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Plastic Fantastic

play, research, collect, build PLAN, ACTION, REFLECTION CYCLE balance, strength, stability, beauty IT IS AN ART INSTALLATION WITH AN INTEGRATED PROGRAM OF EVENTS INCLUDING THE MAKING OF THE ENVIRONMENT, MUSIC EVENTS, A VIDEO SHOOT, INTERVIEWS, EDU…

An Interview With Diedra Krieger, Artist, Creative Director of Plastic Fantastic

Preface: Aborification

I chose as my subject for this exercise my dear friend and colleague, Diedra Krieger, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Our conversation took place via email and the telephone, and resulted in both parties being simultaneously on the verge of tears and laughter.  Ms. Krieger, who previously worked at large, private, conglomerate Ivy League university in West Philadelphia, passionately engages her free time in an art/installation, public awareness, and group collaborative project known as Plastic Fantastic. To better give you an idea of Ms. Krieger and her work, here is the mission statement of Plastic Fantastic:

I.               An overview of Plastic Fantastic

A. Build a nomadic, immersive environment in a geodesic dome from water bottles. …

B. The overwhelming use of materials function not just as an aesthetic but as a strategy to raise awareness and criticality about the everyday and the basic right to water….

C. Play is the utmost priority in everything that is done in relation to the creation of the immersive environment ….

Recognize the struggle of the creation of the mission of Plastic Fantastic. Recognize that by persevering, 1% of the imagination can be realized. Strive towards it in the face of opposition. Pursuit to make environments for this cause is better than any paid work in the whole world that exists in any everyday anywhere. Immersive environments for play, created collaboratively from the waste of the world we often so deplore. It is through this process that we better our relationship with our unavoidable everyday, challenge pop culture, the bottom line and mass production.

Interview and Provocation

 

The Accusation:

Chris:  Lovely Diedra, I roundly accuse you of abjectly aborifying.  How do you respond to that accusation?

Diedra:  I doth indeed protest, as I do have no idea of any sort what that word means, so indeed I protest.

Chris:  Please elaborate.

Diedra:   (after a brief independent query into aborifying) A Thousand Plateaus?  Funny book, but whatever does it mean, love?

Chris:  In accusing you of aborifying, I think I am attempting to accuse you of a state of being that is the opposite of being a rhizome, in other words if you are arboreal, you are soundly linear and predetermined.  If you are rhizomatic, then one can infer that you are more multi-spatial, chaotic and interconnected, something like chaotic order.  Does that clarify the particulars of the accusation for you?

Diedre:  I am a linear rhyzome, the time is on a line and the life is connected amongst thee. Now sir what say you? 

Chris:  (was supposed to call Diedra to say something, but has actually fallen asleep in the couch reading Lacan)

Diedra:  (who takes the initiative to follow up with Chris) How dare you accuse me of aborifying. You are absurd, you are obscene.  When you speak to me, invoke your imaginative powers.  There is no aborifying in this land of plastic fantastic.  Dissipate your psychotic aberrations of your social construct.   I will not engage in such dialogue.  Take it back, and perhaps we discuss what aborifying means. I shall not be accused of non-sense.  If I multiple date am I rhizomatic (by multiple date, one can infer that she is discussing romantic interludes)

Deterritorialization

Simulate deterritorialization (and explain it using negative differential relations)

Diedra: (At my provocation, attempts what she thinks is deterritorialization)  Step 1 step 2, simple to do. Hey.  I plead to you to put down what you are doing, leave it behind, disregard your labor of everyday , and join plastic fantastic, indeed by doing so you will experience the deterritorialization of your labor everyday.  If you don’t believe me I have witnesses that have been part of this process, who would gladly leave their everyday for just a moment of this sheer bliss, this freedom.  What plastic fantastic requires is collaboration, spontaneity, and distraction, all of the things that are not welcomed in the labor of the everyday.  I ask you to jump out of your chair, to leap and make a star with your body and sit back down if you must.  Now, a pirouette, I beg you, do a pirouette rise people rise.  Tell me, do you prefer this nanosecond of freedom or do you prefer your banal existence within the superstructure.

Chris:  In essence, this attempt at deterritorialization seemed rather on the mark.  The significance of deterritorialzation is that it is not territorialization, which one would identify, if we think in fixed terms, as a moment of stasis in the geographic realm.  This, in essence is negative differential relation in action.  It is defined by what it is not.  Its negation is necessary to construct an identity of what it is. Applied to behavior, it appears that Diedra breaks the social constructs of acceptable behavior for an adult and implores us to momentarily forget our material obligations and engage in frivolity and play and a fusion of yoga and calisthenics and dance.  By leaving our roles as workers in a capitalist society and engaging in art-play, we are deterritorializing our assigned roles as proletariat.

Accusations of Madness

I do not think Diedra could accuse me of being mad.  Actually, quite often, I am the one accusing Diedra of being mad.  Thus, I thought she was a most appropriate subject for this exercise.  Needless to say, we decided to discuss the authentic fake.

Chris:  I propose we discuss the authentic fake

Diedra:  What is that?

Chris:  (Simplifying) It’s like a picture of a portrait of a person in a scene.  It’s a reproduction of a reproduction of a contrived setting, whereas ultimately the picture becomes the real, it is the object.  Wait, I know…!  Think of Las Vegas or Disneyland and their respective representations.

Diedra:  Oh, why didn’t you just say so.  You mean, simulacra.

Chris: YES!  That’s it!  For some reason, this makes me think of your ex-boyfriend, Accidentally Gay <Insert Name Here>.  (Background:  Accidentally Gay <insert his name here> became his accepted nickname, earned because of his tendency to be hyper-gay, beyond mere tendencies of metro-sexuality.  Although, at root, a heterosexual, <insert his name here> easily assimilated into, and rapidly adopted, the behavior of his and Diedra’s close gay friends and associates.  Absent, sex, he was probably more of a gay man than me.  However, to prevent this vignette from entering the realm of gender identity and politic, we will go back to simulacra.)  His Accidental gayness achieved such a state of hyperreality, that it hid the real, the heterosexual <insert his name here>.  And, let me say, I’m impressed with your ready knowledge of French philosophical ideas.

Diedra:  Oh my god, Chris.  I hate you, but that is so true.  Although now he has evolved to just Accidentally <insert his name here>.  I’m not sure if that’s of any significance. 

(Note:  Names of accidental gays have been redacted as a measure of privacy for said accidental gays, and for integrity of the piece)

Or Not

Not applicable

See the Grass in things and in Words

Chris:  Lastly Diedra, I should accuse you of not being able to “see the grass in things and in words,” however to do so would be to deny that I know you, and to deny the essence of your person.  I believe my futile grasps of trying to “see the grass in things and in words,” has a direct correlation to my friendship with you.  For you continually challenge me, and my assumptions and acceptance of the world as I experience it.  That is, you inspire me to constantly question everything and to do so from all available perspectives and angles.  At least from conscious perspectives.

Diedra:  You know, a French gay man taught me how to pronounce Baudrillard.  Pretty impressive, huh?  Say it right Chris….say…”bo-driyahd!”

Chris:  Please, I implore you, now that you no longer have a job holding you down, you should most definitely consider moving to New York when you return from Costa Rica.  I mean seriously…not that Philly doesn’t hold a special place in my heart…but…things are different than they were when you were here in the early 90’s, and they’re different from the era of “Sex and The City” obnoxiousness.  The city is kind of nice again with the collapse of Wall Street.  Everyone moved back to Jersey or Long Island with their parents.  It’s sort of like the restorative balance that happened in San Francisco after the dot com bust.  Please please please come back….

To see more on Plastic Fantastic, please visit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7J4xYUo2uE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tde1HlTYYiY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8WIOpvXQ1k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgdevCxxg-c

Notes, Context and Bibliography

Gilles., Deleuze,. Thousand Plateaus (Continuum Impacts). New York: Continuum International Group, 2004. Print.

In essence, A Thousand Plateaus is concerned with assemblage, thus the rhizomatic analogy.  One might be able to say that rhizomatic tendencies demonstrate the ability to assemble or create pastiches or montages from the fragmented self or fragmented existence.  To create coherent chaotic organization.  This is important because Plastic Fantastic seeks to bring together disparate communities and found/discarded waste objects to create visual impact and conscious synergy on important social issues such as access to basic human rights .