Installation view, Snowmobile, 2000 (essay: Reid Shier, “A Thousand Miles of Dust and Ashes”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver: 2003)
In Snowmobile (2000) Pullen carved a small car to scale out of a snow bank in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Here again, a life-sized replica of an actual object is rendered in an ephemeral, transient material. Humour, again is at work. Is it a car covered by snow? Or just snow? Like Sucker, the work's temporary nature bears witness to the possibilities of materials that, while in no way permanent, have inherent, unexploited possibility.
POSTCARD, 2000 (essay: Reid Shier, “A Thousand Miles of Dust and Ashes”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver: 2003)
On the simplest level, the massive, carveable nature of the matrix of a snow bank is acknowledged and made use of. In Snowmobile, however, Pullen uses the documentation of her temporary work as a work of its own: a postcard multiple featuring a photograph of the 'car'. Originally an afterthought that would allow others to see the sculpture, the photograph became the work.
POSTCARD, 2000 (essay: Reid Shier, “A Thousand Miles of Dust and Ashes”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver: 2003)
With this the artist argues the photograph is the work, and the snow mobile acts much like a staged tableau. The importance of this idea to Pullen's practice is articulated in a recent photograph Flash (1999) seen here at the Contemporary Art Gallery. In this cibachrome, Pullen poses wearing a dress made of light sensitive fabric.
SNOW SAW, 2000 (hypothetical tool, essay: Rosemary Heather, “Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating In Space”, Les Commensaux | Quand l’art fait circonstances / When Art Becomes Circumstance, SKOL (Montreal: 2000)
If we put outselves in the space imagined by repational aesthetics, it is possible to see the topoography of modernism and post modernism as a shore we’ve pushed off from. As the distinctness of its landmarks, the shadow of it’s dual influence recede from view, we are left floating. It is a situation that is unique, if only because we are able to sustain it, to be relaxed and happy travelers, free even of the desire to glance backward, and free anxiety about where it leads. The spatial metaphor - nameless, placeless, but a space mometheless- seems apt. There is much to suggest that this situation - - - an absence of the object and a newfound lack of dependence on the institution - - - results from the virtual nature of media relations. More than ever new media provide an abstract avenue for cerebral connection. It is a world of virtual sex, virtual money and illusory ideas about “instant” communication. In relation to this, contemporary art finds its relevance bu bringing the body - not a theoretical body but ont that exists in everyday interaction - back into the equation.
I SAW SNOW, 2000 (hypothetical tool, essay: Rosemary Heather, “Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating In Space”, Les Commensaux | Quand l’art fait circonstances / When Art Becomes Circumstance, SKOL (Montreal: 2000)
The defining feature of the media relation - the new otherwise - is its atomistic character. The Internet, still only in the early stages of its development, is for now the quintessential expression of this. Revolutionary in the efficient way it is able to navigate time and place, it is also equally efficiently, isolating. Virtual communities do exist, but the precondition for any one of them is the individual alone at his or her computer.
The worlds we inhabit are increatingly mental, increasingly not defined by our actual location. What is a larger expression of this condition? in a word: globalism. Or even better, more to the point, the idea of money itself. As public policy makers never fail to remind us, money is the notal point of existence, if not the apex of human relations. It is this philosophy that drives the policy of certain conservative governments: to eradicate the social or see it exist in only the most individualistic of ways, from peer to peer, or person to person. The intent here is to remake society in the image of capital itself: that is, as an amoral and unceasing kind of flow.
I SAW SNOW, 2000 (hypothetical tool, essay: Rosemary Heather, “Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating In Space”, Les commensaux | Quand l’art fait circonstances / When Art Becomes Circumstance, SKOL (Montreal: 2000)
Acting as a ballast to this tendency is the practice of the relational aesthetic. As a way to conduct a kind of investigation into this, I asked seven artists - Adrian Blackwell, Germaine Koh, Sandy Plotnikoff, Lucy Pullen, Luis Jacob and the Instant Coffee’s Jennifer Papararo and Jin Han Ko - to answer three questions about their practice:
1). What is the origin of your work? (How did you arrive here? (i.e. origin in terms of influence or in terms of your practice.)
2) What is the relationship of your work to locality? (Where is here? Is Toronto / the city you live in a specific context for your work? Is the urban environment integral to what you do.)
3) What is the relationship of your work to the present? (In what relation does your work constitute itself? Is it conceived in relation to a specific audience? Specific Social Conditions? This might also be a question about the contemporary role of the gallery / institution.)
London England: 1999 (photo: L. Pullen, essay: Rosemary Heather, “Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating In Space”, Les commensaux | Quand l’art fait circonstances / When Art Becomes Circumstance, SKOL (Montreal: 2000)
For all of the participants, Toronto has been a context for their work, often in collaboration with other respondents: Sandy Plotnikoff and Lucy Pullen’s collaborative work is well-known: Luis Jacob and Adrian Blackwell took part in the Gebruary Group’s Mattress City action at Toronto’s City Hall and were both among the initiators of the Anarchist Free School (Toronto, 1998-2000; Instant Coffee is an ongoing collaborative project that plays all-accommodating host to an array of infections, art-like and otherwise. In spite of these connections, the respondents would not necessarily see themselves belonging together as a group. Although all have done work based on some form of exchange, all also avail themselves of a variety of artistic methods, and so should not be considered relational aestheticians as such. This is in keeping with relational practice’s tendency to be an aesthetic category defined only by its individual instances.
London England: 1999 (photo: L. Pullen, essay: Rosemary Heather, “Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating In Space”, Les commensaux | Quand l’art fait circonstances / When Art Becomes Circumstance, SKOL (Montreal: 2000)
Curiously, this forum, because it does not create the conditions for a real conversation, replicates the tendency towards atomization. The email response format ensures this. It is an irony that all the better brings into focus what the relational artwork does, which is to use the specific incident to allow up to imagine the bigger picture, the network of relations that is society itself.