The plastic bag has one of the shortest intended life spans.

Plastic which is clean
Recycling you can see

Having worked with the plastic bag as my primary material for the past 8 years all of the obvious references to recycling, first world culture, class, high and low art give way to an almost formal process which reflects the unique flexibility of the medium. Cut like paper, sewn like fabric, these constructions have been presented as flat art (framed or mounted) with crumpled and shiny surfaces that are dulled by dirt, and time; un-useful pieces of their former selves. The work is becoming more sculptural ; literally folding off of the wall, hinged by discombobulated handles, the real potential of the medium presents itself to me.

The material's relationship to marketing and advertisement culture is ever present, unavoidable and inherent in my work. The graphic text on the bags often influences the theme of a piece, but just as often disappears into the background of color, almost becoming subliminal in the work. The somewhat dirty, hands on approach involved in working with what has already become trash and the labor involved in the sewing process directly belie the promise and mythology of convenience that the plastic bag represents. In this juxtaposition lives the alchemy of my work, like the alchemy of plastic itself.

"Plastic...is less a thing than the trace of a movement"
-Roland Barthes

Dianna Cohen transforms polyethylene bags into paintings that delineate artistic, physical, historical, and social transition. Acquired on her travels or sent from friends around the globe, she scissors and then sews the remnants into vibrant images that map journeys taken either personally or vicariously. Each remnant invokes places, people, communities; each stitch records borders, trails, connections. "A map can be memory or anticipation," writes Lucy Lippard and, indeed, the resulting work forms an imaginative landscape created from the artist's memories and desires.

One of Cohen's desires is to investigate and articulate the possibilities inherent in plastic. In this she has something in common with Arte Povera artists such as Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, and Alighiero Boetti, who incorporated humble, ephemeral, and man-made materials into their artworks. Cohen's hand-sewn invocations of maps recall Boetti's embroidered Mappa del mondo and Mario Merz's vision of the artist as nomad. Her insistence upon sewing within her work parallels Marisa Merz's devotion to knitting and "craft." But whereas Arte Povera artists juxtaposed synthetic and organic materials in order to expose the friction between the two, Cohen identifies their consonance. She acknowledges plastic's artificiality and cultural status as a dispensable material, yet also advances it as a medium containing natural energy and intrinsic value. In so doing, she probes the hierarchy society places on organic versus inorganic materials, thereby negotiating territories similar to those explored by British artists Tony Cragg and Cornelia Parker. Cragg constructed his 1981 mosaic-like Britain Seen from the North out of found plastic scraps in a move that challenges popular perceptions about value and authority. Parker, too, dares her audience to re-evaluate received statuses and values by magnifying the extraordinary associations underlying the mundane materials that comprise her works, as in Exhaled Blanket from 1996 (dust and fibers from Sigmund Freud's couch, projected from a glass slide). Cohen's manipulation of a commodity deemed disposable by society-the plastic bag-into objects that evoke culturally esteemed item-maps, flags (Of thee I sing), and fashion (le poisson)-enriches this line of artistic inquiry.

Whilst Cohen aestheticizes and ennobles plastic bags, she also exploits their commercial properties. Through her fragmentation of texts, logos, and images found on shopping bags, including those from some of the world's most exclusive stores, she subtly critiques an industry fueled by twin imperatives to acquire and dispose at ever-decreasing intervals. Cognizant that both product and packaging hence find themselves outmoded and superseded in a cyclical process generated by commercial production, Cohen intervenes by rescuing the often dirtied, torn, or crumpled detritus and then renewing it through personal, as opposed to mass, labour. As she describes it, "It feels like I'm repairing something that's damaged or taking little bits of things that would be garbage and giving them another life."

The second life Cohen offers to her polyethylene bags is unlikely to be perpetual. Although a relatively stable plastic, polyethylene is subject to photo-oxidation by light and air. When exposed to the sun, its colors will fade; when exposed to heat, fissures may appear. Yet for Cohen, these fissures map the material's aging process and mimic the cracked overglazes of old oil paintings. They confirm what she sees as plastic's organic qualities by evincing the mortality of her chosen medium and thus tracing its movement toward a natural decomposition.

Alison Bracker
Royal College of Art, London
June 2001

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