plastic and plasticity Do "plastic" and "plasticity" in the extracts below mean "formable" and "formability"? Extracts: #1. Although art and advertising are both seen primarily as visual arts, I want, initially, to explore an area of convergence that is as much about linguistic practices as it is about visual correspondences and exchanges. I am both captivated by the way that words acquire plasticity and become an ambient medium when co-opted by the visual arts and intrigued by correspondences that occur at the level of language forms, with a shared preference in both instances for particular types of shorthand, such as truisms, clichés and commonplaces. #2. Art, on the other hand, has become increasingly conceptual, with a significant number of artists readily presenting their work through the medium of words, despite the continued need to render their conceptualisations plastic in some way. The move into sometimes purely verbal works of art has been aided by a purposeful recuperation of the word in art over the last century. #3. What Kruger, Weiner, Ruscha and other word artists all share with advertising is not only the ability to give words a visual plasticity, but a tendency to adopt certain types of linguistic forms that, although frequently banal, have an indisputable hold on the unconscious. (Art and Advertising by Joan Gibbons)