Jeff Koons, 1995

December 1995 - March 1996, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Project team included Janet Parfenovics, Doug Knox (engineering) John Walsh (plants) and the artist's assistant, Gary McCraw among many others.

Having made its debut as part of the ‘Made in Heaven’ menagerie, the diminutive 'White Terrier' has gone on to become the prototype for Koon’s most ambitious work to date, a colossal sculpture made of live flowering plants known as 'Puppy'. In 1992 Jeff Koons was not included in Kassel’s Documenta 9, the quinquennial international art exhibition that had been Kaldor’s introduction to the Christo’s work in 1968. He was included, however, in something of a latter-day salon de refuses in the nearby town of Arolsen. Koon’s contribution stole the alternative show, and indeed the Documenta itself, which offered nothing so triumphantly appealing to cognoscenti and general public alike. The artist had created ‘Puppy’, a temporary sculpture nearly twelve metres high, modelled on the ‘White Terrier’, covered in a breathtaking coat of thousands of flowering plants.

Art historian Robert Rosenblum wrote of how "this giant topiary toy telescopes the old and new baroque, mixing memories of the kind of fantastic garden follies which were meant to dazzle the absolute monarchs who could afford them with the most deliriously deviant branches off that old tree, whether the flower floats at the annual Rose Bowl pageants or the animal-shaped hedges that greet visitors to Orlando’s Disney World." The Arolsen 'Puppy', regarded by the artist as an experimental prototype, encountered a variety of technical and logistical problems. It has now been reincarnated in its definitive, demountable version at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.