The work of Elizabeth Pulie
The objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself – if something like this view has the remotest chance of being plausible, it is possible to suppose that art had come to an end. Of course, there will go on being art making. But art makers, living in what I like to call the post-historical period of art will bing into existence works which lack the historical importance or meaning we have for a very long time come to expect. Arthur C Canto [1]
Blank and beautifui-Eiizabeth Pulie would hope to render her work mute and empty, with nothing to betray save its obvious aesthetic appeal. Pulie's quest is to find the ultimate blank gesture, a quest she sees as the only option available to an artist given the impoverishment of the avant-garde tradition in Western art at the end of the millennium. In other words, Pulie is well-aware of and resigned to her status as a post-historical artist. She describes her project as a response to the hijacking of art by philosophy, as a desire to resuscitate the art object and reinvest it with the aesthetic-if not representational-functions which had largely characterised it before the modern period. Pulie takes issue with the modernist, and to a degree postmodernist, assumption of art's inherently ideological role, an assumption often coupled with a demand that art be politically engaged in order to attain avant-garde status and social relevance. She seeks to unburden art of these onerous expectations, to liberate art to a state of complete uselessness... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline