Ideal Matter: Art, Bioplastics, and the Hope for Degradation
Yorick Berta
Nov 2026 · Raue Reihe Book 4 · Walter de Gruyter GmbH
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Cheap, flexible, colorful, and often flimsy: Plastics shaped the material culture of the twentieth century and its waste for centuries to come. Artists and designers were among the first to notice, and among the first to seek alternatives. This book traces the continuities and ruptures between a fading – though far from degrading – plastics age and an emerging bioplastics age: its ideologies and aesthetics, its promises and pitfalls.
Cheap, flexible, colorful, and often flimsy: Plastics shaped the material culture of the twentieth century and its waste for centuries to come. Artists and designers were among the first to notice, and among the first to seek alternatives. This book traces the continuities and ruptures between a ...
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About the author
Yorick Josua Berta, studied art history, Russian studies, and philosophy in Berlin, Moscow and Canterbury. His dissertation After Life. An Art History of Decay examined motifs, materials, and discourses of transience in artworks from the late Middle Ages to the present. Following a research assistantship at the Art University Linz and a fellowship at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, he is currently working as a research assistant at Freie Universität Berlin. He also works as a freelance curator — most recently organizing the group exhibition Material Flows. Resources, Discards and the Afterlives of Art (Traklhaus Salzburg, 2023) — and writes monthly film reviews for indiekino.
Yorick Josua Berta, studied art history, Russian studies, and philosophy in Berlin, Moscow and Canterbury. His dissertation After Life. An Art History of Decay examined motifs, materials, and discourses of transience in artworks from the late Middle Ages to the present. Following a research assis...
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