Plastics are another world in themselves. They range from delicately thin films and foils to aero plane and racing car tyres, refrigerators, radios, TV sets, office equipment and other machines are for the large part made of plastics. Crockery, toys, LP records, furniture, figurines and tapes are made of plastic materials. Even more significant is the invisible use of plastics in car building and in housing and construction, as insulating materials, packing materials, human body prosthesis and sexual objects living and inanimate. Not only can it be all these things, as the readymade, it is art.

Plastics are another world in themselves. Dualistic in beauty, it is revered as a miraculous material for its transformational qualities on the one hand and hated for its stubborn decomposition and destructive entanglement with nature on the other. Plastic has entered the collective psyche and it is there to stay. As malleable as it is to those that use it, it is as capable of being shaped and molded but is also capable to form or influence the plastic forces of the imagination. It is a resource that invents objects, it needs something to become, for it is only useful as an artifice of something else.

Though the very word suggest it, Plastic has become not only the notion of forming, shaping and molding in fine art, but has defined itself and been defined materially as an art object unto itself. Its use in modern art was paramount appearing as paint (Synthetic Polymer | Acrylic), but its use in contemporary art is the very tears of conception, the simulacrum made visible through plastic and silicon cast copies, Plexiglas, vinyl lettering and the bodies of our technological equipment and power tools.

Roland Barthes published his encounters with the material in a text called Plastic, a short essay on the substance in his 1957 book ‘Mythologies’. Barthes identified the mythical past and future of plastic as infinitely transformable and invisible, nature as seen by Barthes is not only the muse of plastic, that which plastic makes image of, but is a rival to nature. We consider the substances own independent nature that which is itself an enigma. Rethinking all this...

He says despite having the names of Greek shepherds such as Poly & Plastikos it is the stuff of alchemy;

“...more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible. And it is this, in fact, which makes it a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature. Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than the trace of a movement.” ‡

‡ Roland Barthes, MYTHOLOGIES, Selected and translated from the French by ANNETTE LAVERS THE NOONDAY PRESS - NEW YORK, FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX. Translated from the French Mythologies ©1957 by Editions du Seuil, Paris Translation ©1972 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.

Social thought moves through plastic towards luminous matter frozen in time. “It is a ‘shaped’ substance: whatever its final state, plastic keeps a flocculent appearance...”§

§ Roland Barthes, MYTHOLOGIES, © 1957
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It is our Ideas alone that give us the multitude of objects that plastic becomes, and it becomes us. Alongside it’s unlikely counterpart ‘Electricity’ plastics have helped us attain the mystical powers of psychic telepathy, the shell of the crystal ball that sits on or desk tops and travels in our pockets. From the radio, to the television, to the computer, to the pocket I phone and the microchip, plastic has been there, housing the magic of our late civilization. To further quote Barthes:

“Plastic is wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used: ultimately, objects will be invented for the sole pleasure of using them. The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.” ¶

¶ Roland Barthes, MYTHOLOGIES, © 1957
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Plastic hearts, plastic sculpture, Plastic Art? The term Plastic Arts is used more generally in the Latin speaking world to denote what we describe as Fine Arts and seems more fitting to our current notions of art than the secondary concept of visual art, the latter term used for what we generally think of as art, drawing, painting, sculpture. If the whole world can be plasticized then so too can art. Piet Mondrian and De Stijl sort after a plastic reality in art. In 1926 Mondrian co-authored an article for the Lillebased review Vouloir with Michael Seuphor. In that text, Mondrian out lined the means and goals of Neoplasticism. In part II of the article, Neoplasticism and Form, Mondrian states his case regarding the primacy of the plastic elements in art over the artifice of nature.

‘In nature, relationships are veiled because matter appears as natural form, colour, and sound. All of the arts have unconsciously followed the “morphoplastics” in the past. Thus, until now, art has copied nature. For centuries, painting treated relationships in terms of natural forms and colours: but today it has arrived at the plastics of relationship alone. For centuries, painters based their compositions on natural form and colour; but today, pure composition is becoming the plastic expression, the image.’ **

** Piet Mondrian, Neo Plasticism: The General Principle of Plastic Equivalence. Paris, Editions de l’Effort Moderne. Léonce Rosenberg, 1920, Brochure, 24 x 16 cm, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Serge Lemoine, Mondrian & De Stilj, Published in England in 1987 by Art Data. ©1987 by SPADEM and ADAGP, Paris. Printed in Italy. Pp, 42-43
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With plastic art we are liberated from the eye, (our eye is liberated from nature) we can see beyond the worlds given appearance and we can think of any substance as plastic on all sense levels. Fine art yes, is a reasonable term, but is still confined to the institution and the academy, its soaked in the idea of refinement of form and culture. Plastic Art on the other hand, although marked with superficiality and artifice, is a term able to take on the fields of any medium regarding shaping, molding, being drawn, cast, extruded, impressed to the point of deformation, formed and flexed. It is not refined but is the shape of the final movement upon it.

Language too is plastic, how does language take on the qualities of plastic? In the work of 1960’s counter culture journalist Tom Wolfe, language is used like a flexible malleable substance. He uses a language that explodes with comic book words like “POW!” and “BOING.” His sentences are shot with ellipses, stabbed with exclamation points, or bombarded with long lists of brand names, onomatopoeia’s and anatomical terms. Language wasn’t the only plastic obsession of Wolfe’s. Wolfe’s first collection of articles—The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, written mostly for Esquire and New York magazine—was a carnival of pieces about custom car styling and demolition derbies, teenage tribal rock music, the girl of the year and the plastic city. That’s right you guessed it, Las Vegas. Even by this time the plastic forces that create and wear down a mountain had been harnessed to build the greatest artificial spectacle known in the Western world at the time. Wolfe describes a plastic world of fad hype and sensation, a world that accepts your money in plastic payments. His reportage on the rages and outrages of modern America’s cultural phenomena is fascinating—and fatiguing.

Perhaps the pulsating, neon-lit, chromium-plated, plastic, pastel peregrinations of the times demanded this plastic roller-coaster rush of words to recreate the “shockkkkkk” of the real-life experience. Wolfe, too often dressed for the role of plastic descriptor, coated in orange or off-white suits, he appears like plastic, an action-painter-of words recklessly ravaging the retinas with pastel wordblobs.††

†† Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Published by farrar, straus & giroux, 1965
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But knowing plastic and being plastic does not only mean being superficially attractive yet unoriginal or artificial. Understanding the plastic nature of the human brain John Lennon and Yoko Ono quickly realized that minds are also capable of being molded or formed. For example easily influenced and impressionable the plastic minds of youth were something Lennon may have felt responsible for. In lui of this logic Ono and Lennon conceived the Plastic Ono Band. In 2010, Yoko Ono discussed the origin of the Plastic Ono Band name: “As I was asked to do a show in Berlin before John and I got together, I wanted to use four plastic stands with tape recorders in each one of them, as my band. I told that story to John, and he immediately coined the phrase plastic ono band.” ‡‡

‡‡ “Yoko Q and A day – Fridays on Twitter – latest answers here”. Imagine Peace. 2010-09-19. Retrieved 2011-08-20.
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The beauty of the idea was that it was a band with no fixed idea and exchangeable players and members. In fact, the Plastic Ono Band was an identity to describe works by Lennon and Ono and whoever happened to be performing with them. The plasticity of relationships was a key to the dynamic of the band so to the concept of change. Lennon and Ono decided that all of their future endeavors would be credited to the Plastic Ono Band. Its credo, “YOU are the Plastic Ono Band”, implied that everyone was part of the group. Ono and Lennon suggest that everyone is plastic.

They are all malleable substance capable of being reformed, shaped, and transformed. Certainly we sense the brains plasticity. The Brain that changes itself explains that the networks and patterns in the adolescent brain are constantly and violently changing as it rewires neuron pathways for new thoughts and experiences. In this case, Ono implied that both their audience and themselves need to mould their minds to make change and difference.

The plasticity of the mind is a sort of psycho-plastikos, a level in our perception where the ridged, tangible and rational modes of perception can be swiftly turned into a hot melting landscape of heavenly hallucination and hellish fear. Whether by substance or sensory experience, it is sometimes a shock to the brain to have to reconfigure it’s own stimulus | response mechanisms. In Aldous Huxley’s 1956 classic The Doors of Perception, Huxley presents an articulate microscopic view of the brain under the effects of mescaline. Through Huxley’s written experiment with the substance we are told about fascinating colors, tones and textures, the reflections of a piece of glass or the shimmer of a metallic surface. Huxley explains that all these precious materials, objects and surfaces have for millennia opened us to the antipodes of the mind. Huxley reminds us that; “Precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.” §§

§§ Heaven and Hell, first published by Chatto & Windus 1954-1956 Published in one volume in Penguin Books 1959. Made and Printed in Great Britain by Hunt Barnard & Co. Ltd, Aylesbury. Set in Monotype Bembo. Pp, 86-87

If we put in place of Gem Stones, objects of plastic then how can we interpret our world as it is today. What imitates nature becomes nature, as Huxley explains we are at risk of constant visionary propulsion toward new flexible regions of the brain; “Indeed, we may risk a generalization and say that whatever, in nature or in a work of art, resembles one of those intensely significant, inwardly glowing objects encounter at the mind’s antipodes, is capable of inducing, if only in a partial and attenuated form, the visionary experience”. ¶¶

¶¶ Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception Heaven and Hell, 1954-1956

Huxley uses the term antipodes to describe the “regions of the mind” that one can reach via meditation, vitamin deficiencies, self-flagellation, fasting, or (most effectively, he says) with the aide of certain chemical substances like LSD or mescaline. Essentially, Huxley defines these “antipodes” of the mind as mental states that one may reach when one’s brain is disabled (from a biological point of view) and can then be conscious of certain “regions of the mind” that one would otherwise never be able to pay attention to, due to the lack of biological / utilitarian usefulness. “The traffic between our Old World and its antipodes, between Here and Beyond, travels along a two-way street. Gems, for example, come from the soul’s visionary heaven; but they also lead the soul back to that heaven. Contemplating them, men find themselves (as the phrase goes) transported – carried away towards that Other Earth of the Platonic dialogue, the magical place where every pebble is a precious stone. And the same effects may be produced by artifacts of glass and metal, by tapers burning in the dark, by brilliantly coloured images and ornaments, by flowers, shells, and feathers, by landscapes seen, as Shelley from the Euganean Hills saw Venice, in the transfiguring light of dawn or sunset”. ***

*** Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception Heaven and Hell, 1954-1There is no doubt that plastic [deserves a place] would have been listed in Huxley’s hierarchy of precious stones and transcendental materials. Had Huxley before 1956 had more contact with the future of its transformations the antipodes would have certainly responded to the language of plastics. In the years after Huxley Published The Doors of Perception and until his death in 1963, Designer Plastic alongside SPT’s, Synthetic Psycho-Tropics | LSD would hand in hand define the visionary realm of the psychedelic experience.
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PLASTIC FURNITURE

Compressed tube injected hot synthetic polymer crystals began to be pumped under our back sides and on to our light globes in the form of slick dripping, comfortable blob shaped chairs and spherical mushrooms blooming lamps and tables. Early as 1950, Eames & Eero Sarrinen made Plastic & Fibre-glass arm chairs,... Many of the plastics were not only satisfactory as substitutes for wood, metals, ceramics, glass, ivory, ebony, rubber, etc., but proved to be far superior, and in some cases, completely replaced the natural materials. Today [2011] the cult of designer plastic is as evident as ever. Recently I took a calculated visit into the modern contemporary furniture Super Store show room SPACE. In the walls of this temple to design I was confronted, encapsulated in the shimmering, glossy marvels of high-end plastic products. A shrine to the platonic apartment, an ideal | heavenly realm of contemporary living. I realized, I am here; this is it, The Future! Surrounded as I was by round, smooth glowing spheres, cylinders, symmetrical obscurities, cubes and low functioning polyhedrons, an epiphany prevailed, a profound experience, a moment of transcendental bliss. I was having a relatively more perceptive and engaging experience with the objects and the space than I had at many art exhibitions. I questioned, is this what we do? We make new experience imitating reality? Furniture of the past cast in plastic. But the irony, the sham, All these objects, the treasures of paradise, the stones of fire, they were all labeled with ridiculously high prices in the thousands $$$. Kartell prisms of function stacked up neatly in notes and coins. The giant Kartell plastic gnome smiling back at you, buy me! So at the moment of psychedelic bliss the curtain fell. Boom, Marx’s fetish of the commodity raised it’s head in the gnomes eye.

In Marx’s critique of political economy, a commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. Marks turns to fetishism to make sense of the apparently magical quality of the commodity: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”.

Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things (e.g., in totems). Marx borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms “commodity fetishism.” †††

††† Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 1867 chapter 1 section 4
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The awe of industrial alchemy, not a trace of the hand, a miracle of creation. Neatly wrapped in a price tag destined for the chosen few, the rich, the wealthy, a symbol of the Bourgeoisie. Like precious stones in the past, plastic has too become a holy possession for the social elites and the ever present desire to have divinity in the mind’s eye here on earth.

But let’s move back to our plastic master. The mythology of plastic and the dialogue initiated by Barthes was published 1957, just one year after Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. It is odd what Barthes added to the missing material in Huxley’s journey to the antipodes. Through his critical fetish of the material, Barthes gives plastic it’s place in the realm of visionary matter, it’s magic, the physical evidence of mind over matter, the invisible factory.

“...the movement here is almost infinite, transforming the original crystals into a multitude of more and more startling objects, plastic is, all told, a spectacle to be deciphered: the very spectacle of its end-products. At the sight of each terminal form (suitcase, brush, car-body, toy, fabric, tube, basin or paper), the mind does not cease from considering the original matter as an enigma. This is because the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels. Hence a perpetual amazement, the reverie of man at the sight of the proliferating forms of matter, and the connections he detects between the singular of the origin and the plural of the effects. And this amazement is a pleasurable one, since the scope of the transformations gives man the measure of his power, and since the very itinerary of plastic gives him the euphoria of a prestigious free wheeling through Nature”. .‡‡‡

‡‡‡ Roland Barthes, MYTHOLOGIES, © 1957 , Pp, 98
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Through plastics we are at one with nature, because we no longer depend on it. Holding its memory in the material of the multiple corporeal, plastic does not just satisfy function it invents it. Our art is one of plastic forms for their own sake, where a bucket is no less than a pen or a bowl of fruit. Plastic is not actually anything as Barthes tells us, ‘it is ubiquity made visible’

Overall , the term plastics applies to a large group of synthetic resins which are plastic or pliable at some time in their manufacture and while in their plastic state can be molded, cast or extruded, i.e., shaped, usually employing heat or pressure. With critical insight we can see that like the material, art, music, language, minds and people can be shaped, molded and cast when forces are applied hence we see that in art today all of these elements are integrated in the term plastic arts. From its morphic physical forms to the invisible illusions of perfect silicon breasts, plastic takes form in the simulations of nature whilst creating its own elusive nature respondent with the liquid geometric pulsations of a visionary mind. It is our in heritance that we take this substance and use it carefully. Mondrian would be pleased, the shapes of pure form unto themselves cast in the material unto itself. Not the imitation of nature but a new nature – The Neo-Plastic. Though the future of plastic is uncertain one thing is certain, by placing the pressure of our thoughts on plastic, to re-use re-cycle and re-incarnate we shape and continue to reshape the invisible.