Jeff Koons's "One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank" (1985) consists in a Spalding basketball suspended in a glass tank resting on a simple black metal stand. The ball was conceived by the artist as an image of stillness indicating a state of rest, suspension, and transience, while symbolising also unattainable ambitions.
The work was originally exhibited in the '80s at Koons' first solo show, surrounded by posters by the Costacos Brothers that Koons sold as his own art after buying from Nike the rights. In that occasion Koons combined popular culture, sport and advertising, using art for social mobility in the way other ethnic groups may have been using basketball for the same purpose.
You could argue Riccardo Tisci did the same in his Autumn/Winter 2014-15 menswear collection for Givenchy, inspired by his childhood passion for basketball (a basket ball also appeared in the lookbook images of Givenchy's S/S 12 Haute Couture collection) and hinting in a way at the possibility of social mobility through luxury.
The collection was presented in a caged basketball court with markings lit up in Dan Flavin-evoking neon lights. Mixing sport and tailoring, the casual and the formal, the collection featured loose wide trousers, coat-length jackets, pristine shirts, leather parkas, puffer jackets, sweats and angora jerseys.
Art was referenced in the abstract paint smudges in a palette of orange, white and yellow in the first part of the collection; basket courts/balls were instead referenced in the zippers, orange edges, and linear curves embracing the chest or the shoulders, elements that then turned into fine red, blue and yellow graphic lines printed on shirts or traced on bomber jackets.
Basketball nets were referenced in the nets hiding the faces of models, or reinterpreted as tops, while furs made an appearance worn like a towel around the neck (one of the fur looks was donned by Mariacarla Boscono).
Tisci stated the collection was inspired by the lines of basketball courts combined with the abstract minimalism of the Bauhaus and his fascination with Mies van der Rohe’s architecture. The press didn't probe further, but it would have been interesting to hear about more specific artists and works linked with the Bauhaus since, whenever you ask him, Tisci mentions the Bauhaus as an influence (after all, you can't go wrong if you tell a bunch of journalists you took your inspirations from it...).
Quite often you get the feeling that Tisci suffers from "Internet knowledge syndrome" (you know everything/think of knowing everything, cos you have seen it on the Internet, but that doesn't mean you actually know what you're talking about - remember the embarrassing Aelita incident a couple of years ago?), so he throws the same art reference around almost to justify himself.
You wish that, rather than randomly referencing the Bauhaus (again), he would have mentioned a recently published photographic book that features some powerful images about basketball, Hoop: The American Dream by Robin Layton, a volume celebrating this sport as an American institution. This collection wasn't indeed about art but about using the enduring popularity of a great American passion as a commercial excuse.
This is where Koons and the Costacos Brothers (and not the Bauhaus) come in: the Costacos played with pop culture and combined it with sports athletes, and their successful and affordable posters helped creating superhero images for athletes. Then Koons came and transformed the famous posters into expensive art objects.
Tisci did the same with Givenchy's fashion collections: he took some very ordinary and basic clothes, enriched them with de-contextualises chopped up images including paintings and prints, added a veneer of luxury and put the pieces on the market as elegantly hip items that allowed him to establish a firm connection with hip-hop performers, celebrity stars and trendy artists (Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Marina Abramović...). Hopefully he will grow up and for his next collection he will admit his less arty and more pop and commercial vocations rather than calling (for the umpteenth time) the Bauhaus to justify his designs.
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