Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent, 1999
I’ve often thought that John Ruskin or William Morris, those tireless critics of the cheapness and ugliness of industrial products and processes, would have a lot to say about plastic (not least: “we told you so!”). Ruskin’s design ethos of “truth to materials” shows us the economic logic that was already at play in the nineteenth century—he railed against the substitution of wood for marble or plaster for stone. That same logic would drive chemists to develop synthetic polymers applicable to numerous uses and available through the apparently endless supply of fossil fuels. Plastic is now evidence in the rock strata for the Anthropocene as a geological epoch and embodies multiple aspects of our current crises: our disposable economy, reliance on fossil fuels, rapidly changing climate, and the unevenly distributed toxic effects at all stages of plastic’s production, use, and disposal. These negative externalities fall along historically constructed lines of racial inequality, and such disparities continue to make plastic seem deceptively cheap. Now that microplastics are everywhere from the air to the ocean to human blood, Ruskin’s sense of both “modern manufacture” and the “storm-cloud” of uncontrolled production and pollution has taken on new meaning. Thinking about Ruskin and plastic together can give us ideas and materials for thinking through the intertwined problems of systemic racism, mass production, hidden costs, art and design, and extractive economies.
Amy Woodson-Boulton is professor and past chair of the Department of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. A historian of Britain and Ireland, she works on cultural reactions to industrialization, including the history of museums and ideas about “primitive art” in anthropology and art history. Published work includes an edited volume, articles, and book chapters as well as Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford, 2012). She has recently published “Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations” at the Victorian Review and “Teaching Modern Environmental World History, Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Urgency of Climate Change,” co-authored with Elizabeth Drummond for World History Connected. She teaches modern British, European, and global courses that focus on imperial, cultural, public, and environmental history.