|
“The only task left is to consider how I received this idea. For I did not get it through the senses, nor has it ever appeared to me unexpectedly, as the ideas of sensible objects are wont to do, when these objects are presented or seem to be presented to my external organs, nor is it only a product for the fiction of my mind, for it is not in my power to diminish nor to add anything to it. No possibility remains, consequently, except that this idea is born and produced with me from the moment that I was created, just as was the idea of myself.” |
 |
Iconic Plastic – Horace Brockington
“The only task left is to consider how I received this idea. For I did not get it through the senses, nor has it ever appeared to me unexpectedly, as the ideas of sensible objects are wont to do, when these objects are presented or seem to be presented to my external organs, nor is it only a product for the fiction of my mind, for it is not in my power to diminish nor to add anything to it. No possibility remains, consequently, except that this idea is born and produced with me from the moment that I was created, just as was the idea of myself.”
—Descartes, Meditations
Artists have historically minded that edge between process and materiality in order to provide creative statements derived from abstracts in nature to intentionally ambiguous narratives. The diversity of new and inexpensive plastics has continually intrigued artists for their potentiality and flexibility, or else for their link to consumer culture. The ability of plastics to simultaneously provide both softness and strength is a major attribute of their materiality. Perhaps more than any other modernist’s material, plastics, as artistic means, offer unlimited potential for a complete range of iconic and metaphorical associations. Artists often mimic their associative reference with industrial society, advancements in technologies and the promise of a utopia society. It is therefore not simply for its creative possibilities that many artists embrace the wide range of plastics materials, but for plastic’s metaphorical associations themselves.
The artists discussed in this essay, “Iconic Plastic,” share no common bond in their artistic practices—nor, aesthetic and contextual ends—rather, they are united through the expansive range through which they push their material means, especially in the use of plastic, in order to bring the viewer into the dynamics of artistic strategies, or into the polemics of content. However, if one characteristic were to unite the works included, it might be defined as the very nature of the plastic medium, in the way that it speaks to an interplay between logic and absurdity.
Artist such as Eva Hesse, Richard Tuttle and John Duff bravely push the potential of using plastics into a conceptual and minimal vocabulary—eccentric formats that revolutionized object-making—while also pushing the very notion of sculpture. The use of plastic allowed artists such as Tuttle and Hesse to create works in which a rather complex and rich content is achieved by an economy of means.
Collectively, all the artists in “Iconic Plastic” use the substance’s materiality to create a certain ambiguity in order to dislocate or to expand our rather concrete reasoning.
While initially creating freestanding objects, Lisa Hoke’s work, over the course of years, has become increasingly site-specific. Working with a host of elements, which can include mirrors, glass, pigments and, often, plastic materials, Hoke has described her work as an attempt to capture the dynamics of arrested motion. Hoke utilizes industrial-produced materials, such as plastic, in order or create highly complex and energetic installations.
Her works have been described as relating to a void, patterns in which no clearly discernible system or pattern is possible. Hoke uses plastic materials to create sculptures that erupt and move into real space, suspended in space, interacting with the surrounding walls and often inviting the viewer to find their own unique point of entry into the work. Her works often consist of a series of vibrant colored elements, reds, earth, colors, blues, rich yellows all juxtaposed in eccentric color patterning that periodically undermine the actual nature of the plastic materials. The variation in color creates a surface tension in her works that gives the suggestion of animated elements.
In her earlier works, Hoke intentionally recycled found materials. In Ricochet, Hoke juxtaposed five large, irregular plastic sheets, consisting of translucent drinking straws immersed in a clear resin. The overall result is a luminous series of objects, suspended in midair by lengths of string, all converging near the ceiling. These strings are extended through bolts or drawer-pull handles, encapsulating the surrounding space, ending at the top of a single wall where they thread downward through various types of drawer-pulls screwed to the wall. The final result is a type of crystalline design, in which the final image is a series of strings connected to a series of cast-iron forms. This collective convergence of elements results in what has been described as a formal tension between light and space and the surrounding architectural environment.
Hoke has commented: “I love that initial intoxication of color… You can take the simplest things and find out what potential is locked inside.”
Tom Butter has long used plastic, especially polyurethane with a host of painterly and materials such as metals, concrete, etc. to push his sculpture towards creating a dialogue between formalist and spontaneous experimentation. His work has always hinted at both Surrealists and Constructivists vocabularies. Butter’s forms operate between their essential abstraction and their potentiality for narrative.
The strength of Butter’s forms is often the honesty of the materials and process. He wants the very nature of the materials to be an essential element of the objects, as such armature, construction, shaping, the entire work, becomes a type of visual manifestation of his decision making in creating a work. There still remains a subversive ambiguity to Butter’s in his artistic strategies. Content is never clearly reviewed despite the ‘strip-down “ nature of his materials means.
Behind their inherent humor is a profound serious about formal art making and real life experiences.
The evolution of completed working Butter’s approaches moves towards the treatment of rather fragile materials tot appears far more solidity. His approach of combining stone, or metal, with the precious lightness of flexible polyurethane give the work a structural foundation and solidity that anchor them squarely into the history of sculpture.
Working in plastic clear medium, Butter like Hoke is intrigue by color, but his “ palette” is far different. He is decisively careful that his color never overwhelms or becomes decorative. Rather the Butter often selects rather eccentric color combinations in his work in to remove emphasis from this aspect of his work. Color in Butter’s sculpture never leads, or seduces, rather is remains another element- still integral- to the overall object .For an artist who has throughout his career made drawings and more recently turned to painting one suspects that using color in his surface, which for the most part, are always translucent, he is equally attempting to address tradition of painting.
Of his work Tom Butter has stated:
“I present dualistic tensions between materials and systems in my work in order to suggest the functional incompatibility of so many things in our world: representation and reality, life and death, relationships between people. My sculpture is divided in fundamental ways in order to focus on the means of opposition as well as the means of joining. This duality requires, and produces, both doubt and hope. Elements are combined so they can work together, but they do not become part of a seamless whole. Many of the pieces have rotating, spinning or balancing elements expressing transience and mutability. Translucent fiberglass works in opposition to solid form by allowing the penetration of light. Steel structures hold space and define edges efficiently, with a 19th century engineering logic. The resulting work is both with and against the natural world. This tension or polarity illuminates our own sense of being in the world, and concurrently feeling separate from it. Unusual and interesting aspects of presence emerge from the amalgam of the materials and forms with which I work.”
John Duff emerged in the late 1960s were his works were included in exhibition projects under such rubrics as Post Minimalist art, Anti-Illusion, Materials/Process Art. Over the years he has worked extensively with works often combing polyurethane, plaster, and steel into geometric and organic shapes. The transparency of many of his earlier works has lead observer to compare his works to a type of drawing in space. Their lightness gives them the air of formless sculpture/objects that are continuously in flux.
Coupled with his plastic means and his approach to form, his works often appear unstable, malleable, possessing a type of suggestive internal motion in which forms have the potentiality if not the actuality to change. As such his forms have a their own eccentric internal logic, which has been described as the point at which the mind of the sculptor and that of his viewer meet and form something active, living, unique.
Duff has stated that his interest lies in the way separate materials combine to form something greater than each alone. Nathan Kernan has described Duff’s work as studies in “ binary permutations”. In many of his works of the 80s and 90s, he has combined resin plus wax, rubber, plaster, cement, wax, and a host of materials in manners that are characterized by eccentric, and whimsical, often comic juxtaposition of forms.
From l960 and throughout the 1970’s the artist Eva Hesse, one of the seminal figures conceptual and minimalist art often used plastics latex rubber, poly resin singularly or combined with a host of materials to create three- dimensional sculptural installations. Not surprisingly then Hesse’s art has impacted many of the artists included in this brief discussion. Similar to many of her contemporaries, but perhaps more so than others, Hesse mined the boundaries between processes and materials as the intent of her art. Her forms have been described as operating between order rigidity and pliability, geometric and biomorphic forms, series and singularity.
While her practices were impacted by a materials, and medium: paint, watercolor, pencil, papier mache, it in her work with latex, and fiberglass in which she pushes her techniques to create works that are collaged, reconfigured, combined with discarded, or found elements in order to dissolve the inherent nature of the individual properties of the singular medium. Often the fascination with materials as in her exploration for fiberglass and resin was her aim to reveal and retain gesture as the impetus for working with the very medium. Such devices as replication, repetition, and serial formal sculptural arrangements are crucial to her works. Hesse often extending these structures from the ceiling, resting against the walls or spreading out on the floor in order challenge the rather restrictive notion of object in both place and space.
Hesse combination of clear polyethylene with sand, paper, and cotton often gave a work anthropomorphic quality in both form and shape. This combination of industrial, and natural materials equally endowed her work is an expressive vitality, and unique physicality, that formal and sensual, delicate and tactile.
One of the delightful of Hesse’s approach remains her ability to embrace issues related to time and process through the very nature of her materials. In working in nontraditional materials especially plastics, her sculptures had deteriorated to the point that they no longer resemble their original structures. In several instances the latex, which in it original state was apparently translucent and light has, becomes solid, opaque forms. However, one can clearly argues that for an artist, whose interest lay in time and process the present state of many of these works speaks to the very nature of her artistic practices and investigations.
Judy Pfaff has long associated her work with aspects of exterior environments, light, water, trees, etc. There was also her interest in shifting imagery, in which color in her installations operated rather spatially. Pfaff notes that for over ten years she pushed to make objects /installations that contained content. She notes: “My work has been talked about as being decorative and joyous. I think it has some joyful aspects, but I find myself thinking, “ How could this be so misunderstood.”
More recently Pfaff turned her attention to interior space, and with that color, and material means take on a new functions. Her new terrain is that in the cerebral interior. Pfaff in her fresh explosive interior installations now wants material means much of which consists of plastics to convey the notion our interior landscapes. But the works are never meant to symbolize simplistic scientific diagrams of the brain functions or anatomy. Pfaff complex installations are intended to leave the viewer with what she has described as a type of “sensation”. Viewers tend never to remember the works, but rather their reactions and relations with these new vigorous sprawling colorful environments.
In Pfaff’s work there has always been a curiosity with science, and the very structure of things. The works has always been influenced by a host of forces, outside of art. Now, Pfaff wants the work to look organic, The installations that look like the functions of the brain a type of have echoes of the old 1960s sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage, the first of it kind to employ psychedelic special effects. Of these installations, Pfaff has stated that part of her intentions is to suggest the interior spaces where all human bodily senses and connection from right to left, the eye and work collectively and how the brain process this information. She states, “I just wanted it to feel like walking inside a head- as I am alive inside. I think most artwork comes out of someplace you can tap into, and make that so obvious.”
Pffaf notes that the recent work is far more psychological. It’s more fragile; it could collapse quite easily in certain sort of way, emotionally. In Pfaff’s approach there is a tenacity or rigor that is often overlooked by the viewer. In order to create these rather complex structural systems and retain their visibility Pfaff has to be very precise.
Anish Kapoor creates structures that are realized in both interior and exterior settings. His diverse works include powdered pigmented sculptures and site- specific instillations that interact with the viewer’s psychological and physical space. He has explored what he as described as deep-rooted metaphysical polarities: presence and absence, being and non-being, place and non-place and the solid and intangible.
In 2002 for Tate Modern Unilever Series, Kapoor created one of his major works, Marsyas. Marsyas created for The Tate’s massive Turbine Hall consisted of three steel rings joined together by a single span of PVC membrane. Two are positioned vertically, at each end of the space, while the third is suspended parallel with the bridge. Seemingly wedged into place, the dynamics generated by the three rigid steels structure determines the sculpture’s overall form, a shift from vertical to horizontal and back to vertical again. The PVC membrane gives the entire structure a fleshy quality, which Kapoor has described as being “ like a flayed skin”. The sculpture’s dark red color gives the work a physicality, which Kapoor describes as a body into sky.
Kapoor approached the commanding space of Turbine Hall as a rectangular box with a shelf (the bridge) in the middle of it. Human scale and the relationship of the viewer to the work was key to his conceptualization of the work. The work has been described as immersing the viewer in a monochromatic field of color. Because it is impossible to view the entire sculpture from any one position the viewer must experience it as a series of encounters, and left to construct a personal concept of the whole.
Brian Jungen’s work has been described as centered into the humorous observation of contemporary consumer culture and his ancestral association with the Dane-zaa Nation of northern British Columbia. His works raises issues related to various economic, sociological and cultural values of the western world while placing them in a dialogue with Aboriginal and global cultures.
Jungen has stated that his approach to working with existing objects and altering them is directly related to a material sensibility which he experienced in his childhood, the way his mother’s family would use objects in ways that weren’t intended, a kind of improvisatory recycling that was borne out of both practical and economic necessity.
Cetology (2002) made from common plastic lawn chairs resembles a lifelike whale skeleton sculpture. The work moves between objects of natural history while simultaneously commenting on commodity culture through the household object of the plastic lawn chairs. The work is in fact named after the branch marine mammal science devoted to the study of whales.
Isolated Depictions, consist of a handcrafted cedar pallet that is surmounted by neatly stacked plastic cafeteria trays in several colors. Trevor Smith has observed that while the form can be understood in terms of the classic minimalist cube, it is also a facsimile of an escape pod that was fashioned by an inmate at one of Canada’s largest prisons. Knowing that the cafeteria trays were delivered by truck to another facility for cleaning, the prisoner had built up and glued together many cafeteria trays, leaving a void at the center in which he could hide while the trays were being transported. In Jungen’s sculpture the void is now taken by with a television playing daytime programming and soap operas.
Gregory Coates’ works moved subversively between sculptural objects and paintings. In the past he has utilized rubber inner- tube as the major material means for his work. However, a series of recent works consist of wrapped plastic structures, which are directly related to minimalist monochromatic painting, and sculpture of the late 70s. In these new works Coates wraps the surfaces of wood palette frames with shrink wrap, emulating elements of layering found in traditional painting techniques and incorporating aspects of drawing of their linear forms.
Coates has stated: “As a painter I find surface, color, and line my realm of explorations. This recent work largely monochromatic, scales down on the hierarchy and drama between the differences of materials and focuses more on spatial nuances. This body of work reflects my attraction to simple repetition of line. …”
However, as any artist who continuously works with available means, with this series of work, Coates has transforms his usual investigations to readily available means. These works are clearly transitional and suggest the art deeper embracement of sculpture.
Sofi Zezmer’s sculptures are constructed from a series of materials, often colored plastic: pinks, blues, oranges, and reds, combined with fabricated metal objects assembled together. Her use of plastics and other synthetic materials with welded elements suggest ongoing give and take between an organic fragility and metal’s rigidity. But her use of metal parts is always light and as a result their armature never weighs down Zezmer’s highly biomorphic forms. They suggest biological systems or microcosm, volumes moving through an ambiguous space. There is a linear quality to her works. The translucent quality of her plastic means provide a dynamic internal/external movement which proposes a type of cosmological reordering.
Her works has been described as reflective of an increasingly technology infiltrated daily environment. Her forms often suggest mass produce objects ranging from life saving medical equipment to household objects and children toys. This comes in part from her works being motivated by the cognitive processes of our cultural socialization, and patterns of awareness in processing and classifying information. In a conversation with Zezmer she has stated that she draws her point of departure from biochemistry, quantum mechanics, space travel, and genetic stem research.
Zezmer states: “I am interested in patterns of identifying and classifying information; the temporality and fragmentation of vision and awareness; observing how the same element can simultaneously function quite different, conflicting context, the zooming and/ or magnifying structural patterns in their hybrid accumulations; disorientating the accustomed sense of order.”
Inigo Manglano- Ovalle, works with a host of diverse materials in his installations Thematically, the works has been centered upon human genetic research, sensory deprivation, and sound systems. Often the serious his works is subverted by the minimalist aspects of his installations. Manglano-Ovalle’s interest lies in exploring the simultaneity and multiplicity of events. His work is engaged in a process of understanding how certain extraordinary forces and systems –man made and a natural – are always and already in process of remaking the world. In all of his installations there is emphatic intention on the artist’s part to engage the viewer, implicating him/ her into the unfolding events, linking the experience of the works/installations to a type of self-reflection.
Manglano-Ovalle combines his interest in working with a host of synthetic mediums with a interdisciplinary practice that has leads to his collaboration with geneticists, biotech researchers, legal consultant, medical ethicists, biotech researchers, writers, historians, etc. He is less driven by clear lines of artistic production and more so by issues related to personal and collective spaces, the negotiation of borders, and social injustice, treating these issues in a more abstract manner, against what has been described as a larger metaphorical landscape of passages—through time, space, atmosphere, and geography.
Weather and climate, super cell storm clouds have become new vehicles for examining patterns of migrations. These new interventions reflect the Manglano-Ovalle mapping new zones of a technologically mediated interface.
Cloud, one of Manglano –Ovalle most ambitious large scale sculpture is a fiberglass and titanium sculpture of a cloud whose form is based on a cumulonimbus (or supercell) thundercloud modeled by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. Working with architect Douglas Garafalo, Manglano –Ovalle converted the numerical data scanned from an existing 50 kilometer wide thundercloud, and then scaled it down to be digitally sculpted by computer-controlled milling machines used by the automobile industry to prototype new car forms. Over sixteen feet wide and suspended, Manglano –Ovalle’s harnessed and shimmering cloud looms becoming a the equivalent of a innocuous meteorological event that determined its three dimensional form.
James Elaine has characterized Tara Donovan’s sculptures as born of everyday materials, such as scotch tape, drinking straws, paper plates, and Styrofoam cups. The results are large-scale abstract floor and wall works suggestive of landscapes, clouds, and cellular structures. In approaching the construction of her works, the impact of light is essential for determining the final structure of her work, but the final form actually evolves from the properties and dynamics of the materials. Donovan delights in the use of the everyday which she explores through multiplication and repetition to question the viewer’ very sense of perception.
Paul Brewer has described Tara Donovan’s art as directly related to the legacies associated with the transposition of utilitarian materials. Process, Minimalist, and Postminimalist artists are often terms often cited by observers in describing Donovan’s work. However, there is equally a biomorphic quality inherent in her work. She has stated that the biomorphic reading of her work is rather accidental rather than intentional that exist rather as a by-product of her process which may the work appear “organic” because her process mimics in the most elementary sense, basic systems of growth in nature.
Space for Donovan operates rather contextually. Light is major factor in her work, and it operates both metaphorically and perceptually. Donovan often uses the term “ site responsive” to explain the dependency of her works on the architectural specifics and lighting conditions of the given space in which her works are installed.
The recent Haze evokes the notions of fossilized remains, but in reality is a series of plastic straws forming peaks that range over thirteen feet. Stacked in a perpendicular formation along a wall resulting with the suggestion of buttressed vertical planes. The straws pushed to the surface create the suggestions of recessions for hills or ancient rock formations projecting into real space.
Untitled (Plastic Cups) is a large-scale installations resembling a topographical landscape, measures approximately 5” x 50” x 60” occupying the center of the exhibition of space. The work is simultaneously suggests deep moving turbulent seascape, but it equally has an other- worldliness, perhaps space clusters or a glacial terrain. The work atmospheric effects are both cerebral and seductive.
Richard Tuttle’s art similar to many of the artists discussed herein is often depended upon to a certain degree on post-studio practices where art is often completed as it is installed. Similar to Eva Hesse Tuttle’s work has influenced several generations of younger artists. Artists such as Jim Hodges, Sarah Sze, Thomas Hirschhorn and Tom Friedman on – site-specific approaches are to a degree similar to Tuttle’s early strategies.
Tuttle’s work are a series assemblages of disparate materials paper, plastics, painted sticks, cloth, acrylic, nails, plastic, Styrofoam, wood, and wire. Molly Donovan has observed that in Richard Tuttle’s work a model of freedom through paradox is achieved, for its seemingly contradictory elements there nonetheless remain a truthfulness and an attendant, if surprisingly, beauty.
Tuttle’s work has always been someone distinguished from his contemporaries in that he rejected the anonymous aesthetic of minimalism in order to pursuit the very presence of the artist as an essential element of his work. His work defies clear classification it’s this very challenging aspects of his work that often intrigues and delight the viewer. Part of the challenge of the work is his very working method. Tuttle’s incorporates varied nontraditional practices; such as placing string pieces on the floor radically helped to define the very concept of drawing. His artistic strategies critique the creation of space, and have a lot to do with the sculptural quality of the physical space.
Alan Artner has noted that Tuttle’s overarching theme is that art is not a pursuit unconcerned with the rest of the world, carried on as counter-reality. True, the achievement of his earliest works is best understood narrowly, in relation to Minimal art, the coldest and most purely aesthetic movement in the last half century. However, Tuttle’s view of his output goes beyond the aesthetic, indeed, beyond anything we can see, to the mystic.
For Tuttle’s forms are abstract, invented and do not refer to anything in nature. And the works, strong in physicality, stand only for themselves. They are "about" line, shape, volume, color and texture. But put Tuttle’s object directly on the floor or wall in front of an audience and it leaps into the mystical and its impact transcends formal considerations, giving people added insights. It is this quality of his work that sets Tuttle apart from contemporaries.
Part of every artwork says, `This is you… You look at a [Jackson] Pollock painting, and it’s saying, `This is you.’ Well a lot of people can say, `Are you crazy? That is not me.’ But I find in art a mirror. Some artists turn the mirror to the world. Some turn the mirror to you. With an actual mirror, you can never really see yourself, and we have a passion to do it. So art is supposed to perform as a mirror. Its job is to define us.
—Richard Tuttle.
Tony Cragg, in many of his early used plastic, for example, in which Cragg used recovered colored plastic scraps to comment on connections between part and whole, used and new, and the processes of waste and recuperation.
New Stones, Newton’s Tones an early work featured found objects, such as pieces of colored plastic and refuse picked up from the street, including shopping bags, hubcaps and lighters, which he then sorted by color and organized in various ways. Cragg’s is New Stone Newton’s Tones (1978) consisted of plastic fragments arranged on the floor in a rectangle and grouped according to their position in Newton’s spectrum of colors. Continuing to use plastic discards from streets and construction sites in his sculptures, Cragg’s use of the material is seen as part of his search for a new metaphor in sculpture, suggesting, for instance, that urban waste is to the urban environment what fallen leaves and other natural detritus are to ‘wild’ nature.
The selection of mediums by any artists is never arbitrary given the very means of the working process and their materiality endows the artwork with the ability to amplify or dissolve comprehension. This selective group briefly discussed utilizes plastics in varied modes of expression. Each has her /her own manner of embracing the potential of technology and modernist materials to open up their work to radical possibilities. They a re both guided an interest in artistic forms but equally how these norms can interactive with reality. Through an interest in alterative aesthetics they connect new strategies and materials means with dialogues relating to art history, and life and in the process establishing contemporary associations of the creative potential to form and break fresh boundaries of art and investigation.
Removed from their industrial use the plastics in many of these works obtain fresh definition related to form and meaning far removed from their expressed functional association. The use of plastics in several of the work discussed is intended to comment on issues connected with modernism, consumption and the manufactured object. Many of the associations of the plastic in the work are metaphorical. Contrastingly, in several instances the use of plastic means to create forms that are open. Materiality in these latter situations acts as starting point for the artist’s greater concern.
Plastics /materiality remains the means and never an end in itself. Rather than fusing with the real life aspect of the materials, the artists pushed the plastic means in order to stress their difference and how they are operate in context of art. The artists discussed herein use plastics to create structures anticipating new possibilities of art. Plastics combined with technology has opened art making to expansive new points of departure and in the process liberating art from rather codified idioms.
