Isabel Elson-Enriquez

This dissertation provides the first study of how plastic transformed art and cultural attitudes toward the human body in the post-war United States. The project analyzes works by several artists who embraced the material in the 1960s to work through issues of corporeality, including Senga Nengudi, John Chamberlain, Lynda Benglis, Carl Cheng, and the Ant Farm collective. “Becoming Plastic” argues that the proliferation of plastic forced a renegotiation of boundaries between synthetic and biotic matter which, in conjunction with social politics of the 1960s and 1970s, played a pivotal role in reshaping perceptions of the body and shifting definitions of humanness. Through a theorization of “synthetic materiality,” the study offers an interdisciplinary understanding of the material constitution of plastics, while reckoning with the way in which plastics have affected the materiality of the human body, both physically and discursively.