The Brooklyn Rail

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Bay Area artist Lucy Puls began her artistic practice considering items deemed undesirable, and thus disposable. She gleaned marked-down items in resale stores, specifically looking to acquire objects when they were offered at their lowest exchange value. Accumulating a motley assortment of used books, electronics, clothing, dinnerware, and other everyday items, Puls embarked on a form of consumer culture archaeology, unearthing the castaways of our throwaway society. These discarded objects became the raw material of her sculpture practice, allowing her to interrogate the structures of consumerism with a focus on disposal after product consumption or obsolescence.

Here Everywhere at Nicelle Beauchene offers a retrospective glimpse of selected artworks created over nearly fifteen years. The “In Resin” series features objects encased in yellow resin, transformed into three-dimensional geometries that reveal glimpses of the items trapped within. Children’s toys, easily outgrown, are prevalent, with once-coveted My Little Ponys ensconced in Equulus Duo (Two Horseys) (1993), and stuffed toys uncomfortably frozen into the resin boxes of Noven Beastiolae et Octo Massae (Nine Animals and Eight Blocks) (1994/99). As if enclosed in amber at their point of lowest desirability, they are artifacts of personal affect. If these pieces evoke any sense of nostalgia, the irony of their regained but misplaced allure merely replicates the idiosyncrasies of attachment to objects.

A BB gun’s underpinnings of violence undercut the ostensible innocence of toys in Pueri Arma (Child’s Gun) (1991). The muzzle breaches the heavily fractured surface of the resin cuboid. Beneath it hangs the toy’s heavily worn, original cardboard box, originally adorned with the image of the Red Ryder cowboy and the problematic stereotype of his Native-American sidekick, Little Beaver. The piece seems to ask, when is violence introduced to boys, and what constructs are we buying into with our consumption choices?

In Res Parvus (Little Things) (1991), a medley of small plastic toys enclosed in ten cubes are suspended at even intervals, reminiscent of Donald Judd’s “Stacks.” Yet, there’s a subtle irreverence that undermines the purity of canonical Minimalism, as in the stacked toasters in Segmenti Octo (Proctor Silex, w/ red) (2000), which allows for playful subversion within geometric order. With a visual vocabulary that recalls Minimalism, Puls’s straight-edged, amberized sculptures evoke the precision of factory-made products. She invites us to reconsider ordinary objects devoid of their original function—paper towels, kitchen knives, and dinnerware preserved in wax or resin, neutralized of their intended use in domestic settings. The methods of display also evoke the mechanized production of factories, with makeshift crate podiums elevating resin sculptures on different registers, while others rest atop metal shelves nailed to the wall like assembly lines.

Notions of replaceability are sharpened in Puls’s fossilized technology, such as an answering machine in Nuntius(Panasonic) (2000) and a metal record stand with sleeved records in Protegens Manicarum (Physical) (1999). Nearby, the desktop, keyboard, and mouse of a Macintosh 512K are individually nestled within three resin cubic forms, echoing their clunky and square outlines. Puls recalls that when the computer model was introduced in 1984, it was nicknamed the "fat" Mac due to its significant increase in memory storage compared to the previous model—a moniker that Puls Latinizes in the title, Pinguis (MAC 512, complete) (1999).

There’s a clever anachronism in assigning Latin titles to objects so far removed from antiquity, and yet now so far removed from our present moment as well, suggesting language can also fall into obsolescence with time. And though semantically, these Latin words can still hold a relationship to the objects Puls assigns them, words like automatus and sonus can also spill into a litany of meanings in our contemporary moment. This slippage of signification comes through as well in her “Of Book” series, where she reshapes books to reconsider the ideological frameworks inherent in her scavenged reference materials. Imperfectus (Encyclopedia Britannica) (2002) and Involvo (Websters Twentieth Century, Red) (2002) were created by unbinding and meticulously sticking loose pages into a solid free-standing ring and sphere, respectively. By sanding them down, the words and phrases blur into a typographic haze, re-articulating the ideologic form of the encyclopedia as a repository and authority of knowledge.

For all the playfulness with materials it offers, Puls’s latest exhibition is an insightful display of the ever-shifting boundaries of cultural significance. Although all works in the show cull back at least two decades, the artist’s work nonetheless feels timely, precisely because, starting as cultural debris and recast anew, her sculptures reflect the distorted mechanisms of desire, disposal, and sentimentalization still relevant today.