Visitors to last month’s Scope Art Fair (the smaller, more avant-garde version of the well-known Armory Show) had the opportunity to see the latest work by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac, famous for his ‘glowing bunny.’ Created in 2000, this transgenic rabbit contains the GFP gene from the Pacific jellyfish Aequoria victoria, giving it the ability to glow under ultraviolet light. Alba the glowing bunny was not itself a part of the exhibit. It couldn’t attend, having never left the lab in France where it was created.

“Free Alba!” (Ann Arbor News) 2001. Image courtesy of Eduardo Kac.

Kac’s work is exemplary of a new direction artists are taking: one that combines various techniques of molecular biology, gene transfer, and tissue culture technology in a highly conceptual discipline that explores notions of life, as well as the ethical issues raised by biotechnology. Labeled bioart, it has been greeted with controversy, with responses ranging from “brilliant” and “thought provoking” to “silly.” Oftentimes, people just find it frightening and upsetting.

Some of the work does indeed require a strong stomach. This is literally the case in a recent performance piece by Tissue Culture and Art Project, entitled “Disembodied Cuisine.” It consisted of growing biopsied frog skeletal muscle in vitro and culminated with a dinner at which artists ate their creation. The work deals with “victimless” meat consumption and the creation of a “new class of object/being” which they refer to as “Semi-Living”¹. The same group also makes “soft sculpture,” such as wing-like objects made of pig tissue (a play on “when pigs fly”). This is done by seeding cells on a polymer scaffold and growing them in a bioreactor, a procedure also used by another group to make “designer hymens”. These are described as “not intended for human application at this time”⁶.

The move of art to this new medium of biological materials and live organisms is perhaps not surprising. In fact, it has been called “a logical next step in contemporary art”², which has historically made use of new technologies such as photography, video, and computer technology. Bioart uses life itself in its attempt to generate discourse, which makes it a pretty powerful medium if one considers the common perception of art mimicking life.

This form of artistic production requires an intimate collaboration between artists and scientists. For instance, Joe Davis, one of the first people to envision the possibilities of bioart, has a research associate position in the lab of Alexander Rich at MIT. In close collaboration with students and postdocs, Davis mastered the techniques of molecular biology and started encoding messages in the genome of E. coli and other organisms. In his Microvenus project he used a binary code to represent a graphic symbol in a short piece of DNA that was stably replicated in bacteria. The symbol was an ancient Germanic rune that was used to represent life and the female earth (the symbol also mimics female genitalia)³. Davis has also encoded a 60-character piece of text by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus into a fruit fly gene. Incidentally, since they are made of propagating organisms, Davis’s works have been replicated more times than all the other works of art put together. This is an interesting echo of the mechanical reproduction mode of artistic production practiced by artists such as Andy Warhol.

While many scientists question the decision of Alex Rich to hand over valuable lab space to Davis, whose work arguably has no scientific merit, Rich values “his unconventional imagination” and considers it “fun to have somebody like that around”⁴. As many bioartists will attest to, it is only very senior and well-established lab heads that will take on an artist in their lab.

What is the artistic merit of bioart? It provides a new form of artistic inquiry, one that can be used to comment on the possibilities and limitations of the scientific method and the emergent biotech culture. It also provides a deconstruction of novel, hybrid products of genetic engineering. Kac’s GFP bunny is neither natural nor completely unnatural, just like victimless steaks occupy an uncertain position on the life-death continuum. Not everyone finds great value in this new movement. San Diego-based artist Veronika Bauer sees “only limited potential to express metaphor” with an artwork such as the GFP Bunny. She also brings up the important question of when something is considered a creative act. Says Bauer: “How does one differentiate between a non-creative and creative gesture? What degree of commentary or deviation from the already said, seen, sensed must exist?”

But not all the work is this esoteric in nature. Some of it is more immediately engaging and more accessible. The Whitney Biennial (ongoing through May 28) includes three videos from Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a group that attempts to “provide information about government and corporate co-optation of global industries, therefore empowering the masses to reflect and react”⁵. Their videos document different performances, such as “Genterra”, which is basically ‘participatory theater’ —an interactive space posing as a biotech company that manufactures genetically modified organisms that are supposed to be socially beneficent. Visitors are encouraged to discuss the dangers and advantages of the organisms and then to actively participate in determining the risk by choosing to release (and thereby expose themselves) to either wild bacteria (collected locally) or a transgenic “crippled lab-strain.” These are released via a mechanical arm that lifts the lid of a Petri dish for five seconds.

It is projects such as this one that have repeatedly led to CAE’s confrontation with the authorities, most prominent of which was the arrest of Steve Kurtz, a founding member of the collective and respected professor at SUNY Buffalo. The tragedy started when Kurtz made a 911 call because his wife was having a heart attack. The police discovered a biological lab at his house—complete with incubator, centrifuge, and bacteria growing in Petri dishes. Even though the bacteria turned out to be benign (the type sold to high school teachers), Kurtz was indicted in the summer of 2004 on charges of mail and wire fraud. The problem was that the bacteria were sold to a lab at the University of Pittsburgh and then sent to Kurtz. The case will likely go to trial in the next few months and the maximum sentence Kurtz can receive is 20 years in prison. One of the videos showing at the Whitney Biennial documents the invasion of the artist’s house by the FBI. While the episode is mainly the result of bioterror hysteria (the statute in question was expanded by the Patriot Act), it also points to the murky legal, ethical, and practical issues raised by the convergence of art and biology.

The author is a graduate student at Weill Cornell University.

References:

¹ http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/

² The Artists in Hazmat Suits, Randy Kennedy. The New York Times. July 3rd, 2005.

³ Microvenus - art form using genetic sequences and binary code. Joe Davis. Art Journal, Spring 1996.

⁴ Science for art’s sake. Steve Nadis. Nature, Vol. 407, October 12, 2000.

⁵ http://www.critical-art.net/

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