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The art work of Robert Pulie might be from a fun-park gone wrong. The irreverent sense of play in Pulie's works makes full use of the gallery space and of the viewer's place in it. The fun park is a complex of unproductive machines: the lighter side of machines of industry. To become part of the unproductive machines is to be thrown into the midst of repeating lights, undulations and gyres where for a brief time we are secure from the rigours of labour. The funpark is a caricature of industrial society: we put our faces on bodies which are not ours; we eat what we usually do not eat and we do not worry about thinking.
There is always a certain innocence, an ingenuousness, to Pulie's handling of materials. Once he is finished with his carnivalesque objects, they are even less useful than they had been. In a past exhibition he slammed a perspex amorphous shape, with two face-holes as if it were a sham group torso cut-out, in the middle of the gallery, so that the spectator was placed in a state of ambivalence as to whether to walk around, or become a part of the object which was so patently intended for display. The display and the role of the spectator were undetermined.
The Paint is the Petrol consisted of a procession of plywood cut-outs, this time of oversized shoes and undersized cars, all about one foot high. The snag was that only the upright support remained visible as the fronts were pasted together. A small amount of painterly description was visible where the contours were incompatible. On the wall was a single panel, the Plywood Manifesto