Plastic Soul

David Bowie rides the Soul Train? It happened. In 1975, presenter Don Cornelius welcomed a formally-dressed, whiter-than-white Bowie for a lip-synced rendition of "Golden Years." The lip-syncing lent an even more detached edge to Bowie's "plastic soul," a term he used to acknowledge that he was dabbling in a genre that was clearly not his own. Inspired by this pre-Berlin model Bowie, I collaborated with artist Niho Kozuru to create the sculpture below, molded in rubber using an actual life mask of Bowie procured on eBay. The finished piece is evocative of the plastic soul concept on many obvious levels, from the use of the synthetic material to the implications of the mask itself. It's plastic art.

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