When Spider-Man Met Jeff Koons

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the sequel to the 2018 reimagining of the arachnid-adolescent superhero, doubles down on the primary installment with an ingenious and magpie visible fashion. The result’s, a minimum of partly, a crash course in artwork historical past (actually so, as characters ceaselessly crash into artworks).

While the movie is basically rendered in computer-generated animation that speeds by at a dizzying clip, there are moments of slowed, even gorgeous magnificence: backgrounds dissolving with painterly impact, shifting into emotive abstraction harking back to, at turns, the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. New York’s cityscape is softened into brushy, Impressionistic swaths. Ben-Day dots stutter throughout the display, a nod to the story’s comedian e book supply materials, but additionally calling up Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriations of the identical.

Justin Ok. Thompson, a director of the movie, mentioned the collision of methods and purposes was deliberate. “We wanted to emulate dry brush, watercolor, acrylic,” he mentioned. “I looked a lot at the work of Paul Klee, the work of Lyonel Feininger.” The experimental movies of John Whitney, a pioneer of pc animation, have been one other inspiration.

There are additionally a lot of extra direct allusions to modern artwork. An early set piece within the Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright constructing allowed the filmmakers gleeful abandon. A model of the perennial Spider-Man villain Vulture that seems as if lifted from a Leonardo da Vinci parchment drawing tumbles via the museum’s rotunda, wielding weapons impressed by da Vinci’s fanciful and terrifying innovations and inflicting havoc in what rapidly seems to be a Jeff Koons retrospective. The combat scene deploys a number of of Koons’s sculptures of inflatable toys, like “Lobster” (2003) and “Dolphin” (2002), hurled as projectiles. Naturally, a Koons Balloon Dog, his most readily recognizable work, receives prime billing.

“When we talked about the Balloon Dog we said, ‘What could we do with it? What would be special?’” Thompson advised me. Koons, he recalled, “was actually the one who said, ‘You know, one thing about the Balloon Dog is it’s this thing that has a lot to do with breath. It’s filled with human breath. But we’ve never actually seen the inside of one. What if we cut one open and we could see what was inside?’ And we just kind of looked at each other, like, ‘But what’s inside?’ And he said, ‘Whatever you want.’”

What’s inside ended up being a sight gag that follows after Vulture lops off the pinnacle of a 12-foot-tall Balloon Dog, from which spill numerous smaller Balloon Dog sculptures, satisfying the nagging suspicion that Koons’s outsize works are in truth elaborate piñatas. (The scene dropped at thoughts an episode earlier this yr, the place a collector visiting the Art Wynwood truthful in Miami unintentionally shattered a 16-inch version The movie was already nicely via manufacturing.)

“It was moving to me,” Koons mentioned on a cellphone name from Hydra, Greece, “because I always thought of the Balloon Dog as kind of a ritualistic work, something that could have a mythic quality to it, a little bit like a Trojan horse or Venus of Willendorf, where there would be some form of tribal community.” (His personal balloon Venus didn’t appear to make the ultimate reduce.) Koons thought-about the Balloon Dog’s presence within the movie as “truly participating in a larger community where people can rally around it.”

The scene, which additionally options a number of of Koons’s earlier, stranger and fewer uncovered works, just like the polychromed wooden sculpture “String of Puppies” (1988), from the “Banality” sequence, the chrome steel bust “Louis XIV” (1986), and several other of his Eighties vacuum cleaner assemblages, is a homage to an artist who served as the unique, if oblique, affect for the primary “Spider-Verse” movie’s path. In 2014, whereas nonetheless in an early conceptual part and at an deadlock as to the way to create a type of postmodern model of the deathless hero, Phil Lord, a co-writer of the screenplay, and Christopher Miller, a producer, visited the Koons retrospective on the Whitney Museum. Lord has mentioned the exhibition crystallized their pondering.

“You could look at ‘The New,’ ‘Equilibrium,’ ‘Luxury & Degradation,’ ‘Antiquity,’ ‘Hulk Elvis,’ all different bodies of work that possibly seem like this kind of multiverse,” Koons supplied. “Where you could have things existing at the same time but in different ways.”

Whether the deep dive into Koons’s oeuvre resonates with informal viewers is one other story. As the plot swings between barely overbearing teen angst and extrapolations into quantum physics — itself an prolonged metaphor for the angst-inducing, open-ended prospects of adolescence — the artwork in-jokes really feel like a concession to grownup aesthetes. (“I think it’s a Banksy” is a one-liner recycled from the primary movie, referring to one thing that appears nothing like a Banksy. Everyone laughed on the joke on the Upper West Side screening I attended, however not on the Koons stuff.)

The concept that, in an alternate universe, Jeff Koons’s profession booster befell on the Guggenheim as a substitute of the Whitney is probably essentially the most in-joke of all of them, one thing even seasoned art-world insiders may not have totally appreciated. “There was a discussion for many years that I would have my retrospective at the Guggenheim — it never happened,” Koons advised me. “So it was wonderful to see.”

For his half, Koons gushed in regards to the consequence: “I think the film is really astonishing, and I think culturally it’s playing a very important role for a whole generation of young people to inform them about the possibilities of perception.” He went on to say, “I never had seen richer colors — the reds are phenomenal!” Koons was born in ’55 and grew up on Disney. “There was a certain point in the ’70s maybe where we saw animation fall off,” he mentioned, “and then with Pixar we saw this tremendous leap forward. The film uses that technology as a base but brings back a texture, really the texture of the senses. I mean, it’s like the way we perceive a Rembrandt or a Titian.”

Asked if he was in any respect disturbed by seeing representations of his work obliterated by animated superheroes, Koons responded with Zen Buddhist diplomacy. “I care very much about the world. I care about living. I care about existence,” he mentioned. “Everything turns to dust. The world around us turns to dust, universes turn to dust. What’s important is how we can enjoy the world that we’re in, and be able to have the perception of what our future can be. As an artist, it’s nice to feel in some way that the fine arts are able to participate within culture.”