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
IN a certain part of the art world, the story is recounted like a slowly
unfolding nightmare: On the afternoon of May 11 last year, Steven Kurtz, a
respected artist and professor at the State University of New York at
Buffalo, called 911 to report that his wife, Hope, 45, was not breathing.
The police arrived to find Hope Kurtz dead, and in a hallway they found
something else - a biological lab, with an incubator, centrifuge and
bacterial cultures growing in petri dishes. Windows nearby were covered with
foil, and on the shelves sat books like "The Biology of Doom" and "Spores,
Plagues and History: The Story of Anthrax." The F.B.I. was called in. Agents
in white biohazard suits scoured the house. Subpoenas - citing sections of
the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act - were issued to Mr. Kurtz and
other members of an art group he and his wife helped found, the Critical Art
Ensemble. And in the summer of 2004 Mr. Kurtz was indicted by a federal
grand jury on charges of mail and wire fraud, accused of illegally obtaining
two of the bacteria samples in his lab, crimes that could send him to prison
for up to 20 years.
While the bare facts of the case lent it the contours of a doomsday episode
of "CSI," information that emerged later changed the picture considerably.
Medical examiners found that Mrs. Kurtz's death was not suspicious; she died
of heart failure. As artists, she and her husband had long worked openly
with biological and chemical agents, which they used at exhibitions around
the world, including a 2002 show involving genetically altered plants at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Most significant, the bacteria
cultures in Mr. Kurtz's lab were determined to be essentially harmless. One
is used in high-school science experiments and is available on the Internet
for educators to buy.
But federal prosecutors have continued to pursue the case, which could come
to trial later this year. In the process, they have transformed Mr. Kurtz
into an unlikely art world martyr-hero and shone a spotlight on an emerging
art movement that blurs the lines between art and science - especially the
science of genetics and biotechnology - and also the lines between art and
activism.
Called bioart or wetware by some of its practitioners, the field is growing
rapidly in the United States and Europe, and it is producing bizarre and
sometimes disturbing work that seems sprung right from the pages of Philip
K. Dick or Koji Suzuki, except that the science involved is not fiction.
In many ways bioart represents a logical next step in contemporary art,
which has eagerly embraced new approaches and nontraditional materials:
video and computers beginning in the 1960's and 70's, digital technology and
the Internet in the 90's.
But bioart can credibly claim to have made a more revolutionary break with
tradition. Instead of finding ways to represent and distill life using paint
or marble or pixels, the artists use life itself - bacteria, cell lines,
plants, insects and even animals - as the medium to ask the questions that
art has always asked. In ways that art has not been in a long time, the work
can feel genuinely subversive, even dangerous.
Certain aspects of this kind of living art have been around for a long time.
Some bioartists credit the photographer Edward Steichen as the founder of
genetic art: in the 1930's at the Museum of Modern Art he showed a
collection of giant, alienlike delphiniums he had mutated using selective
breeding and chemicals. Biological elements have also played a part in the
body-art movement and in some well-known contemporary work, like the
lifecycle-behind-glass gross-out of Damien Hirst, in which maggots hatch,
become flies, feed on a rotting cow's head, then die on a bug zapper. (That
piece was bought by the collector Charles Saatchi in 1990 for what was said
to be less than ?100,000, and is now believed to be worth more than 10 times
that amount.)
During the last decade the field has grown largely because of the very
advances in biotechnology - genetically altered plants and animals, cloning,
mapping of the human genome - that the artwork often addresses. In many
cases the artists work alongside scientists in their labs and use the same
technology being used in cutting-edge research. Joe Davis, for example,
considered a father of American bioart, has worked for years as an unpaid
research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the
biophysicist Alexander Rich, who discovered a rare form of DNA that could
hold clues to human diseases.
Occasionally the work is playful, verging on silly - serenading a strain of
E. coli bacteria with Engelbert Humperdinck's greatest hits to see if that
causes increased antibiotic production. (It appeared to.) Other artists are
simply trying to find new ways to do old things - creating portraits on
leaves or in swaths of growing grass by using photosynthesis. But much of
the work is provocative and, depending on your Brave New World tolerance,
disturbing: creating "victimless" meat by growing tiny steaks from biopsied
frog cells and then eating the steaks; using bone cells from pigs to grow
wing-shaped objects, a play on the "when pigs fly" trope; coaxing cactuses
into sprouting humanlike hair; growing tissue in a petri dish that could
theoretically be marketed as a hymen replacement. ("The hymens are to be
distributed as soft sculptures only, not intended for human application at
this time," states the Web site for that project, www.vivolabs.org.)
The five-member Critical Art Ensemble has for many years pushed the art deep
into the realm of activism, questioning the activities of the biotechnology
industry and even proposing what they call "fuzzy biological sabotage" -
such as releasing strange-looking genetically mutated flies into offices and
restaurants around biotech-company plants to sow paranoia or releasing rats
near fields where genetically altered plants are being tested so that they
invade and destroy the test samples.
"The fuzzy saboteur has to stand on that ambiguous line between the legal
and the illegal (both criminally and civilly)," states the position paper of
one of the group's projects. (Through his lawyer, Mr. Kurtz declined to
comment for this article.)
Other projects included a 2001 exhibition in France in which the collective
and another artist, Beatriz da Costa, allowed visitors to take home a sample
of genetically altered E. coli bacteria, an act forbidden by the University
of Washington's biosafety committee when the exhibition was shown in
Seattle. The artists described the bacteria samples as benign, but the
nature of the work made the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York so
nervous in 2002 that the exhibition of the project there was postponed and
then allowed to be shown only to visitors who signed consent forms.
It is largely because bioartists have begun to acquire the kinds of
knowledge and technical abilities to pull off such daring projects that the
work, in a jittery post-9/11 world, has begun to draw more attention from
law-enforcement agencies and the safety and ethics committees of
universities. Some say that the Kurtz case is making that scrutiny only
greater.
"It's made my life at M.I.T. biology certainly more tenuous than before,"
said Mr. Davis, whose esoteric works include a project in which he encoded a
60-character fragment of a Greek text by Heraclitus into the white-eye gene
of a fruit fly. Of the Kurtz case and its implications, he said: "The head
of my department talked to me about it. My colleagues have talked to me
about it. People just want me to be really careful."
Despite the Kurtz case's beginnings in fears of bioterrorism, federal
prosecutors describe it in court papers now as a relatively narrow one,
having little do with the implications of bioart and more about simply
whether Mr. Kurtz and a friend also under indictment, Robert E. Ferrell, a
geneticist at the University of Pittsburgh, defrauded that university and a
Virginia biological-supply company. The case alleges that at Mr. Kurtz's
request, Dr. Ferrell used his university account to get the two bacteria
samples, which are sent only to labs that meet certain requirements. Then he
mailed them to Mr. Kurtz for use in an art project that was to examine the
involvement of the United States in germ warfare experiments. (Neither the
University of Pittsburgh nor the supply company has pursued civil fraud
cases against the men.)
But the case, which Mr. Kurtz's lawyer, Paul J. Cambria, describes as a
disturbing overreaction on the part of the government, has raised serious
questions that, perhaps fittingly, cross the boundaries of bioart into
science. For example, many scientists say that living samples like the two
in question are frequently shared among institutions and researchers. If the
two men are found guilty, they say, it could have a chilling effect on
collaborative research.
Among bioartists, the case has provoked soul searching about the kinds of
standards they should be held to regarding safety and ethics, two unlikely
areas for artists to be pondering. In a book of essays now being compiled,
"Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts," Ruth West, a
bioartist at the University of California, San Diego, asks whether the
Critical Art Ensemble should be required to abide by all the same extensive
rules as a biotech lab. "Or should they be allowed a 'poetic license' which
extends to the release of transgenic bacteria into people's home and the
environment?" she writes.
Those kinds of questions have already illuminated a deep divide between
practitioners like Mr. Kurtz, who see art as a way to challenge the power
that government and business hold over science, and others like Mr. Davis at
M.I.T., who say they think such activism might make for provocative
political discussion, but not necessarily good art.
Members of the ensemble complain in one of their books that bioart that
divorces itself from political questions is essentially just another curio
to feed the cultural world's "market for novelty."
"Corporate and state culture," they add, "could not ask for better public
relations work."
But Mr. Davis, while critical of the case against Mr. Kurtz, said in an
interview that he disagreed with that view, and added that when artists are
dealing with materials as powerful and complex as living bacteria or
transgenic organisms, that gives them a kind of responsibility they have
never had before. And their status as artists, he said, should not give them
any more license to make a point that could have dangerous implications. He
mentioned a 1999 project by the British artists and activists Heath Bunting
and Rachel Baker in which they offered to mail anyone who wanted one a
"superweed" kit capable of producing a genetically mutant weed that would be
resistant to herbicides. (It's unclear whether the kits actually worked.)
"I don't understand why they weren't arrested," said Mr. Davis, who added,
"Suppose I'm against gas stations. Does that give me the right to walk
around them with a pack of matches?"
As biotechnology advances and bioart grows - several American universities
are establishing centers for the art - it will undoubtedly become more
difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. And as artists
are given ever more advanced tools for making their work, questions about
how far the art can be pushed will only become harder to answer. Already,
there are artists like Adam Zaretsky, an eccentric even in the eccentric
world of bioart, who profess not to understand why everyone gets so worked
up by its practical and ethical implications.
Mr. Zaretsky, who has worked at M.I.T. and San Francisco State University
and describes himself as "between academic gigs," has had numerous run-ins
with university ethics and animal-use committees, which he describes as
"rent-a-priests." In one case, he was not allowed to stage a project at San
Francisco State called the "Workhorse Zoo," in which he sealed himself in
glass room for a week with albino frogs, mice, flies, microscopic worms and
an actively growing yeast culture - in other words, a group of typical
scientific test subjects - and ended up eating some of the frogs, fish and
mice as any predator desperate for a meal would. (The project ended up being
staged at the Salina Art Center in Kansas in 2002.)
Mr. Zaretsky says, mostly seriously, that no matter how many curbs are
placed on them, biotechnology and bioengineering will end up transforming
life as we know it, and in his view their tools are too powerful to be left
in the hands of business and government alone. Artists should be able to use
them, too, as a kind of canvas and paint to create ever more ambitious
living works, ? la Dr. Moreau.
"I'd like to see humans with the necks of giraffes; I'd like to see a
thousand-legged dog - a dog crossed with a millipede," he said. "I'm all for
things getting really, really weird."
