Plastique Fantastique

Zero Time

30.11.2019 – 17.01.2020

 

Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Comic Communique:The Story of Cimon, BoDroNo, Eurnikern, NanOr/5, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, Silver Blankets, 2400 x 2400 mm

 

Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Comic Communique:The Story of Cimon, BoDroNo, Eurnikern, NanOr/5, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, Silver Blankets, 2400 x 2400 mm (detail)

 

Plastique Fantastique, Zero Time, 2019, exhibition view

 

Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Nan0r/5, BoDroNo, Drone Monkey, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm

 

Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Termites, Pixel, Funnel Face, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm

 

Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Nan0r/5, BoDroNo, Drone Monkey, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm (detail)

 

Plastique Fantastique, Plastique Fantastique Avatars: Termites, Pixel, Funnel Face, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, 2200 x 1400 mm (detail)

 

Plastique Fantastique, CIMON, 2019, Polystyrene, Ribbons, Paint, Foam, I-Pad Screen, 500 x 500 x 500 mm

 

Plastique Fantastique, CIMON, 2019, Polystyrene, Ribbons, Paint, Foam, I-Pad Screen, 500 x 500 x 500 mm

 

Plastique Fantastique, CIMON, 2019, Polystyrene, Ribbons, Paint, Foam, I-Pad Screen, 500 x 500 x 500 mm

 

Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm

 

Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm (detail)

 

Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm (detail)

 

Plastique Fantastique, Spacehex Dragon, 2019, Digital Print, Plywood, Wood, Ribbons, Metal and Wood Table, Perspex, 2200 x 1000 x 800 mm (detail)

 

Plastique Fantastique, Mars Earth Sigil, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, 3000 x 1400 mm

Plastique Fantastique, Witches Ladder, 2019, Rope, Feathers, Dimensions Variable

 

Plastique Fantastique, Mars Earth Sigil, 2019, Digital Prints, Magnets, Ribbons, Plywood, 3000 x 1400 mm

Plastique Fantastique, Witches Ladder, 2019, Rope, Feathers, Dimensions Variable

photos: Jonah Gebka, Magdalena Wisniowska

 

To a certain extent we are all used to the idea that art involves fiction. The events described by a novel are not real, neither is the play performed in the theatre, nor the bunch of flowers painted on a canvas. When Plastique Fantastique presents “Zero Time,” an exhibition which deals with a question familiar from science fiction – whether we, as a people, should stay on planet earth and try to sort out our mess, or whether we should leave instead, and seek our future elsewhere – it is tempting to think that the exhibition with its video, performance and installation, is that which is fictional. But this is not what the work demands from us. The kind of “fictioning” pursued by Plastique Fantastique shows that it is our reality, and not the video or performance, which is fictional – they disrupt the structures of our dominant world order to reveal them as myth. 

It is not that the exhibition presents a fiction, but involves the practice of “fictioning”.  Plastique Fantastique is an art collective of Simon o’Sullivan, David Burrows,  Alex Marzeta,  Vanessa Page and Benedict Drew. Simon o’Sullivan , professor of Art Theory and Practice in the department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths and David Burrows, Reader in Fine Art at the Slade, work in theory as much as in practice, and they define the meaning of “fictioning” in their 2019 book, Fictioning: The Myth Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. In their introduction, they trace the concept of fictioning philosophically through Plato’s contaminated opposition between poetry and philosophy – poetry being fictional, philosophy, having to do with truth – showing how more recently Deleuze replaces this opposition with Nietzsche’s fantastic theatre of metamorphosis. They also show how the tension between fiction and truth has been addressed by contemporary art, arguing that there is an efficacy of fiction when it is experienced as fact.  As a performative gesture fictioning is generative of social identities and relations. It brings about a truth which does not yet exist by fictioning it.

I like to understand the shift in relations produced by their performative fiction, in terms of the experience this kind of fictioning engenders.  It is not the relation of a predetermined human subject to its equally determined object. It is rather, the chaosmotic process of combining the sensory event with its network of associations, an affection and all the affects beyond experience, which it harbours. The ‘I’ is not what experiences the work of art. The ‘I’ here is produced in the encounter. When I engage with art I like to think this involves a different “I” to my everyday one, maybe there isn’t even an “I” here to speak of, but the complete participation in a creative activity. 

Plastique Fantastique creates a world very different from our own: a more colourful one, more glamorous, glittery, extravagant.  A future techonologically advanced world, but also a medieval, mystical one. It runs parallel to ours and we are welcome to visit it anytime Plastique Fantastique might exhibit or perform. 

Magdalena Wisniowska 2019