Domestic Left #65: Plastic fantastic lover
“A billiard ball was the first commercially mass manufactured object made from petrochemical polymers, commonly known as plastics,” you are informed as you walk into the exhibit Everlasting Plastics, which is at the Carnegie Museum of Art through July 21, but will be traveling in the future to Cleveland and Chicago. “This new material was used to replace ivory, which was in short supply due to elephant overhunting.”
That was over 150 years ago. Now, of course, plastic is everywhere — in our kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms, in our offices and workshops, in the toys our children play with and the medical devices that keep our parents alive. We store our stuff in plastic bins, we pour our beverages from plastic bottles, we keep our teeth bright and white and our skin smooth and supple using pastes and creams and lotions we squeeze from plastic tubes. Massive floating islands of discarded plastic wander the oceans; tiny microplastics infiltrate our bloodstreams.
In the late 1980s the union I work for, UE, launched an ambitious attempt to organize workers in the plastics industry. This campaign was launched not only because the plastics industry was large (employing around 600,000 workers at the time) and mostly unorganized, but because, as then-Director of Organization Ed Bruno told the 1988 UE convention, “Plastics has become what metal used to be in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. If you look in our own shops, plastics is becoming the key material that we’re using to build machinery, to build electrical apparatus, to do all of the work that metal used to do.” He noted that General Electric, at that time the largest employer of UE members, had just announced the creation of a new plastics division.
(The traditional jurisdictions of the union, whose full name is “United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America,” were electrical and radio manufacturing — e.g., workers at companies like GE — and the machine tool industry, workers who worked metal to build the machines used in factories to make other stuff.)
Although the campaign did not rebuild our membership numbers — I believe we only represent one plant in the plastics industry at this point — it did represent an attempt to think pro-actively about organizing American manufacturing at a time when every other manufacturing union in the U.S. was just circling the wagons (or, to be honest, not even circling the wagons — just letting them get picked off one by one). All the old CIO unions were reeling from the massive deindustrialization that hit not only the electrical manufacturing and machine tool industries but also auto, steel, rubber ... the industries whose unionized workers, for better or for worse, came to define a “middle-class,” “American” standard of living in the post-war era.
When GE announced the launch of their plastics division, they predicted that in the future cars would be made of plastic (a prediction which has come partially true, I suppose). I imagine that, to their investors, they also predicted that the plastics industry would remain low-wage and non-union — and that prediction came true, 100 percent.
This installation of Everlasting Plastics (it was originally presented at the US Pavilion at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2023) is in the Heinz Architectural Center, a small exhibition space in the center of the Carnegie. The center consists of one large room and a set of three smaller rooms, bisected by a small hallway, with a second, longer hallway running up the side, from the Scaife Galleries to the Heinz Galleries.
It’s a tight fit, and in fact a couple of Lauren Yeager’s sculptures spill out into Scaife 17, mixing with A Pittsburgh Anthology. This is appropriate, I guess, given that Pittsburgh is, or at least was, one of the regions where the U.S. plastics industry was concentrated. (Our one remaining UE plastics shop, Kenson Plastics, is in Beaver Falls, 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.)
Yeager’s sculptures, collectively titled Longevity, consist of totem pole-like pillars of stacked plastic consumer items — coolers, children’s chairs, five-gallon buckets, basketballs, storage bins, step stools, halloween candy baskets. Collectively, they are an intense provocation, but individually, I have to admit they vary in their success as aesthetic objects. Some are sublime, but some are merely ugly.
They are far more successful as art when they are interspersed with Simon Anton’s This Will Kill_____ That series, metal skeletons covered with brightly colored fragments of post-consumer plastic. The two artists’ work intermingles in the three smaller rooms of the Heinz Architectural Center, creating a kind of temple of plastic to wander through in awe and dread.
The small hallway is filled with Ang Li’s Externalities, an exploration of expanded polystyrene foam (EPS) anchored by a long, thin wire corral filled with bricks of the snow-white stuff, wedged at an angle into the hallway and adorned with a scrolling LED display reciting chapter and verse about the environmental impact of the material. The long hallway, meanwhile, hosts Norman Teague’s Re+Prise series, sculptures made of re-used plastic from discarded consumer items, extruded into rope-like strands which Teague then coils into objects resembling ceramic bowls and vases.
My only experience putting my shoulder to the wheel of American industry was in a plastics factory, just a few years after the launch of the UE Plastics Workers Organizing Committee but far from any of its geographical concentrations.
Like many of my high school friends, I sought summer employment during my college years from a temp agency, and was sent to Packer Plastics, out in the small industrial park north of Lawrence, Kansas. I made, I think, fifty cents over minimum wage — that fifty cents being a premium for working third shift.
The factory was chaotic and loud, and the first night that I arrived, no one seemed to know that I was coming, so I clocked in and just kind of wandered around for fifteen or twenty minutes until someone finally noticed me and told me what to do. (I presume that one of the reasons so many of the plastics factories UE organized in the late 80s and early 90s soon closed is that it is an industry characterized by small plants, many of them marginal and I suspect many of them, like Packer, poorly managed.)
What we did, for eight hours a night, was pick up plastic cups (or pitchers, or spatulas, or whatever) off the the conveyor belt as soon as they came out of the machines that formed them, use exacto knives to cut off any extraneous bits, and then stack them in cardboard boxes. The plastic was still hot when it came out of the machine, not hot enough to actually burn you, but hot enough to be uncomfortable. The machines were incredibly loud — walking in at the beginning of our shifts, we would all grab cheap disposable earplugs from a huge bucket by the time clock.
The machines would break down all the time, on average about once per shift, and then we would just stand around while the night-shift maintenance guy fixed it. Mostly they would just stop working, but one time the machine stopped mixing the colored plastic pellets correctly, and instead of the uniform pastel purple it was supposed to produce, the cups starting coming out a swirling rainbow of bright primary colors, not unlike Norman Teague’s pieces. The maintenance guy — a small, grizzled man who never wore earplugs — and I joked about how we could probably take them downtown and sell them at a steep markup to hippies.
By far the most intense, and creepy, work in Everlasting Plastics is Xavi L. Aguirre’s PROOFING: Resistant and Ready, which takes up the whole of the larger, southern room in the Heinz Architectural Center.
The room is darkly lit, and filled with a scaffolding-like structure on which hang various types of plastic paneling, sheeting, and insulation. As the wall text notes, “The environment you are standing in is made from plastic proofing materials. These often-invisible structural layers attempt to hermetically seal bodies from moisture, heat, and other elements, perceived as threatening.” In the center is a bench, its surface coated with a smooth vinyl-like plastic, inviting you to watch a looping video that is projected on the far wall. An electronic-music soundtrack fills the room with a constant synthetic beat.
The video, in which the viewer moves steadily forward through a digitally animated environment, like the trench run in the first Star Wars video game, begins in a room padded entirely with bright orange sound absorption panels. The music is low and muffled here, though you can feel what are perhaps sub-audible frequencies thrumming in your bones.
From the orange room, you progress by way of doorways and other portals through a series of rooms that alternately recall gyms, locker rooms, subway cars, spa resorts (at one point there’s a bottle and a champagne glass visible off to the side), and showers ... or perhaps gas chambers. The music gets louder and more distinct. Twice you briefly emerge into a place open to the sky but walled steeply on either side, perhaps a maintenance area where, as a guest or an inmate, you are not really supposed to be. The final chamber is again “outside,” perhaps on the top floor of the building, except you are enclosed in translucent weatherproof sheeting roughly stretched over a frame. There’s a tear in the sheeting on the far edge as you approach it.
And then suddenly you are outside the building. You see the sun briefly in front of you but it quickly sets or vanishes into a gray mist, turning solo-cup red as it does. You progress through the mists, which feel menacingly chemical, not cooling or aqueous, until eventually they clear onto a gray, lifeless plain, strewn with indeterminate smooth dark shapes that seem like they are the detritus of some long-fallen civilization. You approach a colossal rectangular black structure until a tiny light in its center appears and then reveals itself to be a small portal of some kind ...
... which you fly through back into the orange sound-proofing room, which I have arbitrarily picked as the “start” of this video which loops endlessly, with no half-life, no sense of birth and death, growth or decay, just an endlessly recurring series of chambers, protecting us, enveloping us, sites of pleasure and horror in equal measure, now and forever, everlasting salvation, glory be, world without end.
For various reasons, I haven’t been able to do much writing for work recently, but I did take some time this last week to do a short writeup of a webinar with Palestinian trade unionists organized by the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, of which UE is a founding member. The four panelists gave moving accounts of the living and working (or non-working) conditions faced by working people in Gaza and the West Bank over the past nine months. If you feel moved to participate in the NLNC’s new campaign asking Senators and Members of Congress to join the call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, you can do so here.
I have recently found myself captivated by this video for a song from John Cale’s new album. It is eerie, sad, and somewhat reminiscent of The Office (well, the British version at least — I’ve never watched the U.S. version). And I’m pretty sure the giant masks/puppet heads are made of paper mache, not plastic.