In his book “Everyday Myths”, the French philosopher Roland Barthes celebrates plastic as “magical matter”. The year is 1957 and Barthes writes: “So plastic is not just a substance, it is the idea of its infinite transformation (…) omnipresence made visible (…) a wonderful substance.” In other words: What awesome stuff.
From this stuff, sorry, from this “telluric raw material” (Barthes), which, thanks to inexpensive production conditions, infinite malleability, pop-colored exaltation and blatant promises of the future, elevates man to the congenial creator of the modern world of things, it is only a few decades that the telluric raw material needs to get away from the mythical creatures of modernity being demoted to the bad guy of the present. The congenial creator who commands toothbrushes and dolls, party cutlery, computer housings, disposable syringes and skis, but also baking paper, cigarette filters and T-shirts, which are not always made of fair-trade organic cotton, but are more often made of something with “poly” in them ( polyacrylic, polyamide, polyurethane, polyester) is pulled into the abyss. The year is 2016 and a picture of two dead whales on the North Sea coast is posted on Facebook – “the stomach full of plastic”.
You can read under the picture of death: “Plastic should be the new swear word.” At this point, plastic has long been the new swear word. The largest known plastic waste patch in the North Pacific spans the size of three times France or twice Texas. Hardly anyone doubts that plastic in its global virulence has meanwhile become the stuff on which we are already choking. Plastic, this only incidentally, is a vague term that is used in everyday life for all plastics that can be very different and very different problems.
Literally, by the way: suffocate. In the meantime, it has been proven that humans also ingest microplastics through breathing air and food. The plastic is in our blood, in this very special juice of Faustian nature. We swim after the whales. There are studies that make the connection between plastic chemicals and various diseases plausible. So the prospects are bleak, especially if Leicester University’s Jan Zalasiewicz got his math right. According to him, if you put all the plastic that has ever been produced together into one big carpet of plastic waste, the entire planet earth would be covered by it by now.
Criminals at the supermarket checkout
This is another reason why there are stories of people becoming lepers, criminals and aliens at the supermarket checkout because they keep asking for a plastic bag. Once you stand at such a checkout in Munich. A man wants a plastic bag because in his world-hating madness he apparently didn’t realize that there has been a plastic bag ban in Germany since January 1st. This is, but only marginally, exactly the country that is still very happy to export its plastic waste to distant beaches in the south in a post-colonial way. Nevertheless, people have been waiting for this plastic bag ban for what feels like 450 years. This is exactly the period in which a PET bottle decomposes. According to the organization Plasticontrol, one million of such bottles are sold worldwide. in the minute.
Back to the man in the supermarket with the satanic desire for a plastic bag. A woman boldly confronts him and says: “Criminal”. There is spontaneous approval in the supermarket line, which is basically one of the myths of everyday life, especially in its moral and ideological rigidity. The criminal, who is at least capable of resocialization, finally buys a jute bag. It is documented on it that he is no longer a criminal – but saves the world. If only it were.
This “Life” photograph was staged in 1955 to illustrate the comforts of modern “throwaway life”: It’s raining single-use plastic. It wasn’t meant to be ironic.
(Photo: Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection)
If you want the impressive exhibition that is as brilliant as it is explosive “Plastic – rethinking the world”, which can be admired in the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein until the beginning of September, in one sentence, here it is: Anyone who visits the exhibition (which is thanks to a remarkable cooperation between the Vitra Design Museum, the V&A Dundee and the maat in Lisbon ), strides with great pleasure through the extremely complex, incredibly serious story of a once revered, later damned material, which is like no other material of a dazzling, longing and at the same time apocalyptic nature. As Barthes writes: It is about an alchemical undertaking of modernity. It’s not over yet. Because, and the show shows that: plastic is not just plastic – and there will be no world without plastic in the future either.
Plastics are not evil per se, in medicine, to name just one example, they also save lives. Very nice to read in the exhibition catalog (in the text by Susan Freinkel about “Love in the age of plastic”): “The surgeon who implanted the first artificial human heart said it snapped shut, ,like closing a Tupperware can”https ://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.” Anyone who doesn’t reconcile with the Tupperware box now has no heart. And anyone who has just survived one or the other year in the pandemic better than without face masks knows: They’re over Plastic.
Last exit: “Plastocene”
After the rise and fall of plastics, which begin as a surrogate for “natural” substances, soon become the material cornucopia of democratized mass consumption in the petrochemical age, take the wrong turn (disposable items) and are finally exposed in the “Plastocene” as a billionfold outrage, after all this, the third section of the exhibition under the roof finally becomes a redeeming moment. Utopia follows dystopia. Current research on sustainable “art” materials that have learned from their history is brought together here. In interviews that are both enlightening and thought-provoking, it is discussed what needs to be done to get out of the plastic misery of a scrap plastic world and into the existential sphere of environmental compatibility. It won’t be easy. To shorten this: Above all, it will not work without a different kind of economy. The cheap plastic has to become a price-conscious valuable material in itself. Instead of going to the repository carpet.
The space-age design is a hymn to the futuristic plastic: Panasonic developed the “Toot-a-Loop” radio in the 1970s. You could wrap it around your wrist.
(Photo: Andreas Sütterlin/Vitra Design Museum)
But the astounding history of plastics, often prone to hubris, which is unfolded in the Vitra Design Museum in all the necessary abundance and with all the necessary concentration, also teaches that people have always been resourceful when it comes to the close alliance between economics and sociology. Both spheres can, indeed must, finally be reconciled with ecology. It is possible to still find the philosopher’s stone in this triad.
The plastic that inspired design and architecture in the 20th century, that once – nature-friendly and anti-colonialist – democratized cultural assets made of previously stolen ivory or biogenic tortoise shell that were inaccessible to the masses, that profited from the war, fueled futurism in post-war modernism, has changed many times in the past. The matter of the future, which could be a synthetic “natural” substance, consisting of rapidly renewable, vegetable or recycled raw materials, CO2-neutral over the entire life cycle, can once again become magical matter in infinite transformation. The future has not yet passed.
plastic – Rethink the world. Until September 4 in Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.