The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will begin work this month on renovating the 12.4m Scottish Highland terrier topiary designed by American artist Jeff Koons.
To meet the costs the museum launched its first crowdfunding initiative at the end of June and has so far raised €28,206.
The museum houses other large scale installations including Louise Bourgeois’s Maman (1999), a 9m spider sculpture.
“It’s really a privilege to have this work in our collection and this crowdfunder will make sure Puppy remains in pristine condition for the next 25 years.”
Guggenheim Bilbao was launched as way to revitalise its rundown port area and the design by Frank Gehry, with its silver, wavy cladding, is recognised around the world.
Who is the artist who designed Puppy, the dog covered in flowers?
The dog was designed by Jeff Koons and does not represent any real dog, but could be a mirror of any of our canine friends. Tall head, eyes forward, always sitting waiting for attention, maybe waiting on the next command…
But since the time Puppy was planted (literally!) in the space that today is home to the Txema Aguirre Square, he has not moved. Always attentive to how Basque society made the leap from a Bilbao dependent on the steel industry to a service-based industry.
Puppy was not born in this square, which took a while (and a tragic event) to come to be affectionately referred to as “Txema,” but rather a few years beforehand in the courtyard of the Baroque castle of the small German village of Waldeck, near the town of Bad Arolsen, and on the slope of the lake that forms the Eder river as it passes through the region.
At that time in 1992, Documenta IX was taking place and 195 artists were congregating in the area. Jeff Koons, at that time an artist somewhat in conflict with his ideas, could not miss anything in the picture. He carved a first version of Puppy in “only” 11 meters of wood, but this temporary work of art was destroyed on-site after the completion of the project. It is said that this version had flowers that were larger than the current Puppy, which were built from steel.
People tend to associate the steel with which Puppy is made with the Bilbao shipyards that ended up dislodging the terrier, but the truth is that Koons presented this definitive Guggenheim mascot at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, on the other side of the planet, in 1997.
The fact that the flowers would grow “in an unequal and anarchic way” pleased both Koons and the Guggenheim Foundation, which made haste in purchasing the sculpture the same year for $1.2 million, and left him guarding over the entrance of its Bilbao museum, in the same place where he stands today. But there’s a difference: today that same flower statue is valued at 54 million dollars (4,500% increase in value in two decades). It seems like it was a good investment even if we’re only talking about the tourist smiles it has inspired!
This Sidney Puppy, in addition to his disappeared German brother made of wood, has two others. One, somewhat older, is the artist’s test of the Bilbao Puppy, and after several years being exhibited at Rockefeller Center (NY) and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, it was acquired by Peter M. Brant and finally exhibited (out of the public eye) on his Connecticut estate. This American businessperson and philanthropist has a history with the works of Koons, and that is why he also bought the Balloon Dog a few years ago.
Puppy’s second brother is much smaller (and maybe that’s why it is more adorable?). It is 106.7 cm high and basically a lithograph born in 1999 that today sells for $7,500 or $10,000. Not on the same scale, however, as the Guggenheim flower dog whose caretakers have been kind enough to answer a few questions.
Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era and the attendant crisis of representation. Drawing on the visual language of advertising, marketing, and the entertainment industry and with the stated intent to “communicate with the masses,” Koons tested the boundaries between popular and elite culture. His sculptural menagerie includes Plexiglas-encased Hoover vacuum cleaners, basketballs suspended in glass aquariums, porcelain homages to Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther, and glass depictions of himself coupled with his then-wife Ilona Staller, also known as La Cicciolina (a former adult-film star and member of the Italian parliament). Extending the legacy of Marcel Duchamps readymades, and integrating references to Minimalism and Pop, Koons presents art as a commodity that cannot be placed within the hierarchy of conventional aesthetics.
With Puppy, Koons engaged both past and present, employing sophisticated computer modeling to create a work that references the 18th-century formal European garden. A behemoth West Highland terrier carpeted in bedding plants, Puppy employs the most saccharine of iconography—flowers and puppies—in a monument to the sentimental. Imposing in scale, its size both tightly contained and seemingly out of control (it is both literally and figuratively still growing), and juxtaposing elite and mass-cultural references (topiary and dog breeding, Chia Pets and Hallmark greeting cards), the work may be read as an allegory of contemporary culture. Koons designed this public sculpture to relentlessly entice, to create optimism, and to instill, in his own words, “confidence and security.” Dignified and stalwart as it stands guard at the museum, Puppy fills viewers with awe, and even joy.
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao | allthegoodies.com
It’s a crowdfunding campaign seeking to pull on heartstrings and save a puppy in bad shape, but this request by the Guggenheim in Bilbao is on a different scale. The museum is asking for €100,000 in donations to restore the American artist Jeff Koons’ 12.4-metre-tall Puppy.
The flower-covered sculpture of a west highland terrier stands at the entrance to the museum. Its vibrant 38,000 plants, which include petunias, impatiens, marigolds and begonias, are replaced twice a year.
“The exterior is fantastic and hasn’t deteriorated at all,” said Ainhoa Sanz, the head of restoration at the museum. However, after 24 years in the open air, parts of the irrigation system are leaking and need to be replaced, as does some of the stainless steel structure. “We want it to be in good shape for the next 25 years,” Sanz said.
Begoña Martínez Goyenaga, the museum’s communications head, said this appeal for money was the first time they had used crowdfunding. “We decided to crowdfund because it’s a work that’s so iconic and loved and photographed and so representative of the city and we want to give all the people who love the Puppy the chance to participate in restoring what is both a work of art and a vertical garden.”
Puppy was first exhibited in Germany in 1992. It was later re-erected in Sydney harbour in 1995. The Solomon R Guggenheim foundation bought it in 1997 for its new museum in Bilbao designed by Frank Gehry.
Koons said he chose the sentimental ry of a puppy and flowers to convey optimism and instil “confidence and security”.
In an interview with the Guggenheim this year, Koons said: “Puppy was inspired by my visits to Europe’s baroque cathedrals and the way they achieve this balance between the symmetrical and the asymmetrical and between the eternal and the ephemeral.”
In 1997, just before the museum opened, three members of the Basque terror group Eta disguised as gardeners planted flower pots filled with grenades which they planned to throw at King Juan Carlos as he attended the inauguration ceremony.
The attack was foiled by Jose María Aguirre, a local policeman, who was shot dead as the three made their escape. The square was later named in Aguirre’s memory.
Two-thirds of the museum’s income comes from ticket sales, shop sales or from sponsorship, and the remainder comes from the Basque government.
The crowdfunding campaign has so far raised about a tenth of the €100,000 target. Work on the restoration is expected to begin in late September and be completed by mid-November.