Commentary on my sculpture Angel of Catharsis
BDISPBTPULSISLRIYE is open by appointment at Triest
Just as Angel of Ascesis conveyed a religious-apocalyptic mode of transcendental consciousness, the view of Angel of Catharsis is scientific-rationalist. But no less transcendental. Which means, in the spirit of science, it’s time to discuss the genesis of this exhibition and the meaning of the synthetic materials comprising most of it: polystyrene (EPS/XPS), polyethylene (EPE), and polylactic acid (PLA).
Reclaimed insulation foam, discarded foam packaging, reclaimed refrigerator back cover, discarded balusters, reclaimed air conditioner fan, reclaimed mirror, menstrual pad, PLA 3D print of original digital sculpture, India ink, lightbulbs, table top resin, spray paint, spray adhesive
~48 x 84 inches
About a year ago I found a large panel of XPS insulation foam on the street (polystyrene), together with a plywood panel, several more narrow large foam strips, some with aluminum siding attached, and a batch of seemingly brand new HVAC air filters. It was all being thrown away (I think), so I took it. Most of the pieces in the show are comprised in part of these items; the main panel became Angel of Catharsis, the plywood it had lived behind became Angel of Sovereignty. The encounter awakened in me a heightened attention to the themes of industrial insulation, filtration and packaging with various metaphorical, existential, and critical valences.
In addition to the insulation foam the discovery of which I just described, the show also includes smaller miscellaneous sheets and panels (some polystyrene, some polyethylene, the materials we usually associate with the term ‘styrofoam’) that I saved after unboxing products I’d purchased on Amazon to make art1 - like my 3D printer, my laser engraver, the air purifier in my studio, and a mirror I originally bought for my living room but ended up making into a sculpture.
This body of work’s prime gesture, if you will, is the expressive application of metallic spray paint to the polystyrene surfaces, which yields gash marks. Their aesthetic, which to me conveys a blend of war-ruined municipal infrastructure and mineral crystallization over geological timespans, is due to corrosive chemical reaction when the solvents and propellants in the spray cans touch the XPS surface.
I’ll let the actual composition of Angel of Catharsis speak for itself, after briefly drawing your attention to its components: the reclaimed broken HVAC fan, the reclaimed vanity mirror (also found on the street), the urban rustic decorative lightbulbs, affixed to the mirror with loosely applied table top resin, the India ink (which unlike spray paint isn’t corrosive to FPS), the fence balusters from my discarded backyard fence, a menstrual pad, the discarded backing of an unknown residential refrigerator which had perhaps been replaced, an EPE panel in which an air purifier of mine had shipped, the large XPS panel I found, and the tiny centerpiece: a 3D print of the first modestly convincing digital sculpture of a human face I ever made from scratch in Blender, which I printed using another industrial plastic substance: PLA, polylactic acid.2
FPS, XPS, EPE, PLA: all plastics, man made materials, discovered in the past 150 years. Polyethylene is more familiar as the plastic bag, the water bottle and so on, but its foam version is also a packing material, less common in that form than styrofoam (EPS and the more familiar XPS); the former is used for more delicate and high end products, it it also lines all of the undersea optical cables comprising the internet; the latter for more run of the millp packaging and shipping. These all play a major supporting role in the life of civilization, especially in transportation.
It’s less widely known that they’re also all byproducts of the petroleum industry; oil and gas exploration is also exploration for the raw materials to make plastic. When when the former are refined and usable fuel extracted, the elements which aren’t needed are boiled out in large silos and combined with other more plentiful elements to create styrene and ethylene, which are then fused into polymers, and become the plastics we all depend on for disposable containers and packaging. As far as I can tell, it’s actually something we ‘need’ the petroleum industry for: without the byproducts of oil and gas, it isn’t clear where we’d get these raw materials.
The inability of these plastics to biodegrade is perhaps the original flashpoint of collective anxiety about the long term effects of industrial manufacturing, almost quaint at this point, beginning as long ago as the 1980s: the sea turtle caught in a six pack ring and so on. Sometimes I need to lie down when I contemplate the sheer sublime scale of the production process sustaining the lives of our ten billion human beings. And the singularity of it all, its concreteness. There are no ‘people in general’, there’s just ten billion of us, up from more like a thousand a few hundred thousand years ago. There’s no supply chain in general: there’s just one. Marx said that revolutionary consciousness entails seeing the world as it actually is, rather than as ideology designs it to appear. To apprehend what it is, and that in principle it could and should be otherwise, in ways that respond to what it actually is.
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