“… it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified …” William Gibson, Johnny Mneumonic
Other artists have begun to alter (even interrogate) notions of portraiture and self-portraiture by constructing identity in relation to, and often critical of, ideologies of genetic determinism. In Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait of 1997, the artist’s body is represented by 55 black and white photographs. With the help of Dr. Dorothy Warburton, an expert in DNA research and director of the Diagnostic Laboratory at the Babies and Children’s Hospital at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, images of the artist, including the nucleus of a single cell, fingerprints, sperm samples, hair and blood samples, became large-scale photographs. Schneider calls it “a diagnostic self-portrait” that allowed him to “harvest images” of his body and stage his “emotional response to the issue of privacy in the new World of the Genome.” [Quoted in Paradise Now, 94] The patenting of DNA has resulted in debates over who can “own” biological material and the commodification of such material, often by large pharmaceutical companies funding institutional research. Is Schneider reclaiming his ownership over the representation of his body and its materials, or is this question misplaced given the business of biotech? The portrait has morphed to encompass the complex nature of subjectivity in the age of forensic analysis. When we scrutinize one aspect of the human system, we often lose our connection to the larger picture. Our genetic blueprint adds another layer to representations of selfhood, but none of these layers is sufficient, in isolation, to explain who we are.
The cultural necessity for questions about selfhood and ownership of genetic material can be illustrated by the case of John Moore, a Seattle businessman, who had surgery to remove his spleen when he had hairy cell leukemia. [Moore’s story is relayed in Lori Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin, Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age (NY: Crown, 2001), 1-2] Moore received treatment from a specialist at the UCLA School of Medicine. The doctor kept him flying back to Los Angeles for tests over the next seven years. Unknown to Moore, the doctor had been patenting unique chemicals in Moore’s blood and negotiating with a Boston company for shares. What piqued Moore’s suspicion was his doctor’s request for bone marrow, skin, and sperm samples in addition to his usual blood samples. Moore found out that his tissues had been patented and turned into a product. A Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, paid 15 million dollars for the right to develop Moore’s cell line (named the Mo-cell line). He sued his doctor for “property theft” in addition to malpractice.
Although the California Supreme Court that heard the case in 1990 stressed that physicians must inform patients in advance of surgery that their tissue could be used for research purposes, they nevertheless ruled that Moore had no property rights to his own tissue. The ruling clearly illustrated the shift from private research to a dramatically expanded global biotech marketplace catering to the interests of large pharmaceutical companies (forging alliances with researchers) and their stockholders.
Returning to Gary Schneider, the artist raises questions about what signifies “identity” and “ownership” in the age of forensic evidence, medical imaging technologies such as CAT, MRI, and PET scans, and the patenting of bloodlines. If a portrait is not a naturalistic or abstracted representation of the external semblance of a human individual, but one or more enlarged fragments of a private interior identity that enters the public realm, how does this alter how we perceive subjectivity and selfhood?
In a piece by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, entitled Doug, Joe, and Genevieve, of 1998, each person is represented by a computer-manipulated image of their DNA and the three vertical photographs are hung together in a triptych. The participants are Doug Ischar, an artist, his partner Joe, and their artist friend, Genevieve Cadieux. Each image is over five feet high; the DNA samples are thus given anthropomorphic scale. This is part of Manglano-Ovalle’s project The Garden of Delights, in which the Spanish-born artist made 48 Cibachrome prints of digitized DNA samples. The artist asked sixteen people to choose two relatives or friends to participate with them. Manglano-Ovalle was assisted by Dr. Suzanne Hart at Wake Forest University (who was then the director of the biochemical and molecular genetics laboratory). She put the samples through polymerase chain reaction tests and helped the artist develop the chainlike DNA imagery. [Barbara Pollack, “The Genetic Esthetic,” 137] By hanging the images as triptychs Manglano-Ovalle, not only utilized the format of the altarpiece (the title makes reference to Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, of the early 1500s), he also redefined the family portrait. Doug, Joe, and Genevieve raises questions about genetic information and its relation (or not) to emotional intimacy.
In the works of Schneider and Manglano-Ovalle, the DNA profile – usually associated with forensic labs identifying the perpetrators of violent crimes or with medical labs determining paternity or hereditary propensity to disease – changes their artistic perceptions of self-portraiture and portrait likeness. They represent individuals as genetic “profiles.” For better or for worse, something invisible to the naked eye becomes implicated in new perceptions of selfhood. The artists struggle with what that might mean.
Sandra Seekins / Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art
Image: detail of a plant cell, from an early electronic literature work by J. R. Carpenter:
(a grammar of signs has replaced a botany of symptoms) (1998).
other islands in this text-fed stream
