Shahar Livne
Atelier for Bespoke Conceptual Material Based Design
Shahar Livne -Conceptual Material Designer and Researcher
Consume!
2021
In the video work "Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger" by JØrgen Leth from 1982, the iconic pop artist eating a Burger King burger for four minutes and 20 seconds. Leth shows in this video Warhol's love for all things in a traditional sense of American consumerism.
Warhol once wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: "What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest."
The same goes for plastics in the last decades. We all consume them and we all can't escape the possible effects of them on our bodies, environmental bodies, physical bodies, and emotional bodies.
Plastics are hyper objects; objects which have a vitality to them but you can't touch them, like race or class, or climate change. Their effects may be experienced even if they cannot be necessarily touched.
Plastic disperse freely with no distinction, yet it doesn't degrade or mix, it floats beside and in other materials, it moves through bodies with no purpose.
Plastic, if we go back enough in time, is the substance of life, it transforms the death of one organism into the life of another, it is definite, it nourishes, it hosts but it also starves and suffocates. A meat burger is one organism's death in the intention to nourish another, yet if consumed in excess, can suffocate the arteries and stop the heart.
We cover our bodies with plastic, we touch plastics, we breathe plastics, we build our cultures and life with plastics, we are not addicted but rely on plastics.
Concept: Shahar Livne
Videos: JØrgen Leth (Youtube) and Alan Boom
Supported by: Stokroos Foundation and Yksi Expo