Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker Rocks Rockefeller Center

Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker Rocks Rockefeller Center

Benjamin Sutton, Saturday, June 28, 2014

Jeff Koons is back at Rockefeller Center. On the exact spot where his beloved Puppy(1992) sat in the Midtown Manhattan plaza 14 years ago, now a similarly flower-covered colossus depicting two toy heads halved and spliced, Split-Rocker (2000), stands 37 feet tall. The colorful, playful, and gently off-kilter sculpture’s installation, a Public Art Fund project, coincides with Koons’s career retrospective at the Whitney Museum, which opens June 27. While Puppy and Split-Rocker’s materials may be similar, Koons sees the newer piece as a very different beast.