Artists not only comment on the communicative metaphors of genetics, they also comment on how genes can be combined to create life forms that are simultaneously innovative, fascinating, and disturbing. There is a long historical tradition of public fascination with freaks, chimeras, monsters and the grotesque. Artists tap into this history, from the literary tradition that begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to the display of living specimens in circus sideshows, to Hollywood films about cloning, mad scientists, and eugenics.
In addition, the growing belief in the plasticity of the body, its malleability, is what gives reality TV shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover their popularity, or people like Lizard Man his context. Lizard Man (Erik Sprague) has green hair, scales tattooed on his body, and has had his tongue split and reptilian bumps implanted above his eyebrows. The subcultural (and sometimes erotic) appeal of surgically created “animal-human” hybrids is fast becoming a lucrative mini-industry.
In this section of her essay, Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art, Sandra Seekins offers four examples of hybrids: biological, digital, sculptural, and painted. Firstly, Eduardo Kac’s most notorious work, GFP Bunny. Kac defines the term he invented, “transgenic art,” as a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to an organism or to transfer natural genetic material from one species to another, to create unique living beings … With at least one endangered species becoming extinct everyday, I suggest that artists can contribute to increase global biodiversity by inventing new life forms. [Eduardo Kac, “GFP Bunny,” Telepresence, Biotelematics, Transgenic Art (Ljublijana: Kibla, 2000), 101.]
Art’s role has dramatically expanded if it can contribute to increased biodiversity. Kac’s artworks are so unorthodox that they instigated a symposium at Chicago-Kent College of Law: “Art, Science and Free Speech: The Work of Eduardo Kac.” [See Jeremy Manier, “Art Takes a Genetic Engineering Leap,” Chicago Tribune (Sept. 19, 2000): sec. 2: 3.] His work raises many questions, including what does it mean to use biotechnology as an artistic medium? The GFP Bunny, Alba, an albino rabbit born in February 2000, is indeed a creature that could not exist without human intervention. Her name means both white and, fittingly, dawn of day. Kac, in this work, relied on collaborations with scientists and technicians. Alba was created in Jouy-en-Josas, France, by zoosystemician Louis Bec (Bec coined this term to describe the digital modeling of living systems), and scientists Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Punnet, both working at the Institute National de la Recherche Agronomique. [Eduardo Kac, “GFP Bunny,” 102]
GFP is green fluorescent protein, and it is found in the Pacific Northwest jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. GFP occurs in many organisms: slime mold, yeast, bacteria, fruit flies, viruses, and zebra fish. After its isolation from the jellyfish, the GFP was modified in the bacteria to become EGFP, a synthetic mutation that enhances GFP, giving it a magnitude of two times greater fluorescence in mammalian cells.
The genetic sequence that produces the enhanced green fluorescent protein was joined with the rabbit genome through the molecular biological process of zygote microinjection. Supposedly (although it has been argued that Alba would have to be shaved first), the rabbit glows bright green under blue light with a maximum excitation at 488 nm. [Kac] The rest of the time she is an ordinary white rabbit with pink eyes. Kac states that the GFP is harmless to her, as well as to other animal species (many lab experiments with GFP back him up). [See George Gessert, “Art is Nature.”] However, to assert that GFP does no harm is not the same as stating that genetic modification or transgenic experiments are animal-friendly. The number of lab animal deaths from genetic experimentation is truly appalling, and certainly reiterates the point about domination made in the biblical passage in Kac’s Genesis.
Kac asserts that he is concerned with taking responsibility for the creatures he modifies. He wants to counter any idea that a genetically modified animal is a monstrous thing, and he often brings up issues of the crossbreeding of plants and the selective breeding of animals throughout history, as if to imply that this is the logical next step. Alba was supposed to return home to Chicago to live with Kac, his wife, and their daughter in July 2000, but the director of the French government laboratory refused to release the bunny. [Blake Eskin, “Building the Bioluminescent Bunny,” ARTnews 100, no. 11 (2001): 118-119.] The integration of Alba into a family setting would have allowed Kac to experience a transgenic being on an informal and emotional level.
When the lab withheld Alba, Kac began a “Free Alba” campaign on his website. This jibes with the artist’s notion that Alba herself is not the artwork, but rather that GFP Bunny as a whole is the artwork, which includes the creation of Alba, her social integration, and the public debate surrounding her creation. The issue of ownership of the bunny remained unresolved at the time of Alba’s death at the age of four. [See Kristen Philipkoski, “RIP: Alba, The Glowing Bunny,” WIRED News (August 12, 2002)] In GFP Bunny, Kac utilized a bioengineering process, attempted to humanize it, and opened up space for a critique of it, all in one work.
Artist Eva Sutton, who has also worked as a software designer, created Hybrids (2000), an interactive digital installation that she has described as a “surrealist slot machine.” [Anker and Nelkin, The Molecular Gaze, 107] It allows users, with the click of a mouse, to create transgenic creatures by randomly altering combinations of animal body parts. The program can be experienced at http://www.genomicart.org/eva.html The very nature of the artwork makes connections between software design and biological system manipulation, while Sutton’s project was also influenced by recollections of the Grimm’s fairy tales read to her as a child. [Quoted in Anker and Nelkin, 107] Are these the new monsters under the bed? What are the consequences of such recombinations in our fantasies and in reality? The permeability of species boundaries is certainly highlighted in transgenic research; Sutton gives us a playful way to explore what this means in terms of selective breeding and aesthetic experimentation.
In 1994, Thomas Grünfeld created Misfit (St. Bernard). This sculpture, part of the Saatchi Collection, London, is made from taxidermied animal parts, with the body of a Saint Bernard dog and the head of a sheep. This chimera has a surprising appeal despite, or perhaps because of, its incongruity. Misfit raises the specter of genetically modified creatures that might one day exist, although, to what purpose, remains an open question. Will they be living works of art?
Lastly, the painting The Farm (2000), by Alexis Rockman, offers the spectacle of genetically modified animals and produce coexisting with more familiar livestock. The painting combines a naturalistic style and mathematical perspective with flattened elements more reminiscent of advertising or graphic design. Against the backdrop of a field of neatly planted rows of soybeans, stand an obese pig bred for organ donation, a three-winged chicken, a square-bodied cow, a basket of square tomatoes, a plant producing rectangular cucumbers, and in the very foreground, the infamous mouse with a human ear growing on its back, referring to a 1997 experiment by Dr. Jay Vacanti. Vacanti, a transplant surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, grew a human ear from cartilage cells and grafted it onto the back of a mouse. To some critics, despite the possible applications of this research in terms of growing replacement tissue, the still photographs and filmic images of the mouse are a dramatic example of monstrous experimentation.
Floating vignettes in Rockman’s The Farm include a prize-winning show dog and the DNA double helix. Pressures on the farm are evident in terms of human food consumption and crop enhancement, advances in genetic engineering, and medical applications of modified lifestock. The farm has become a locale serving corporate and pharmaceutical interests. Scientific experiments first performed in a laboratory are now part of the “natural” environment. As Rockman puts it, in Paradise Now: “The flora and fauna of the farm are easily recognizable; they are, at the same time, in danger of losing their ancestral identities.”
Sandra Seekins / Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art
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