Le synthétique au cœur de l’humain

Centre Culturel Canadien / Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris

November 15 2022 – March 24, 2023

Christina Battle, IAIN BAXTER&, Sara Belontz, J. Blackwell, Amy Brener, Hannah Claus, Patricia Corcoran, Heather Davis and Kirsty Robertson, Aaronel deRoy Gruber, Fred Eversley, Pierre Huyghe, General Idea, Kelly Jazvac, Kiki Kogelnik, Tegan Moore, Skye Morét, Meagan Musseau, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, Claes Oldenburg, Aude Pariset, Meghan Price, Alain Resnais, Françoise Sullivan, Catherine Telford-Keogh, Lan Tuazon, Joyce Wieland, Nico Williams, Kelly Wood

Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through is an experimental exhibition with plastic at its heart. As an art material, cultural object, geologic process, petrochemical product, and a synthetic substance fully entangled with the human body, plastic is politically loaded. The exhibition seeks to explore how plastic has become fundamental to artistic, gallery, and museum practices as a material that provides a range of artistic expressions and possibilities, while acknowledging that plastic pollution is also a “wicked problem,” an extension of many of the harms of the fossil fuel industry. In so doing, Le synthétique au coeur de l’humain is organized through an auto-critique that seeks to lessen its own carbon footprint and provide a model for more sustainable curation. 

This exhibition grows out of the work of the Synthetic Collective, an art and science collaboration. Our work is guided by an interdisciplinary principle linking scientific and artistic methodologies to demonstrate how arts-based approaches to thinking and working can make viable contributions to environmental science and activism. To this end, the Synthetic Collective recently completed the first microplastics pollution studies on the shores of the Great Lakes in North America, one of the largest freshwater systems in the world. The exhibition features data visualizations of this important study by Skye Morét, as well as artworks created by Synthetic Collective members Sara Belontz, Heather Davis, Kelly Jazvac, Tegan Moore, Kirsty Robertson, and Kelly Wood in response to our Great Lakes research. 

In wanting to give a sense of both the history of plastics in art, and how plastic challenges some of the norms of museum cultures, contemporary art works are juxtaposed with historical art installations, paraphernalia, objects, and documentation from artists IAIN BAXTER&, Naum Gabo, General Idea, Kiki Kogelnik, Claes Oldenburg, and Joyce Wieland. Some of these historical artworks that used early plastics are now degrading, drawing into the exhibition questions of conservation and preservation. Plastic is often thought of as immortal, but it readily breaks and degrades into smaller, yet lasting pieces. As Eva Hesse said in relation to the synthetic rubber that she often used in her practice, “The rubber only lasts a short while . . . it’s not going to last. I am not sure what my stand on lasting really is. . . . Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.” Plastic is then, paradoxically, a material that allows viewers to see more clearly the earthly processes of transformation, degradation, and decomposition. 

When plastics entered the art world in force in the 1960s, artists both embraced and resisted the peculiarities found in the flexible materiality of this new medium. Thus, we find artists such as Françoise Sullivan, Fred Eversley, Les Levine, Lea Lublin, Aaronel deRoy Gruber, and Eva Hesse pushing the boundaries of plastic, working directly with fabricators in plastics factories, excavating and playing with the flexible properties of the material, defining more literally the historical description of the “plastic arts.” Alain Resnais’ Le Chant du Styrène compellingly documents the beginning of the mass production of plastic, with a poetic and subtly critical eye. More explicit environmental resistance would come later, often coupled with or as a response to developing concerns around the potential toxicity and consequent health impacts of using plastics in art and in our daily lives. The contemporary artists featured here exhibit a more ambiguous, or directly critical, relationship to plastic. Christina Battle, J Blackwell, Amy Brener, Hannah Claus, Pierre Huyghe, Meagan Musseau, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, Aude Pariset, Meghan Price, Catherine Telford-Keogh, Lan Tuazon, and Nico Williams explore the complicated relationship between the synthetic and the natural, showing how these two terms depend upon each other but are ultimately enfolded into one another. Many of these artworks also interrogate and display the ways that the harms associated with plastic’s manufacture and distribution often happen in profoundly uneven ways across class, race, gender, and geography. 

Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through is organized within the tradition of institutional critique in order to propose alternative methods of exhibition making that address ecology and sustainability in content and form. As plastic is one of the most intimate manifestations of our imbrication with fossil fuels, we felt we could not simply offer a distanced critique. Instead, it was also necessary to think about the exhibition’s environmental impact. The result is an experiment in the political and aesthetic choice to lessen the exhibition’s carbon footprint while still maintaining its legibility as an exhibition. By paying close attention to when it is important to make something new—when the cultural import offsets the carbon footprint—and when materials can be reduced, reused, or salvaged, the exhibition offers some possibilities for thinking aesthetics beyond fossil fuels. To accomplish this goal we made all kinds of decisions, from limiting the weight and size of artworks that were shipped, to working with artists based in and near Paris, to re-using existing museum furniture, to sourcing Manitoulin natural inks as an alternative to traditional wall vinyl. All of these decisions are captured in more detail in the DIY Fieldguide that accompanies the exhibition. The model of exhibition making, as well as the artworks within, offer many ways to engage with the complex dialogue about plastics in the museum, the environment, and our bodies.

Plastic Heart: Surface all the way through

Art Museum at the University of Toronto

September 08 – November 22, 2021

Christina Battle, IAIN BAXTER&, Sara Belontz, Leticia Bernaus, J Blackwell, Amy Brener, Hannah Claus, Sully Corth, Heather Davis and Kirsty Robertson, Aaronel deRoy Gruber, Fred Eversley, Naum Gabo, General Idea, Kelly Jazvac, Woomin Kim, Kiki Kogelnik, Les Levine,  Mary Mattingly, Tegan Moore, Skye Morét, Meagan Musseau, Christopher Mendoza, Claes Oldenburg, Meghan Price, Françoise Sullivan, Catherine Telford-Keogh, Lan Tuazon, Marianne Vierø, Joyce Wieland, Nico Willliams, Kelly Wood

Plastic Heart is an experimental exhibition that examines plastic as art material, cultural object, geologic process, petrochemical product, and a synthetic substance fully entangled with the human body. The exhibition includes new commissions, historical and contemporary artworks that relate to plastic as a politically-loaded material, and investigations into the paradoxes of plastic conservation in museum collections. The exhibition acknowledges plastics as both lubricants of artistic, gallery, and museum practices and also as ‘wicked problems,’made even more complex by their use and discard in the COVID-19 pandemic. Plastic Heart mobilizes practices of institutional critique and proposes an alternative method of exhibition development and presentation that addresses ecology and sustainability in content and form. Seeking to stimulate viewers to be active subjects, the exhibition challenges received modes of art makingand viewing that are deeply dependent on fossil fuels. It also features data visualizations of a study conducted by the Synthetic Collective that provides a first-ever snapshot of post-industrial microplastics pollution on the shores of the Great Lakes. This exhibition links scientific and
artistic methodologies to show how arts-based approaches to thinking and working can makeviable contributions to environmental science and activism.

Documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid and Alison Postma.