, Wilson Home Court, Wilson Final Four) is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s early Equilibrium series, a body of work that came to mark Koons’s status as a powerful artistic voice. From an edition of two, the related version of which is prestigiously housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Three Ball 50/50 Tank was created for Koons’s first solo exhibition which took place at International With Monument, New York in 1985. Three buoyant basketballs - the quintessential symbol of the American sports ideal – here float in a minimalist vitrine half-filled with water. Calmly suspended as though scientific specimens or precious objects in a museum case, their eerie stasis is at odds with the frenetic movement of a basketball game. In the present work Koons masterfully fuses a minimalist lexicon with the Duchampian legacy of the readymade to create an entropic vision of the consumer-oriented nature of late-capitalism, a social model that is at once aspirational and troubling.

Working on Wall Street as a commodities broker to finance the Equilibrium series, Koons gleaned an astute understanding of art as a commodity and the forces that shape its value. Suspended in a moment of symbolic and aesthetic transfiguration, the basketballs in Three Ball 50/50 Tank assume a mysterious, unattainable quality. As mass-produced objects of consumer culture transformed into high art, Koons taps into the psychology of desire fulfillment: perfectly bisected in midway suspense, Koons replicates how desire is produced yet never truly satisfied. This unsated desire is made manifest by the Nike advertisements that formed part of the Equilibrium series and complemented the tanks in Koons’s original installation. In these unaltered advertisements, drawn straight from the sphere of consumerism and planted into the realm of "high" art, basketball stars are photographed as though modern day deities with biblical titles and imperious poses. This elevation of everyday man to godlike hero is at the crux of the suggestion to the viewer that he too could achieve similar success if he bought into the given brand. By suspending the basketballs in Three Ball 50/50 Tank in a state of constant equilibrium, Koons illuminates the false promises of consumer society.

Dealing with the broader issues of social mobility, Three Ball 50/50 Tank, and the Equilibrium series as a whole, broaches the aspirational promises promoted by consumer culture – specifically those that target the under-privileged.  In the inner-city, professional sports are considered by many as the quintessential way out. Within the field of sport, basketball is the urban choice, suited as it is to small backyards and inexpensive equipment. Koons’s glorified basketballs in the present work act, therefore, as tantalizing and precarious metaphors for upward social mobility. As Koons elaborates, “white middle-class kids have been using art the same way that other ethnic groups have been using basketball – for social mobility. You could take one of those basketball stars, Dr. Dunkelstein, or the Secretary of Defense, and one could have been me, or Baselitz, or whoever.” (Angelika Muthesius, Jeff Koons,  Cologne, 1992, p. 19) In Three Ball 50/50 Tank, the promise of breaking out through basketball hovers unattainably as though an ungraspable vision of salvation that is couched, as with Koons’s greatest works, in the lexicon of consumerism.

In order to create these arresting and fascinating tanks, Koons worked extensively with a team of fifty physicians, one of whom was Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics. Rejecting the use of silicones and oils, which would have easily allowed the balls to float, Koons sought to uphold a covenant of trust with the viewer and to make the balls float in actual water: “I wanted to keep it a very womb-like situation with water. I like the purity of water. So I arrived at an equilibrium which is not permanent but very pure.” (the artist cited in Ibid., p. 18) The deceptively simple solution that Koons eventually devised was to fill the basketballs themselves with a carefully mixed ratio of sodium chloride reagent so that they might float naturally in a half-submerged position in the distilled water of the tank. In a manner akin to Hans Haacke’s real time systems, the balls in the tanks are susceptible to the external conditions of the gallery, imbuing the work with a delicate sense of life and a very human expression of transience.

Caught as though in utopian equilibrium, a realm beyond time and space, the frozen flight of the balls in Three Ball 50/50 Tank approach what Koons deems the “ultimate state of being.” (the artist cited in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 340) Born of the artist’s earlier body of work, The New, where Koons encased vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas and illuminated them with commercial strip fluorescent bulbs, the works that comprise Equilibrium took the Duchampian proposition of the readymade a step further. Within this series, Koons created One Ball, Two Ball and Three Ball Total Equilibrium tanks and the same sequence of 50/50 tanks, which owe much to Søren Kierkegaard’s seminal text Either/Or. Citing his reasons for using a basketball rather than any other object, Koons stated that it is "probably for the purity of [the basketball], that it’s an inflatable, it relates to our human experience… to be alive we have to breathe. If the ball would be deflated, it would be a symbol of death. But it's inflated, so it's a symbol of life.” (the artist cited in New York, Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Galleries: 1980-Now, 2011, online audio transcript) Koons’s shrewd choice of cultural signifier is framed by the philosophical vocabulary of high art and metaphorical allusion to deliver a contemporary vanitas for our late capitalist moment.