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Chapter 8 - Plastic Art Moment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2025

Sidney Homan
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Summary

How successfully can we name and define a work of art? Doesn't an art experience “prick” us? We name, but the naming is just not enough to express it. The art moments betray an incapacity to name, which, then, as Roland Barthes points out, becomes “a good symptom of dis-turbance.” Putting their work in context, artists Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang write:

When the common use of plastic found its way into our lives during WWII, plastic was touted as an exciting new material that would revolutionize and indeed, it has—providing new hips and knees, allowing for unbelievable medi-cal advances. But we’ve been inundated with “convenience” and a throw-away ethos. In the swirl of debris, from food shopping to consumer goods, plastic is the unseen background of daily living.

Besides the blight of plastic itself, a mad scientist's brew of toxic chemicals is leaching into our bodies. We have learned that every human being has traces of plastic polymers in their bloodstream. That's the bad news we live with these days. There really is no choice when asked for here or to go? It's all here, and there is nowhere for it to go. Simply, there is no away. So here we are at the Cliff House, a place of gathering, a place of celebration, a place on the edge, and yes, we are at a precipitous moment. But we have turned ourselves toward the joy we feel at participating with other creative souls to say what artists have always said, “What if […]” and then the miracle of the creative mind catches a breeze, and we are off on a journey all the way out from here to there. “Will that be for here or to go?”

There is an art-making to the moment. One can identify a focused curation in the way the installation got arranged, something that spells of a permanent “diagram” and design. But art's afterlife is in constructing “asignification,” which means how curation or attention to artistic details cannot oversight the inexplicable sites of appreciation and reception. The Plastic Food Art installation inculcates imagination, a wide panorama of emotions, and aesthetic bafflement. Art exists; it entices.

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Chapter
Information
Art's Visionary Moment
Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime
, pp. 75 - 80
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2025

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