List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I Plastic Forms

   Chapter 1 History of Dematerializations

   Chapter 2 Concepts and Objects

   Chapter 3 Plastic Subjects

   Chapter 4 Form or Imprint?

Part II Plastic Arts

   Chapter 5 How to Make an Imprint

   Chapter 6 Sculpture Before Sculpture

   Chapter 7 Losing Form

Part III Plastic Materials

   Chapter 8 Material Complicity

   Chapter 9 Wax, Plaster, Marble

   Chapter 10 Synthetic Becomings

Conclusion: Materialisms Without Matter

Bibliography

Praise

Combining an expansive and explorative understanding of plasticity both chronologically and thematically, Iacobone builds a solid critique of Catherine Malabou’s understanding of form and formability. Bringing imprint into the prominence of discussion, the book counters over reliance on form and refigures plasticity and material art, art-objects and their materialist mattering. It argues a way out of Malabou’s bio-centric understanding of plasticity into materialist and object-centric narration as a kind of counter-theorization. An excellent contribution, precisely.

    Ranjan Ghosh, author of The Plastic Turn & Plastic Figures

If we have been living for a while now in what seems the age of plasticity, the aesthetic and truly material origins of what we call ‘plastic’ have not been reflectively investigated until now. Iacobone’s Material Plasticity does this investigation brilliantly, giving us new tools, like the concept of thlastotechnics, to think thoroughly—and perhaps for the first time—what we call ‘form’ and ‘matter’ and why we need to go beyond these notions to think ourselves and what, inside and outside of us, is not us, yet touches and imprints us and itself

    James Martell, author of Beckett and Derrida & Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

Quote

“In the workshop, plasticity behaves nothing like philosophy promised. Subjected to the tests of the arts and crafts, plasticity proves to concern less the abstract concept of form than the tangible counter-form that is the mysterious object of a closed mold. At the same time, plasticity never summons ‘matter’ as such. What populates the workshop […] are instead clay, wax, plaster, marble, plastics: singular materials. Rethought from a technical and artistic standpoint, plasticity thus performs a double displacement: form flips into counter-form, while matter diffracts into a multiplicity of materials. Initially framed simply as a morphological and material concept, plasticity proves capable of unsettling both morphology and materiality by countering the former and […] by debasing the latter. This unsettling is not a negation, but rather a shift, a slight displacement: neither form nor matter withdraws; on the contrary, they are both forced to concretize. Plasticity thus refuses to be reduced to a ‘category about form and matter’ and instead renegotiates our understanding of both.”