The Illuminous City and Me, by Luis Jaime
Art, oftentimes, is a means of inspiring other art. Whether it be through homage, direct quotes, or visual cues, art can make other art flourish. Writing, in my eyes, is one of the biggest art forms there is, and art critics have used it to criticize or analyze art for a long time now. Today, I will be presenting my take on a piece I find to be timely and important. The piece I chose is from the Too Much! art gallery at the New Jersey City University’s Visual Arts Building, and it is called Illuminous City, created by Poramit Thantapalit. It is a good chunk of a city, but created entirely of green plastic bottles (First assumed to be from Sprite sodas). The commentary is already there in the quick rundown of what the piece is, with my immediate thought upon seeing the piece being ‘It’s a city of plastic bottles because of the litter strewn about in cities.'
Image 1: Sky high view of the Illuminous City
After reading the description, I found out that the bottles were actually from 7-Up and Mountain Dew, but more importantly, I got to see the legitimate motive behind the existence of Illuminous City. The purpose of the plastic city was to highlight accumulation, and how easy it is to build up, as the bottles were collected at Thantapalits household during a three to four year period. Even this gave me pause as the piece features a lot of bottles. Another thing Thantapalits explained was the idea of making trash into something else, proving that there is a use for any piece of recyclables or garbage. This sentiment made me happy, because as a visual artist, I tend to find ways to incorporate recyclables or general items that one may not find purpose in keeping. Old cardboard built up my Halloween costume for this year, and bottle caps helped with last years.
Image 2: Aerial Constructions
While the artists’ description did not go in depth on the topics I believed to be central to the art, I do think that the sentiments I initially believed to be key to it link up perfectly with the readings we’ve been doing throughout the course. The imagery of soda bottles is something that is overlooked, with so many logos and visuals adding up to make us remember certain things or look at a bottle as a status of advertisement. Even if I believed the bottles at the exhibit were from Sprite, learning that they were from 7-Up or Mountain Dew was something that made sense to me as those bottles also have their own iconic green colors. In chapter 7 of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, Berger says “We are now so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact.”(Berger 130) It is imperative that we, as a collective of people who are bombarded by these images of sodas, snacks, movies, big-budget company products, realize how much of a grasp those visuals have over us right now.
Image 3: Architecture With A Green Tint
Eventually, the acknowledgement of these images will help us visualize the real illuminous cities in our world. New York City will always have the existence of Times Square to be the monolith of the products that Thantapalit made his art piece out of. That is about as close as we can get in the real world to represent the piece, with all of the advertisements and litter you can find out on the streets of the city. The role we play as people is to make sure that these plastic bottles don’t make it to the floors and can be recycled officially or even by ourselves. Poramit Thantapalit did it masterfully by not only making an art piece out of them, but by making the art directly correlate to the message he’s trying to convey. I found that a lot of the artwork in the Too Much! Exhibit did a great job at representing the different issues plaguing the world, but Thantapalit conveyed the same shiny feeling of an advertisement and managed to catch my eye upon entering the room. Not only is it nice to look at, but it represents the brightness of a city, which on the surface is beautiful but underneath may hold a more realistic implication.
The visual aspect of Illuminous City reminds me a lot of a project featured in the Interventionists book, made by Michael Rakowitz called paraSITE. The project was an inflatable homeless shelter that took advantage of exterior building vents. It is made entirely of plastic bags and tape, yet is somehow feasible as an idea. As Rakowitz explains, “The visibly parasitic relationship of these devices to the buildings, appropriating a readily available situation with readily available materials elicited immediate speculation as to the future of the city”, and proceeds to ask “would these things completely take over, given the enormous number of homeless in our society?”. (Rakowitz 22) This makes me think: How many projects could one make with ingenuity and an abundance of plastic bottles? The possibilities are endless with the process of recycling, but the way things are going, people may never realize that people like Rakowitz and Thantapalit have both thought of it as a means of doing something more than getting rid of trash.
Works Cited
Berger, John. "Ways of Seeing," written by John Berger.
Rakowitz, Michael. "The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life", edited by Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette.
Penguin, 2008, 130
MIT Press, 2004, 22
Above, is my digital selfie - A take on a billboard for Mountain Dew, with text that you would never see on the genuine article
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