The Victoria - based artist Lucy Pullen first made her mark in the mid-199os in Halifax, where she attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. From conceptual pieces (2500 Superballs, 1997) to conventional sculpture ( Wooden Standing Construction (Ash Hole), 2003), her work has a sweep that is as broad as her East Coast/West Coast journey. What has bound the work together over the course of her career is a desire to activate the spectator's imagination by disrupting the reception of the art object. Pullen likes to play with us, breaking down our familiarized responses to art by evoking feelings of surprise, delight, puzzlement, amazement and so on. Preoccupied with changing the points of reference that box art in as art, she calls attention to the artistic potential within everyday experience. This is a familiar trope in contemporary art, but it has rarely been pursued with such tenacity.
Public interventions are a time-honoured means of fusing art and the everyday, and this is how Pullen first gained the attention of a wider public. Fellow artist Sandy Plotnikoff presented the example. In April 1994 Plotnikoff set off a minor firestorm in Kelowna, British Columbia, by intervening in an annual radio-sponsored Easter-egg hunt for children. The night before, he scattered thousands of Dumpster-dived buns he had collected, each pinned with the phrase "bun, bun, bun," in the park where the Easter-egg hunt was to take place. Coverage in the local media about the unknown "bun wacko" was picked up by regional newspapers and was available across North America.
In Halifax that July, Pullen gave Plotnikoff's provocation strategy a twist by reiterating a classic 1966 conceptual work by the American artist Bruce Nauman entitled Eat Your Words. She baked sugar cookies in the shapes of letters spelling out "words," packaged them in Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap (complete with computer-generated bar codes) advertising them as Sobey-brand cookies and planted the packages in five local supermarkets. Eighteen packages out of 50 were sold before the commercial cookie hoax was discovered. The police and health authorities were called in, the local media came along and the cookies became a major news story.
While at first glance Pullen's action resembles Plotnikoff's, her intervention had an added edge that belies any easy equation between the two. Plotnikoff's method was aggresive: the idea that it could be just as exciting for children to search for dirty, uneatable buns as chocolate Easter eggs was lost on the citizens of Kelowna. Pullen, on the other hand, called state-regulated marketing practices into question by transforming art-literally-into a friendly, down-home food item. In this way she deftly fused art with the everyday by revealing the impact of mass production for a profit on what you buy in the local supermarket. Why not bake your own cookies rather than buy them? Why are homemade cookies a health hazard as opposed to mass-marketed, machineproduced cookies? Who owns brand names anyway? When you think about it, there was a lot going on here. Pullen articulated a sharply focused social criticism with a light hand. Eat Your Words created a situation that raised serious questions, but did so in a fun way, drawing the public into a critical dialogue with baked goods rather than pummelling them with a moralizing political harangue.
A similar strategy undergirded One of the People in this Room will be a Sucker (1995), her most sensational sculpture of the mid-199os. Again, the literal and metaphorical consumption of art invited a range of critical responses from the public. Sucker was a life-sized cast of the artist's body made from cherry flavoured rock candy. Rock candy is made to be licked (or sucked), but licking the sculpture would of course "damage" the artwork. Visitors to Halifax's eyelevelgallery, where the work was shown, were offered a choice: they could passively refuse to consume the work or they could participate in its destruction by breaking with gallery decorum and licking it. Either way, one's complicity in its demise was already ensured, because Sucker could not survive the climate of the gallery in which it stood. By the end of two weeks it was buckling and collapsing into a pool of sticky red syrup. In casting herself as a sculpture, Pullen transgressed the restrictions at play in traditional art-making for the conventional gallery setting. When you encounter sculpture in an art gallery you are expected to view it, not alter it. The public that accepts these conditions is ensnared in a relationship to art that is not of its own making; and audience members are powerless to transcend their role as spectators. The auto-destruction of Sucker, however, aided and abetted the public's escape from this restrictive nexus. If, indeed, there were "suckers" lurking in the exhibition hall, then every time one of them licked the artwork he or she was also displacing the culturally mediated experience of art appreciation in favour of a pleasurable one of their own making. In so doing they contributed to the intentions of the artist by hastening, literally, Sucker's evolution from rock-candy sculpture to sticky pool of goo.
In 1999 Pullen enrolled in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and in 2001 received a Master of Fine Arts degree. Currently, she teaches at the University of Victoria. Since the mid-199os, she has retreated from the social issues raised by her earlier productions, but remains committed to exploring relationships between the spectator and the artwork. Pullen's recent projects have been perception-based works and are, for the most part, rooted in the gallery environment.
Allan Antliff