Robin Frohardt:
The Plastic Bag Store

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Robin Frohardt’s The Plastic Bag Store at once laments and monumentalizes the destructive permanence of plastic and, in so doing, beautifully captures the ambivalence of living under climate change. Climate change takes us out of historical time: The world as we know it will assuredly be destroyed. And yet our world is also dizzyingly resilient, endlessly reproducing itself without noticeable change to our daily lives. And the primary reproduction strategy of the Anthropocene? Plastic. 

Frohardt’s Plastic Bag Store is both installation and filmed performance piece. We enter a storefront on Michigan Avenue to find a life-size re-creation of a grocery store, made entirely with plastic bags. The produce section is stocked with vegetables from “Strawbaggies” to “Baglet Pears,” all molded from plastic bags. The cereal aisle is lined with “Shredded Waste” and “Caps N’ Such.” Magazines from “Bagmopolitan” to “Bags Illustrated” contain exposés like “Double Bagged? You know it” and “The Ageless Polly Ethylene & Polly Propylene.” And my personal favorite: In the frozen-foods aisle we find “Bagarino,” a frozen-pizza brand with baking instructions that show an actual plastic pizza hazardously melted on an oven tray. However, what may initially seem to be nothing more than an excessive commitment to plastic bag puns transforms into a ready-made cinema. The shelves turn around to produce projection canvases and cardboard boxes are brought out in lieu of seats. What follows is a series of three puppet films following the past, present and future of single-use containers. The triptych serves as a meditation on the inherent contradictions of plastic: It is both indestructible and destructive, permanent and disposable. Frohardt brings such contradictions to bear on the absurdity of history-making and our instance on seeing ourselves within historical time—a temporality that ultimately erases us. 

The first film uses shadow puppetry and follows a lazy young Grecian with an oddly contemporary sensibility. As a true entrepreneur, he disrupts the clay pot industry by introducing single-use clay pots in a misguided attempt to alleviate the laborious task of having to refill the same pot over and over again. The conceit does not make much sense; then again, single-use plastic doesn’t make much sense either. This first film is most interesting for the ways that it comes to bear on the second film, which uses tabletop puppetry and follows a museum custodian named Helen, who walks past a clay pot on her daily route. This clay pot was created by our previous young anti-hero, and on it, he painted a scene warning about the dangerous by-products of disposability—in this case, the creation of a massive clay trash heap. However, like Keats’s Grecian urn, the clay pot proves a silent historian: Its author’s message is lost on Helen even as she is struck by its permanence. Helen is portrayed by a doll-like puppet, only a few feet tall, with a sculpted face and soft-form body. Her puppeteers are visible behind her, and their hands often double as her own hands, as she completes her custodial duties. As Helen picks up empty plastic bottles littered amongst the museum’s relics, she articulates what seems to be the piece’s main thesis: the hazardous permanence of plastic. Upon arriving home, Helen sits down and writes a letter to future generations on the back of an old receipt, warning about such destructive impulses. She seals it in a bottle and throws it in the trash. 

The Plastic Bag Store activates a concept that contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou (2012) calls “plasticity.” Loosely defined, plasticity is, on the one hand, a pliable and easily molded substance that creates new forms from old ones. However, Malabou is more interested in the other side of plasticity: its ability to annihilate and explode those forms out of which it creates new ones. Working primarily with the neuroscience of the brain, Malabou asserts that if “good plasticity” sculpts memories into a cohesive identity, “destructive plasticity” deforms memory, sometimes creating memories out of nothing, memories that have no actual origin. I engage Malabou here because she helps to connect the relationship of plastic to history—a connection that drives The Plastic Bag Store. Plastic creates endless forms: water bottles, bags, toothbrushes, combs, cigarette lighters, those little plastic sticks from Starbucks that go in plastic lids to prevent coffee from splashing out of plastic cups. Yet, Frohardt asks: What are these forms annihilating? What memories are they erasing while they themselves are incapable of decay? 

In the third film, which also uses tabletop puppetry, an archeologist excavates a frozen tundra sometime in the distant future. The archeologist—a puppet in the same style as Helen—leans over a hole in the ice and slowly fishes up each of the items described above. He then brings them back to his lab to be studied. The toothbrush? A child’s doll, he surmises. The cigarette lighter? A canister of holy water. And the little plastic sticks? A talisman with intricate carvings of a God. He finds Helen’s water bottle—a letter carrier—with her scribbled receipt. Her letter has been erased except for a line at the very bottom: Our Most Valued Customer. The archeologist decides these artifacts must have come from the society of the Ancient Customer—a period that falls “somewhere in between the castle people and robot wars.” The mantra of these people, he postulates? “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” Consumerism fueled by plastic is all that remains of our history—one that does not create a cohesive narrative from our present to our archeologist’s future, but rather one that annihilates our present, replacing it with memories that never happened. 

Frohardt next asks us to visit the Museum of the Ancient Customer. The frozen-food section opens up, and we find ourselves in a room with our totems on display in glass cases. As we walk through the museum, we are led back to a life-size re-creation of the Temple of Customers (the Plastic Bag Store that we just left) with an invitation to see a full replica of the world of the Customers outside the store’s doors. Here, Frohardt asks us to return to our present, delivering us to the affective state of historical plasticity: the feeling of living in a present that will soon be annihilated by our very attachment to its permanence.