[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.