North Adams, Massachusetts
Robin Frohardt’s The Plastic Bag Store (on view through November 3, 2024; advance reservations required) is sculptural-objects-turned-installation theater. A satire set in four acts, it begins as a deeply uncanny and unsettling grocery store experience. Viewers enter through a shop organized and attractive in the particular way of grocery stores. Every aisle displays abundance, colorful graphics, and the promise of something novel, fresh, sustaining. The verisimilitude of cereals and cigarettes, flowers and fresh fish, is delightful, provoking a giddy feeling of childish make-believe. The product designs are so recognizable that they begin to prompt a hunger response, and this is when the experience becomes viscerally weird. There’s Bag & Jerry’s Mint Plastic Chip ice cream. A family-size Bagarino’s Capperonni Pizza. The cooler offers skim bag milk to pour over Caps ’n Such cereal topped with blue bag berries. Delight is subsumed by acute nausea. This grotesque place has tricked us into hungering for plastic.
And that’s the point. Our decades-long seduction by plastic means that we have arrived at this exact ridiculous state—humans (and animals) eating plastic. The feeling of illness is amplified by daily headlines: “Costco Just Recalled Cheese Due to Possible Plastic Contamination” (EatingWell, June 6, 2024); “Microplastics Are Everywhere. Here’s How to Avoid Eating Them” (Wirecutter, June 10, 2024); “Microplastics: A Real Global Threat for Environment and Food Safety: A State of the Art Review” (The NIH National Library of Medicine, February 15, 2023). Just when it becomes almost too much to stomach, Act II begins. Plastic Bag Store “employees” swarm and transform the store into a stage for live actors and a silhouette animation about the history of bottled water in Greece. The mood lightens.
After the animation ends, viewers move through the frozen foods section into a room covered in white plastic bags to evoke an ice cave. Act III begins with another movie, this time with puppets enacting and narrating the story of a recognizable present that gives way to a post-apocalyptic future. In this scenario, the remaining population is left to guess at the meaning of all the bags, caps, straws, IUDs, and other plastic mess pulled out of the ocean, leftovers from our era hanging around for centuries for the future to decode.
For the final act, viewers enter a museum-style room, where a docent gives nonsensical interpretations of various plastic objects displayed in vitrines. This type of move is exactly what makes the installation so effective, and so incredibly smart. We only know the interpretations are nonsense because we are awash in this plastic stuff now. We know that a straw or an IUD is not a religious artifact, so it’s funny. It is funny to imagine a future archaeologist or curator—a professional intellectual—contemplating a straw and designating it as part of high culture in much the same way that we enshrine pottery shards of bygone cultures and assign meaning.
Frohardt, whose work has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, and multiple Jim Henson Foundation Grants, is a master storyteller and cultural critic. She effectively manages a lot of moving parts, from the audience that shifts through the space to the sculptural objects, to the endearing puppets and movies. It all builds into a brilliant criticism of intellectual and consumerist pop culture. That alone could be enough, but throughout the approximately 60-minute event, Frohardt weaves in moments of reflection and humanity. There’s something about puppetry and animation that permits a warmth and grace we don’t often allow human actors. The plastic crisis is truly overwhelming. No regular citizen is intentionally trying to destroy the planet when ordering lunch or buying frozen pizzas or preventing unwanted pregnancies. Yet, here we are, all of us responsible. Will future generations judge us harshly for our plastic obsession, or will they have the luxury of misunderstanding us and all our plastic bags?
