4 Doggone Reasons to Collect Puppies Puppies' Hand Sanitizer Sculpture

Here are four reasons why Puppies Puppies 's Untitled gets two 'paws' up:

1. Puppies Puppies is known best for not being known. Appearing under aliases ranging from SpongeBob to Harry Potter ’s Voldemort to the KFC chicken mascot, the human identity of Puppies Puppies remains a mystery.

2. Purell dispensers appear frequently throughout Puppies Puppies’s immersive installations.  At last year’s Material Art Fair, the artist turned Queer Thoughts ’s booth into a dispenser-clad “function-less bathroom” where someone (the artist?) dressed as Shrek sat on a toilet visible only through a peephole. (An updated remake of Marcel Duchamp’s Etan t Donnés, perhaps?) Although Puppies Puppies remains elusive as an artist, one might say their obsession with the hand-sanitizer has become the artist’s “signature.”

3. Puppies Puppies will be one of the 63 artists represented in the Whitney Biennial this year—a testament to the work thus far and a precursor to market success in the future.

4. Untitled departs drastically from Duchamp’s readymade because simply put, you can still use it! Duchamp took an object from mass culture (the urinal) and placed it within the sphere of art, rendering it function-less. Puppies Puppies encourages participants to use his Purell dispensers, as in the case of the 9 ^th Berlin Biennale, which he cluttered with them. So go ahead, touch the art—you won’t leave your germs on it.

Puppies Puppies's Untitled (2012) is available on Artspace for $1,000

Curious where the name “Puppies Puppies” comes from? Read more about the artist in this interview by Dylan Kerr.

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