Write better: Into the void: “Puppy” by Jeff Koons

It has taken a while. But now I understand it. I only write the texts that I want to write. I just leave the others out. Easily said, because I have just written such a text. It bored me, made me tired, dull. In the end it’s all just a question of form. I don’t mean the author’s daily form, his fitness. But rather the artistic form that a text has or not. I maintain that the very thing that made me tired was the absence of an artistic form in my text.

Wait, that’s too easy. Faith and literature, a problematic relationship. Does a successful text really always show itself in the presence of an artistic form? After all, every text has some form. Besides, there are plenty of texts that work, even though they have an impossible form. I fear we need to dig deeper in order to stay away from texts we don’t want to write in the future. I have an anecdote to offer about this. It takes us back to my youth and is a showpiece about the presence of an artistic form (in a dog).

I was 15 years old and we were visiting my grandparents in Bad Arolsen, a small town between Kassel and Paderborn. Normally nothing happens there. But this time everything was different. It was 1992, the year of the 9th Documenta, the legendary exhibition series for contemporary art, which was then directed by the Belgian art historian Jan Hoet. During this visit to my grandparents, I stumbled upon the great sensation of the small town of Bad Arolsen in 1992, which took place there in front of the beautiful baroque residential palace. The protagonists of this anecdote are the American artist Jeff Koons, his then wife Cicciolina – a Hungarian-Italian porn actress and later politician – and a dog made of flowers named Puppy. Koons and Cicciolina were, I must add, the society couple of their time.

Cicciolina wore a demure pink, somewhat baroque dress that contrasted starkly with her flaxen blonde hair and luscious red mouth. You could tell she was in love with Jeff Koons. He, for his part, was constantly grinning from his gray suit with light blue tie, which gave the already very highly regarded artist the overall look of a daring car dealer. The two attended a press event. That means they were photographed extensively, said a few nonsense things and then disappeared again.

What they presented that day in Bad Arolsen was, first of all, themselves: the perfect marriage of kitsch and high culture. But there was something else standing behind them, quite tall and colorful. And that something was the third member of the group that day: It was Puppy, the famous West Highland terrier made of flowers who now stands in front of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

But how does this anecdote fit into a poetology of artistic clarity? Well, it’s supposed to be about the presence of an artistic form – found here in a dog made of flowers called Puppy. We should take a cue from Puppy to write the lyrics we want to write. The secret that can make Puppy the guiding dog for all authors is the banal fact that Puppy is empty inside. This is spectacular! A line from the pen of an art journalist who was also present at the performance of Koons and Cicciolina in Bad Arolsen sums it up quite well: “Jeff Koons, a prophet of inner emptiness.”

Yes, the fact that inner emptiness is always a good starting point for lyrics is damn interesting, I think. Because apparently the texts that I don’t want to write have too much incorrect filling – to dare to make a careful initial diagnosis.

At this point I have to digress. Or better yet, set a framework. Because this anecdote takes place in Bad Arolsen, a place that was strongly characterized by a feeling of inner emptiness during my childhood and youth. This feeling was inexplicable to me for a long time. Until I read Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s book “After 1945. Latency as the Origin of the Present,” which provides an interesting interpretation of the feeling of inner emptiness that I felt there long before Puppy. For Gumbrecht, latency is the continued presence of the past in the present in such a way that the past occupies this present and does not release it. An anxiety arises, a constant feeling of lack of clarity.

Gumbrecht introduces three figures of latency, typical manifestations of this strange feeling. The first figure says that people are in a place where they don’t want to be, but from which they can’t get away. This corresponds almost exactly to the situation of my grandparents, who came to Bad Arolsen as displaced persons to temporarily live with relatives. They never really wanted to be there, but they stayed in Bad Arolsen for the rest of their lives.

The second figure says that people characterized by latency are in a constant interplay of untruthfulness and questioning. Untruthfulness exists in my family in the form of a family rumor. It says that we Deckers are related to the Wuppertal philosopher Friedrich Engels, the inventor of Marxism. Although I was able to effectively refute this family rumor in a feature for Deutschlandfunk Kultur, it lives on to the present day. It is the transformation of the not so famous family past into a heroic story that can now appear as the shining truth.

The third figure says that people who are characterized by latency prefer to stay in containers and at the same time constantly dream of derailments. They perceive the present as a closed space that they cannot leave – and would rather keep it locked because there are only enemies lurking outside. At the same time, they want this space to be completely atomized (a kind of negative claustrophobia), otherwise they would eventually go crazy. A few months ago I was back in Bad Arolsen. We drove from my parents’ holiday apartment to a restaurant only about 300 meters away. This ensured that we stayed in containers at all times.

This excursus about Bad Arolsen and its latency figures is intended to show that the inner emptiness of Puppy, the flower dog, which seems to me to be an ideal of artistic form, does not exist alone, but that – depending on the location – it has a huge subtext we have to think into them. Yes, my brief encounter with Jeff Koons and Cicciolina wasn’t worth much to me so far. I wrote a lot in all the years since 1992, including some texts that I didn’t even want to write. The thing with the two of them and Puppy was a trivial youth anecdote. Today, meeting them seems to me like a prophetic affair.

A form always arises from retreating from the onslaught of possibilities for artistic design, from contemplating the essential contours from which one then wants to create – and which resemble a melody. There are external limits to originality. We cannot create things that are completely new. But we can create things that we want to create. This freedom within us corresponds to the interior space of Puppy, an interior space of a sculpture initially only filled with air, in which anything possible can emerge.

How did this clairvoyant dog, a twelve meter high sculpture with a total of 17,000 flowers, actually come about? Out of rebelliousness! Jeff Koons was not invited to Documenta by Jan Hoet. Out of spite, he simply placed his giant dog in Bad Arolsen. Defiance is always a good indicator of the presence of an artistic form. Because it makes things clear and aims to have an impact. But it is looseness and presence that make it consumable. This creates clarity at a high level.

The nice thing about Puppy’s form is that even after it is revealed, it requires constant care – flower care. And Puppy is changing. Depending on the season, it sometimes appears colorful, sometimes green, sometimes green with colorful speckles. Puppy shows: A form is fragile. It can fade away and become worthless. And it can be copied. Media mogul Peter Brant and his wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, for example, had a copy of Puppy installed in front of their property in Connecticut.

Puppy has a more subversive appearance today than was imagined at the time, because Koons ironically exhibited the West Highland terrier here, the fashion dog of the 90s, and with it an entire zeitgeist. Puppy grins at us like a ghost of the 90s, and that is precisely why something that is art can flood into us when we look at him. And there we stand in front of this monument made of flowers and for the moment we only see ourselves in our ridiculousness and greatness. Great!

And so after Puppy I no longer look at the finished result when I write, but rather at the presence of an artistic form. If it’s not there, I won’t even start. I write with pen and paper and listen to the breath of my words. There is nothing more. And yet everything is there. Yes, the form has to convince me, otherwise nothing else is worth it.

But if I wait impatiently for this form to appear or bring it about with heavy equipment, I can stop. I prefer to think of a game before I write the first sentence on paper. In this game a dog can play a role or some other damn interesting thing. I then play through this form, just like a musician plays through scales. Aristotle said: “An action grows musically through the interpretation of a theme.” Sounds a bit dry, but means the same thing. Creating soul containers like Puppy is the greatest art.