Plastics

(A Work In Progress)

Wikipedia’s entry on plastic:

“A plastic is a material that can change its shape, so many things can be made of plastic. There are many types of plastic. Some can be shaped only when they are freshly made; then they become hard afterwards. Others can be changed by heating them up or even by melting them.

Most plastics are man-made; they do not occur in nature. They are often made from oil that comes out of the ground. The process of making plastics is usually quite complicated. Most of the materials that are called plastic are polymers. Polymers are long chains of atoms bonded to one another.”

Plastic. Material. Melting. Oil. Polymers. Atoms.

The development of plastic and its usage in everyday life erupted around the time of Warhol and McCarthyism, the Algerian and Korean Wars. I use the word “erupted” to emphasize that it is an effect of trans-national oil circulation that plastics were made possible, rigged and brought up from the ground. Plastic expanded into a field, to borrow Rosalind Krauss’s terminology, of everyday consumer logic, feeding, cleaning, shuttling and protecting family life in the developing domestic “metropolitan area” (borrowed from Jean Baudrillard, as he posits the Los Angeles metropolitan area as the city of the future in America).

Interesting, that the first plastics, those that represent innovation and the development of our culture, housed in the Smithsonian and Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example, are beginning to degrade in their vitrines of preservation. One could argue that these instances of our culture literally disappearing under the vigilant eye of museumification are outliers, mere relics of the “malignant” plastics phase, a mere bump in the road to preservation. Curators and administrators are finding, however, that no plastic is quite as durable as wood or canvas, for example, durable enough to withstand the hand of the historical clock. Time is running out to write about these objects.

The ramifications of plastics in the art world are not often explored with its materialist historical narrative in tandem. (to be continued)

Neural plasticity. The constant manipulation of brain chemistry in the developing and adult stages of the central nervous system. Pharmaceutial logic.

Plastic is an interesting medium in art; it degrades. This is not an association we typically have with plastic, and for good reason–the circulation of plastic blinds us to this.

“A whole generation of irreplaceable items that are as representative of our culture as pottery or flintheads were of ancient ones are dying—and many people charged with their care have no idea how to stop further damage.” -Slate.com article, 2009

National Security

“This study shows that obesity is not just a public health issue, it’s a national security concern as well,” said Carlos Crespo, Dr. PH, study co-author and associate professor of social and preventive medicine at the University at Buffalo. “We’re not physically fit to defend ourselves.” (here)

“The civilianization or militarization of science? … Operational reality of the technical instrument, resolutory truth of scientific thought — two fundamentally distinct aspects of knowledge, which are fused here without anyone apparently becoming alerted to the situation. … Science, which is not so attached to ‘truth’ as once it was, but more to immediate ‘effectiveness’, is now drifting towards its decline, its civic fall from grace….As a panic phenomenon — a fact concealed by the success of its devices and tools — contemporary science is losing itself in the very excessiveness of its alleged progress. Much as a strategic offensive can wear itself out by the scale of its tactical conquests, so techno-science is gradually wrecking the scholarly resources of all knowledge.”
–The Information Bomb, Paul Virilio

“One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.”
–The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

On the WDR’s Playlist Right Now

“I’m the Urban Spaceman” by Bonzo Dog Band
“Never Be Alone” Justice vs. Simian
“I am the Walrus” by The Beatles
“Who Are You?” by The Who
“I Don’t Live Here” by Bob Dylan
“Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi” by Jacques Dutronc
“Why Can’t I Be You?” by The Cure
“Us V Them” ” by LCD Soundsystem
“On My Own” Original Les Miserables soundtrack
“Make Your Own Kind of Music” by Mama Cass
“Who Can it Be Now” by Men at Work
“You Know You’re Right” by Nirvana
“I Know What I Know” by Paul Simon
“I Am That I Am” by Peter Tosh
“Us And Them” by Pink Floyd
“I Could Have Lied” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
“Say You’ll Be There” by the Spice Girls
“The Way I Are” by Timbaland
“You Don’t Know How It Feels (To Be Me)” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
“I”ll Be Your Mirror” by the Velvet Underground

Happy Wednesday!

The Bernadette Corporation encourages people to “run out of energy,” “become no one,” and act “drugged” and “retarded.” From their non-authored book Reena Spaulings: “How regrettable when people all around the world start becoming selves, tooth-brushing, anus-wiping, voting selves, Americans. I guess it has to happen before anything else can happen?”

Urban Movement Studies

I am thinking less and less about how people circulate in confined spaces, and more about how they do so when space is no longer a concern, or an option—that is, when outflows are endless. Consider the interminable desert sprawl flanking the east of Los Angeles. Riverside. San Bernardino. This is a bit like the Internet manifesting itself on an Earthly plane. In the city itself, a perpetual current of circulating vehicular traffic is made more virtual, for example, by (a) the sea of salt water resting in the bay; and (b) the constant outward expansion of the freeways, which turns each into a permanent construction zone. Expansion within expansion. There is something of a bloating effect.

These concerns are inevitably related to memory. I like to frame this theme through Odyssean return. Odysseus journeys to Troy and returns, permanently altered, to Ithaca. I like to think of this alteration as resulting from being out to sea for so long, that neural networks had attuned him to a heightened sensory experience of life, changing his perspective forever. The journey alters perspective, so one’s life is altered by any return–from the desert, other nations and provinces, from New York, for example.

You leave Los Angeles and then you return. Right turns on red are OK again. Fine. “No shoes” is acceptable. There are fewer peddlers and more Halloween pop-up stores in closed-down banks than ever before. Certain streets-turned-busy thruways have taken on names like “The 90 to Marina Del Rey” and “The 107: Hawthorne Blvd.”

On my most recent return to Los Angeles, I noted “stalled and speeding traffic” as two particularly diabolical phenomena when coupled together. The feeling is overwhelming, one of being stifled in a cruel, methylated puzzle; juxtaposed with the experience of speeding around the circular on-ramp from the 110 South to the 405 North, my thoughts turn morbid. Hypothetically, there is a semi-truck hovering in parallel; it turns, then it does not turn and then you are dead, your corpse pinned between a flatbed full of meats and a cement blockade. One hardly endures in this tonic pit of post-information despair.

You trust that humans will not defy patterns of inertia in a place like New York, will continue to move and will sweep you willy-nilly into its safe embrace (strength in numbers). In Los Angeles, people stop-and-start, bodies propel themselves along tangential lines, snapping centrifugal strings.

What to do about this? How do we proceed?

I drive the freeways at night because there is nothing left to do. The alternative to stalled circulation: where, for a few brief hours, the impotence of day-to-day life in Los Angeles is replaced by an empty exhilaration.

What to expect

How will you know where to be? Throw the I-Ching. Meditate on Swami Muktananda. Send out smoke signals. Sacrifice a small animal on a makeshift altar and see a map in the pool of blood. Attempt to ask the spirit of Luigi Pirandello via Ouija Board. Check Twitter –– all of it. Or just close your eyes and imagine yourself THERE. And there you are.

Introduction

The Well Dressed Refugees is a group of six disgustingly attractive art and media practitioners working toward total world circulation and dispersion on multiple fronts. WDR travels from place-to-place, living “happenings” wherever its lines take flight.