One group that has been involved for several years with biotech issues is the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Founded in 1987 in Tallahassee, Florida by Steve Barnes and Steve Kurtz, CAE is a collective whose members have recently staged their responses to the paucity of public debate on the biotech industry. [For more on CAE, read Mark Dery’s Interview with Critical Art Ensemble
The CAE create faux scientific labs as part of their performances. This aura of authority or authenticity facilitates encouragement of audience participation in scientific processes. The spectator interactivity they encourage is intended to demystify complex technological processes by making them more comprehensive and accessible. CAE also raise debates about the values, ethical ramifications, or potential recklessness of biotech research. For example, as Robin Held notes in “Generating Gene(sis): A Contemporary Art Exhibition for the ‘Genomic Age,’ they describe their performance GenTerra (2001) as “a theatre of transgenics.” Transgenics involves the transfer of genes from one organism to another or from one species to another.
In GenTerra, CAE investigates the consequences of the penetrability of species boundaries in light of the creation of transgenic life forms. They do so by simulating a biotechnology corporation balancing profits with social responsibility. Biotech activities are brought into public space. Lab-coated assistants (members of CAE) introduce bioproducts to the audience, and explain transgenic initiatives (outlining the social benefits of genetic engineering). They dispel myths of monstrous hybrids by demonstrating the practical applications of such research (disease treatment and xenotransplantation could serve as examples). Viewers are given material and instructions to make and store their own transgenic bacteria. The audience can spin a bacteria release machine with only one of its ten chambers holding active bacteria. They are told that the bacteria they might release into the environment is a benign strain.
Audience members have to decide whether or not they have faith in this claim and whether or not to play this game of “genetic roulette.” Given the history of media coverage of now discredited chemical agents (such as ads from the 1950s showing happy families and livestock under a cloud of mist accompanied by the inscription “DDT is good for me!”), it is unsettling that the majority of the participants in the many performances of GenTerra choose to spin the wheel.
While the participants in GenTerra might have shrugged off the significance of spinning the wheel, the authorities were not so blasé. In curator Robin Held’s account of the exhibition Gene(sis) at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery (April 6–August 28, 2002), during which CAE was to perform GenTerra, she noted that the performance was pending approval by the University of Washington Institutional Biosafety and Recombinant DNA Committees as well as registration with the National Institutes of Health. Even though CAE had performed GenTerra prior to the Seattle performance, since the Seattle date occurred after the anthrax attacks in the United States, the Henry Art Gallery had to go through lengthy negotiations with environmental agencies and register with the National Institutes of Health in the interest of public safety. The state has certainly intervened in art practices before, but such precautions to protect the public are highly unusual, even unprecedented, in art circles. However, they may become more frequent as biotech art proliferates.
Acute nervousness surrounding artists’ use of biological materials is largely due to a post-9/11 environment of fear and suspicion, as well as to the public’s exposure to increased media coverage of threats of bioterrorism. Artists working with biotech are not just appropriating novel tools, they are working under new sets of constraints imposed by government authorities who are fearful of genetic experimentation outside of recognized institutional laboratory settings.
As testimony to such fears, on May 11, 2004, co-founder of Critical Art Ensemble, University of Buffalo professor Steve Kurtz, became embroiled in an FBI investigation. [This incident was reported in numerous newspapers and magazines in May and June 2004, including Nature, the Washington Post, WIRED News, and the Los Angeles Times.] Paramedics responded to a 9-1-1 call from Kurtz’s home; he told them his wife was non-responsive. They arrived to find his wife, Hope Kurtz, dead. The rescue workers were alarmed by the petri dishes and lab equipment they saw in the home, so they called in the FBI hazardous materials response team. For some reason it was the Joint Terrorist Task Force that actually arrived, sealing off the residence (as well as the entire block), and removing bacteria samples (Bacillus globigii, Serratia marcescens, and Escherichia coli). Kurtz uses DNA in his work, which, like most of the work by CAE, is meant to encourage public debate about safety issues and the global impact of genetic research.
Within hours, Kurtz’s grieving process was disrupted as agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force searched his house, seizing, in addition to his wife’s body, Kurtz’s computer equipment, disks, books on biowarfare, papers, and lab equipment, including a polymerase chain reaction or PCR machine (something not generally found in a residence or anywhere outside of a laboratory environment). Kurtz explained that the machine allowed him to test for the presence of genetically modified organisms, and that the books were related to his current work on the group’s latest project, The Marching Plague, which would simulate an anthrax attack as a critique of government germ warfare research. Needless to say, this did little to placate the authorities. Although an autopsy revealed that Hope Kurtz had died from heart failure, a natural cause unrelated to the relatively harmless bacterial samples, Kurtz’s problems were just beginning.
Justice Department lawyers argued to a federal grand jury that the artist was a threat to national security and should be indicted under section 175 of the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which had been expanded by the Patriot Act and states that no one should possess “any biological agent, toxin or delivery system” unless it is justified as “research.” Research, in this case, seems to refer only to laboratory, not aesthetic, practices. [For more information on the above mentioned Act, search here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/search/index.html]
These events were followed by an investigation of the independent publishers of CAE books, Autonomedia, and the serving of subpoenas to several of Kurtz’s colleagues, some of whom pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Many people rallied to Kurtz’s defense, outraged at the events. A lawyer at George Washington University, Jonathan Turley, noted that the Patriot Act “is designed to deal with the likes of al-Qaeda, not Andy Warhol.” [Quoted in Geoff Brumfiel, “Bacteria Raid May Lead to Trial for Artist Tackling Biodefense,” Nature 429] In an article in The Guardian, entitled “Art becomes the next suspect in America’s 9/11 paranoia” Gary Younge suggested that: “What began as a personal tragedy for Mr. Kurtz has turned into what many believe is, at best, an overreaction prompted by 9/11 paranoia and, at worst, a politically motivated attempt to silence a radical artist.” While censorship of art is as ancient as art itself, the reasoning behind this particular case certainly shifted the terms of the debate. In a statement [FBI ABDUCTS ARTIST, SEIZES ART] Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund spokeswoman Carla Mendes notes:
Today, there is no legal way to stop huge corporations from putting genetically altered material into our food … Yet owning the equipment required to test for the presence of “Frankenfood” will get you accused of “terrorism.” You can be illegally detained by shadowy government agents, lose access to your home, work, and belongings, and find that your recently deceased spouse’s body has been taken away for “analysis.”
Ultimately Kurtz was not charged with bioterrorism, but with mail and wire fraud under the United States Criminal Code, Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1341 and 1343. Federal prosecutors in Buffalo argued that Kurtz had fraudulently acquired samples of difficult-to-obtain bacteria by using his connections with Robert Ferrell, head of the human genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health. Ferrell was also charged. Ferrell had identified himself as a primary researcher on application forms for the purchase of the materials, as well as signing a document stating that the material was for lab use only. Usually such a breach of contract would be a civil case not a federal one. Each count of mail and wire fraud carries a maximum sentence of twenty years, according to Rebecca Dana, “In N.Y., Case of Germs Shifts from Bioterror to Moral Error,” Washington Post (June 30, 2004). The men have yet to be convicted. The date for the hearing was set for January 11, 2005, but was postponed, and in May 2005 motions were heard by a Buffalo judge for a dismissal of the charges. This case is indicative of the kind of censure artists can expect when entering the highly charged domain of biotech.
For updates on the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund, see http://www.caedefensefund.org, particularly “When Thought Becomes Crime.” The CAE defense team also notes that The New York Council for the Humanities revoked a grant awarded to the City University of New York due to the fact that they invited Steve Kurtz as one of the speakers in its series on academic freedom! See also Joan Hawkins, “When Taste Politics Meet Terror: The Critical Art Ensemble
on Trial,” CTheory (June 14, 2005).
Many art groups besides CAE have been drawn to the realm of biotechnology. Karl Mihail and Tran T Kim-Trang are co-founders of Gene Genies Worldwide© (GGW©). Utilizing satire, they address how biotechnology re-raises the issue of eugenics, and how biotechnology is predominantly funded not by the government but by the corporate sector, which has a huge amount at stake in its profitability. Commercial application is highly lucrative. Organizations like Genetic Savings and Clone offer to store (for a fee) the DNA of deceased domestic pets, in order to eventually clone dogs and cats. There are other organizations that promise – for a tissue sample and a fee of about $250,000 – to clone your pet (at some future date when it is a more efficient procedure with a better success rate than is evident in current cloning experiments).
[As Seekins was writing this article, it was reported that the first dog (an Afghan hound) had been successfully cloned in South Korea by stem cell scientist Woo-Suk Hwang and his researchers (it took the implantation of more than a thousand embryos in more than one hundred dogs to get this result). See “Koreans Produce World’s First Cloned Dog.” For more on Genetic Savings and Clone, see Charles Graeber, “How Much is the Doggy in the Vitro?” WIRED 8 no. 3 (2000): 220-229.]
In their performances, such as one staged at a shopping precinct in Pasadena, GGW© set up a faux boutique. Wearing white lab coats, standing amid biotechnological paraphernalia, floor displays, and pamphlets, and using mass media marketing strategies, GGW© targeted potential clients, offering them catalogues from which to pick out “designer personalities” and personality traits associated with animals (“the cunning of a fox, canine loyalty, feline intuition, reptilian cool, survivalist properties of a cockroach and the harmonious sisterhood traits of honey bees”). [Brodyk, “Genetic Art,” 5] The artists offered a convincing façade of technological competence and professionalism. While artist André Brodyk takes this to mean they have “complicity in the process they are critiquing,” it appears to me that their tongue-in-cheek approach, and the nature of their offerings – currently untenable – demonstrates how their critique operates strategically from within their utilization of the rhetoric and accoutrements of the corporate biotech industry.
Sandra Seekins / Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art
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