Plastic As Plastic

TECHNOLOGY has devised a new nudity. No starlet could half-hide under bubbles in Babette Newburger's clear blown Plexiglas bathtub. The tub stands on four carved Plexiglas human legs at the Contemporary Crafts' Plastic as Plastic exhibit, which is the most gleamingly contemporary and pertinent of any in New York.

This titillating tidbit is only one among hundreds of objects which prove definitely what Design Research, Georg Jensen, and Bonniers have been hinting at--plastic can be elegant and expressive in its own right, as well as functional.

For most people today automobiles, jetplanes and the Golden Gate Bridge spontaneously evoke "It's beautiful!" Responses to Michelangelo's Pieta or Degas monotypes are more self-conscious.

With technology as a new aesthetic all objects and materials can be art--not just oil on canvas or clay on armature. Within the art world itself wide-spread use of "found objects," like irons and mattresses, verifies this. And the post-Warhol men who make happenings, assemblages, and environments, like Segal and Kaprow, would embroider "everything can be art" on their coats of arms.

This plastics show demonstrates a beautiful all-plastic sub-aesthetic of this technological aesthetic. And within this even a washing machine agitator, lifted out of its laundromat context, becomes a graceful flowing-spiral sculpture.

But furniture and housing exhibits make the strongest case for a new plastic aesthetic. Obviously we all need shelter and seating. And plastic furniture and houses will be the cheapest of the lovely when they graduate from the avant garde to serious mass production. Pouring plastics into molds can be a very cheap method of producing anything, not just toys. And plastic can have a fine surface formed in molding, so it requires no costly hand finishing.

Plastics will revolutionize the way our homes look as much as the Bauhaus or the Scandinavian moderns did. They can be brightly pigmented and highly light reflecting--we may be surrounded with color and shine at no extra cost. Opaque orange umbrella stands and chairs and translucent turquoise inflatable armchairs are at the show and on the market. Many of these furnishings are still outrageously expensive, but prices will go down.

TRANSPARENCY will revitalize interior space. Glass was okay for coffee tables in houses without small children or large dogs. But Plexiglas is lighter, stronger and breakage resistant (so much so that the Boston Garden uses large sheets of it behind goal-post areas to protect spectators from flying pucks).

Pieces like Jacques Famery's Plexiglas arm chair are magic invisible furniture. They hold a body but eyes pass through them. Eiffel's tower and Paxton's Crystal Palace introduced a new kind of building where space flowed through instead of stopping at the walls. And Plexiglas furniture changes the interior from an organization of volumes in space to a mere description of space drawn with light patterns of color and reflection.

Shapes can be freer in plastic. One designer actually refused to make straight-lined furniture in plastic because the material curves so readily and gracefully. This is radically different from wood, which requires very complicated processes before it will curve into a Thonet chair.

All this freedom, color, and imminent economy extends to whole buildings of plastic. At the show one can walk through several free-form hive-like buildings made by spraying polyurethane foam over a fabric frame. In one of these structures there's a slide show demonstrating the process of mush hardening into a building. And there are pictures of a house made from the hive modules by Yale School of Art and Architecture Professor Felix Drury and his students.

The foam building belongs in the suburbs of Xanadu. Being in it is like being swallowed by Moby Dick, perhaps. There is no distinction between ceiling and walls, the texture is amorphous whiteness and there are no easy-to-understand geometric forms.

The model of Craig Hodgett's "Maxx," a modular pre-cast housing unit, is one answer to the very real need for cheap, mass-produced housing on a large scale. Yet he'll have to fight countless Societies for the Preservation of Anachronistic Architectural Techniques, not to mention the Bricklayers' Union, before such a valid solution is accepted.

OF COURSE, as the show reminds us, Buck-minster Fuller did get his Plexiglas and steel dome built at Expo. For the Osaka fair Yutaka Murata plans a blow-up amphitheatre of pneumatic PVC tubes, shaped like a locus of horseshoes. Other inflatables pictured include a dome and a space-capsule-shaped weekend house for two.

But Plastic as Plastic never forced significance on the viewer. A lot of it showed that besides being beautiful, plastics could be a lot of fun. One soft polyurethane foam sphere (37" diameter) turns into a chair when you sit on it. A small gallery has clothes and jewelry--everything from a very uncomfortable pair of clear lucite clog-sandals, to a Medusa-esque necklace of fluorescent acetate strips. More for Christmas giving were the translucent amber boots (vinylite) by Herbert Levine, who supposedly manufactures for I. Miller, and chunky, colorful Plexiglas rings, available at Bonniers. And for would-be travelers, there's a portable polyethylene toilet.

Yes, Benjamin Braddock, I have only one word for you.