“Plastics is totally my comfort zone.” That confession—a decidedly minority sentiment in 2019—came from Paola Antonelli, a senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. She was sitting in her office (cluttered but chic, full of colorful objects, including spongy Swedish acoustic wall panels that could have formed the backdrop to a fashion shoot with Twiggy). That evening, she would be hosting one of the regular “salons”—civilians might see them as akin to panel discussions—that she organizes on such provocative subjects as “Modern Death,” “The Way of the Algorithm,” and “White Male.” That last one, in March, proved so provocative that Antonelli, a native of Sardinia with an irreverent manner, claimed that she lost ten pounds to stress and hate tweets. For this next topic, she said, “I just needed something more comfortable.”
Thus “Plastics,” which, of course, most people hate, when they bother to think about plastics at all, because of their role in poisoning the environment, not to mention the word’s status as a synonym for “cheap” or “phony.” But, if you are a curator whose purview includes modern furniture and product design, you spend a lot of time with plastic and have a more nuanced relationship with the stuff. “For a design buff like me, plastics are a universe of delight and possibilities,” Antonelli confided to the salon audience, then added, “horrid as they are for the environmental impact they carry.”
In her office, she’d mentioned an essay that she wrote years ago: “I compared plastics to a woman that, you know, grew up. It was a little naïve, but it was kind of cute to think of plastics as a human being that goes through different phases in its life.” As the metaphor went, plastics, the oil-based ones invented in the fifties, enjoyed a wild, risk-taking adolescence in the sixties, the era of inflatable furniture and space-age fabrics. But, by the eighties, plastics had reached a less lovable middle age, although a new wave of designers continued to experiment. “There were some chairs by Philippe Starck that had this amazing velvety finish. So plastic was changing,” she said. “I really waxed poetic!”
She mentioned a 1964 chair that was in the museum’s collection. “It’s breaking my heart,” she said, pulling up on her computer screen an image of a blobby Danish armchair that looked as if it were made from half-melted chocolate ice cream. The actual material was self-skinning polyurethane, and the years had not been kind. “The skin is cracking, and it’s like dust inside,” she said, explaining that there was no way to preserve it.
But outré chairs are one thing; sporks and yogurt containers are another. “I try not to use plastics, and at home I am maniacal in recycling,” she said. But she worried that much of it ends up in landfills, anyway. “That’s why I’m happy to hear Mark Chambers talk tonight.”
Chambers, from the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, was one of five speakers. There were six (wooden) chairs onstage, along with six (glass) water bottles. After Antonelli sketched a quick history of plastics (upside: “really great toothbrushes”; downside: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), Christina Agapakis, a scientist and an artist, explained how bacteria could be the key to fixing environmental problems caused by plastics. One such bacterium, Cupriavidus necator, can draw carbon dioxide out of the air and excrete it as natural plastic. Agapakis works at “an organism design company,” Ginkgo Bioworks, which is trying to goose bacteria into further eco-friendly feats.
Next, Chambers emphasized the sheer deluge of plastic crud that is discarded every year in New York: nearly five hundred million plastic bottles; thirty-six million pounds of plastic foodware. “It’s a daunting scale,” he said, before insisting that education, as always, is the answer. He hailed a city program that distributed S’well water bottles to public-high-school students—three hundred and twenty thousand.
In a Q. & A. session, it was suggested that if recycling were done correctly there would be nine bins for different kinds of plastic, as in Helsinki, or upward of twelve, as is the case in Tokyo. Responding to Agapakis, an Italian lighting manufacturer in the crowd described trying to work with a bioplastic derived from sugar: “It was smelling too sweet, the product.” A conservator showed slides of plastic objects in MoMA’s collections which had degraded or turned gunky-looking. The foam lining of a pair of ski goggles resembled a ribbon of old poop. One takeaway: plastic is perverse; it goes away only when you don’t want it to.
Antonelli mock-scolded a questioner for citing the famous line from “The Graduate.” “Oh, somebody had to mention it!” she said, before concluding, “Well, there you have it. Complexity is our friend.” The audience laughed. “We’re really dealing with it, and that’s the best we can do: come together and talk about it as adults, or as kids.” She invited everyone to a reception with, she promised, “mediocre wine and so-so snacks.” The wine was served in glasses made of glass. ♦
