Plastic Life: Patricia Piccinini & Christopher Langton

Plastic Life Exhibition Catalogue
by Jacqueline Millner (2000)

June 2000: Scientists from the Human Genome Project are set to announce they have completed a first draft of the Book of Mankind, the genetic recipe for a person. The event is said to rival such technological feats as splitting the atom and landing a man on the moon. Yet as scientists from the US Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research warn, 'The understanding of the human genetic circuitry that will provide cures for countless diseases may also lead some to conclude that humans are but machines designed to play out DNA cassettes supplied at birth–that the human spirit and human potential are shackled by double-helical chains'.

The spectre that haunts the Human Genome Project is that of the synthetic human being, constructed in a laboratory, possibly using private, patented information: the ultimate plastic life, programmable and perfectible. While this might remain in the realm of science fiction, the technology's potential begs many questions, questions which substantially dovetail with the concerns of this strikingly timely exhibition.

'Plastic Life' conjures up a varied but interweaving set of associations: artificial recreations of organic phenomena; the sense of living an unauthentic existence; infinitely malleable substances; synthetic materials and cheap commodities; and beyond. Moreover, the phrase sets into play many contemporary anxieties about the social impact of technological change, particularly as technology–as a marriage of science and commerce–has come to unsettle our understanding of that fundamental term, life. What does it mean to lead, or to be, a 'plastic life'? Is it the only kind of life available to us as we enter the twenty-first century, in a culture where media representations provide our raw experience; where machines fuse with our bodies as a matter of course, whether we travel in a car or ingest nano-robots to fight viruses at intercellular level; where scientists have come to regard the silicon code inside a computer as equally alive as carbon-based organisms; and now, where the human genome has been mapped?

Melbourne-based artists Patricia Piccinini and Christopher Langton are well aware of the multivalence of this exhibition's title, for each in their individual practice has consistently engaged with many of questions engendered by the idea of 'Plastic Life'. In a sense their works present us with an opportunity to concertedly think about the implications of living in a world where we find it so difficult to distinguish between authenticity and artificiality that the distinction becomes almost redundant. And yet in that 'almost' resides a universe of strategies, and it is here that Langton and Piccinini find fertile ground. Because while the rhetoric about the hyperreal is undoubtedly seductive in its global seamlessness, it's the imperfections in the surface that fascinate these artists.

Piccinini's Panel Work continues her exploration of the quasi-erotic investment we have both in smooth, glossy surfaces and in machines, a combination of themes most evident in Truck Babies (1999) and Car Nuggets (1998). Piccinini has chosen the car in its capacity as the archetypal machine of our time, a machine with which we are intimately familiar, which witnesses our most private moments and compensates for our personal inadequacies, but which at the same time figures as the prime commodity in the public realm of advertising and consumerism. The car, then, occupies the borderline between public and private, between body and machine, between pure functionalism and pure sign, an unstable position that Piccinini exploits in her project.

Panel Work comprises a large series of moulded plastic segments spray-painted in various shades of metallic-blue duco. The surface of each panel is scalloped, gouged and perforated to different effect with the delicacy of precision design. On first reading, the panels are evocative of car detailing and the standardisation of mass production, but they gradually come to suggest organic forms and the idiosyncrasies of individual identity. Despite their obvious synthetic character, these surfaces demand to be read as skin, having clear connections to Piccinini's uncanny renditions of digitised skin in Breathing Room (2000). The analogy also brings to mind the perverse scenario of J.G. Ballard's science fiction novel Crash (1985), where the protagonist finds the tactile qualities of the car as stimulating as female flesh: "His hand was raised at right angles to his forearm, measuring out the geometry of the chromium roof-sill, while his right hand moved down the girl's thighs...' To drive Ballard's analogy further, let's counterpoise Angela Carter's incisiveness: 'if flesh plus skin equals sensuality, then flesh minus skin equals meat...[and] the garden of earthly delights becomes a butcher shop' (The Sadean Woman, 1978).

The metal skin is good enough to lick. It promises sensual pleasure but also the cachet of good design and discriminating taste. Stephen Bayley has observed that 'for some people, owning a new car is the nearest they will ever get to perfection in an otherwise flawed and soiled life', while 'an appreciation of the styling of cars is the nearest most of us will ever get to the consumption of art' (Sex, Drinks and Fast Cars , 1986). Piccinini undoubtedly seeks in this work to invoke car culture as a counter to the supposed refinement of the art world, perhaps asking us to consider the continuity of our aesthetic judgements across these disparate contexts. However, her work also suggests that the object of our desire is no more than a paint-job. Panel Work explicitly uncouples the car as material, functioning machine from the car as sign–as emblematic of speed, success, sexual prowess, control, physical enhancement–and presents us with nothing but surface to fulfil our needs. But Piccinini goes beyond accusing us of being 'seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic' in that her work embodies the very instability of the boundary between what is and what is not organic.

Langton too mixes commodity fetishism with the idea of artificial life, although unlike Piccinini's high-end gloss, he opts for the low end of the market. Langton is renowned for his imposing installations of larger-than-life inflatable plastic dolls which he copies from cheap imported toys, works such as Whoever you are (1997-8) and Soft Centre (1998). In Action Men, however, Langton's figures take a small step towards verisimilitude; they are mannequin-like, with decidedly Ken-doll features although without Ken's Ralph Lauren elan. Rather, these figures are dressed in the synthetic badge of poverty. And, unlike shop dummies, Langton's dolls are programmed to gyrate with all the grace of a battery-operated toy, performing the jagged, yet synchronised, movements of what the artist describes as a 'bad hip hop dance'. Cyborg fantasies on a budget!

With Langton's foregrounding of the cheap and nasty, it's difficult not to read these rather poignant figures as somehow symbolic of the uneven distribution of the benefits of advanced technologies in our culture. This is plastic life at its most trashy: not the slickness and style of high-end robotics, virtual reality cinema, and genetic perfection, but the clunky, near-obsolescent, ragged aesthetics of disposable product deemed sufficient to satisfy second-rate desires. In a sense Action Men are the mongrel offspring of a desire for perfection coupled with socio-economic reality, of a dream to recreate life artificially coupled with the limited horizons of commodity culture.

Coincidentally, Christopher Langton's namesake is one of the world's leading researchers in Artificial Life (or Alife). Alife refers to attempts to synthesise life-like behaviours within computers and other artificial media. Langton stresses that key to Alife research is the proposition that life is a property of form, not matter, a result of the organisation of matter rather than something that inheres in the matter itself. If this is the case, then carbon-based organisms (such as we humans) are not singularly entitled to lay claim to 'life', for it may be that the form of life–with its characteristics of growth by metabolism, reproduction and ability to adapt to an environment through internally generated changes–can occur elsewhere. Indeed Alife researchers claim they have already produced computer codes which display these very characteristics: a mind-boggling spin on plastic life.

Developments such as Alife research and The Book of Mankind have further unsettled our perception of ourselves as essentially unique and irreplaceable, although such assumptions had already been under siege from consumer culture and the mass media. In the midst of this onslaught on the meaning of such fundamental terms as 'human' and 'life', Christopher Langton and Patricia Piccinini offer us a salutary opportunity to gather our senses and reflect.

Jacqueline Millner