To: The Editor of The Art and Leisure Section:
Re: "The Artists in the Hazmat Suits," Randy Kennedy, NYT, 7/3/05
In his attempt to create a whacky new art world genre called "bioart," Randy Kennedy ("The Artists in the Hazmat Suits," NYT, 7/3/05) is actually practicing the more serious art of conflation, lumping together a group of art practices whose aesthetics and politics could not be more dissimilar. It is important to distinguish the bad-boy spectacles of Damien Hirst's cow heads and maggots or the soothing techno-poetics of Davis' Heraclitus in the eye of a fruit fly from the kind of practice that has caused artist Steve Kurtz to face 20 years of jail time on trumped up mail fraud charges. With their emphasis on the word CRITICAL, Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble make challenging works of art that openly question the power and authority of today's "bio-tech industrial complex." The US government is currently spending hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars to lock up Steve Kurtz not because they are trying to protect the citizenry from irresponsible artists who fancy themselves mad scientists, but instead is trying to silence voices openly critical of its economic and social policies. At a moment when reporters are facing jail time for defending journalistic freedoms and the academic freedoms of college professors are being attacked by state legislators, what is at stake here is not our immediate physical safety from artists working with harmless bacteria, but our long-term ability, as citizens, to participate in the political life of this country.
Jeffrey Skoller, MFA, PhD
Associate Professor, Dept. Film/Video/New Media
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
