Chapter Title: Plastiglomerate

Chapter Author(s): Kelly Jazvac and Patricia Corcoran

Book Title: Fueling Culture

Book Subtitle: 101 Words for Energy and Environment
Book Editor(s): Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger
Published by: Fordham University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1hfr0s3.77

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Plastiglomerate

Kelly Jazvac (artist) and Patricia Corcoran (scientist)

Environmental problems are socially constructed via public campaigns that legitimate
claims and build support for reform and change. Rationality is crucial to this process,
insofar as science is enlisted to provide evidence for this or that harm. However,
it is often the emotions that go with environmental issues that can win the day for
specific campaigns. Thus, affective elements . . . are essential in how issues are socially
constructed.
—rob white, Crimes Against Nature

What if the material evidence from a scientific finding were also presented as art? What
could be gained from such re-presentation?
For one, it puts the evidence firmly in the category of made by human as well as observed
by human. When you are making something, as an artist or fabricator does, you are as
close to inside it as you can possibly be. A sculptor making an armature for a sculpture
figures out the inside support so the exterior can stand on its own. Conversely, studying
a phenomenon, instead of making a phenomenon, implies being outside, carefully and
objectively looking in.
Art is a subjective activity, from the maker’s point of view and the viewer’s. Something
curious occurs when a readymade object is appropriated by an artist and declared to be art
under her authorship: what had been an external phenomenon now becomes incorporated
into her oeuvre. The object, now also an art object, has new power: it tells viewers it is okay
to look at this thing subjectively because it is art. Emotion and speculation are encouraged.
Duchamp himself did not think this expressive strategy would work well if used willy-nilly;
therefore, he limited his readymade output to a careful selection over the course of his
career. Had he always put urinals in the gallery, they would have quickly lost their affective
power (Duchamp 1973, 141– 42). Like the urinal that troubled the categories of both art

Speculations by an artist, fact checked by a scientist: Interdisciplinary collaboration in the

Anthropocene.

275

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276 Plastiglomerate

and plumbing, could the category of “scientific evidence as readymade” be better socially
and affectively employed than either category on its own?
In collaboration with geologist Patricia Corcoran, I have appropriated scientific evi-
dence as an art object. Our collaboration began in line for coffee, where I saw a poster
for a talk about PLASTICS pollution by Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch. I was both fascinated and horrified by the talk, and I exchanged
emails with Corcoran, who had organized it. She invited me to accompany her to the
beach in Hawaii touted as the “dirtiest beach on Earth” to investigate a curious geological
phenomenon that Moore had observed. He hypothesized that the interaction of molten
lava with plastic garbage was creating a sensational new substance (Corcoran, Moore, and
Jazvac 2014).
Our fieldwork in Hawaii led us to discover of a new type of stone.1 We called it “plasti-
glomerate.” Plastiglomerate is a composite of melted plastic debris, sand, basalt rock, coral,
organic debris, and various other fragments typically found on a Hawaiian beach. It turns
out that its formation process is more banal than sensational: it is not made by lava but
instead completely fashioned by humans. Plastiglomerate is an anthropogenic substance
three times over: first, it is composed of human-made plastics; second, because inadequate
disposal brought the material through the ocean currents of the world to Hawaii; and
lastly, because human-made fires on the beach melted the plastic debris, thereby fusing it
with natural materials to create plastiglomerate. It is a hybrid that crosses categories and
challenges measurement as either nature or as pollution.
As an artist, I saw in these aesthetically compelling objects a heartbreaking story of
humans prioritizing their role as consumers over their role as citizens of the planet. I also
saw objects that I could never make myself, given all of the forces, distances, and politics
at play in their creation. Yet I had inadvertently and passively contributed to plastiglomer-
ate’s making. Some (or perhaps most) things that are anthropogenic cannot be forged by
a single human working individually. And considering the aesthetic appeal of plastiglom-
erate, I wondered about the ability of artists and other humans to make beautiful things
through environmentally destructive means. Is this what art should be? And if not, what
other models or systems are available to artists who strive for sustainable practices?
Scientifically speaking, plastiglomerate offers material evidence of the irrevocable im-
pact of humans on the environment. Plastiglomerate is not merely a discrete form of hy-
brid pollution; it also has the strong potential to become embedded into rock (Corcoran,
Moore, and Jazvac 2014). This anthropogenic substance can be fused into the earth and
become preserved within its FUTURE rock record.2 It reminds me of Spike Lee’s movie In-
side Man (2006), in which bank robbers make their hostages dress like them so that the

1. Technically, a rock is a naturally occurring material. Since plastiglomerate is not naturally

occurring, we refer to it as a stone.
2. The rock record is any geological formation available for study. It provides information con-
cerning Earth’s internal, surficial, and atmospheric processes, including the EVOLUTION of life and
its effects on the natural environment.

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 Plastiglomerate 277

police cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys. What’s a well-meaning detective
to do?
Like the fusion of Earth/pollution or hostage/bank robber, our plastiglomerate sam-
ples have led a hybrid existence since their extraction from Kamilo Beach: they were key
evidence for a scientific manuscript; they have served as readymade art objects presented
in a gallery among other plastic artworks; they have been employed as pedagogical tools
and subjects of educational outreach programs in a Canadian museum; and they have be-
come a commodity whose sale supports research and volunteer activism.3 In short, plasti-
glomerate has played both subjective and objective roles across different disciplines and
environmental efforts, too. This hybrid resists being contained by any single category.
“Ambiguities of definition,” according to Rob White, can work against finding solutions
for environmental problems (White 2008, 37). If the stakes of an environmental issue are
entangled with other serious issues across broad geographic distances (as with, for example,
the way that PIPELINE projects entangle issues of job creation with issues of environmental
harm to the atmosphere or ecosystems along the pipeline’s path), it becomes difficult to
pinpoint who should address it, how, and where. Environmental CRISIS is itself a hybrid
state. Like plastiglomerate, Earth and our impact upon it are irrevocably intertwined. Our
planet, now host to superstorms, radioactive caribou, and “managed” tailings ponds, has
become a mixture of it and us. This predicament demands a more hybrid, collaborative,
cross-disciplinary model of environmental and political thinking: instead of pegging blame
and responsibility, an expanded field in which acting, making, thinking, feeling, and dis-
secting can occur simultaneously. If we were to approach hybrid phenomena through as
many forms of knowledge as possible, more people would have a more complex under-
standing of the environment.
To mobilize caring about a hybridized scenario, we will need cross-disciplinary systems
of navigation and inquiry that operate objectively and subjectively, while still being held
accountable to the criteria of the the relevant disciplines. Rather than ignoring or erasing
evidence of a mess that has been made (as with the Canadian federal government closing
157 environmentally related research facilities and programs; The Fifth Estate 2014), the
objective and the subjective, working in tandem, can inspire action and the development of
new systems that operate both rationally and emotionally. For Henri Bergson, “the intel-
lect is characterized by the unlimited power of decomposing according to any law and of
recomposing into any system” (1992, 141). The conventional systems, laws, and categories
available to us do not seem to foster emotional clarity with respect to environmental crises.
But if not, let us work with that: let us find each other in line for coffee and collaboratively
recompose how we address the messy realities of an environment composed as much of
plastiglomerate as of grass and trees.
See also: AFFECT, ANTHROPOCENE, CHINA, COAL ASH, DETRITUS, METABOLISM, PLASTICS.

3. GSA Today; Oakville Galleries (Oakville, Ontario); Louis B. James Gallery (New York); Visu-
alizing the Invisible research project at Western University; Hawaii Wildlife Fund.

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