Pink Mice and Petri Dishes

[Guest guest]

From Reason Online,

http://www.reason.com/0012/cr.rb.pink.html

-

Pink Mice and Petri Dishes

Artists contemplate biotechnology

 

By Ronald Bailey

 

The genetic revolution is upon us, and artists are manning the barricades.

But which side are they on: the one that views biotechnology as a horrifying

new development or the one that sees it as a tool of liberation? On the

evidence of Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, a recent

exhibition of 39 artists at the downtown Manhattan gallery Exit Art, the

creative community itself isn’t quite sure.

 

Some of the show’s contributors are still invoking the hoary image of Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein monster. Surprisingly, though, the majority seems

ready to celebrate the revolution. Paradise Now arguably marks a significant

shift in sentiment within the art community from opposing and resisting

progress in genetic manipulation to embracing and exploring its aesthetic

possibilities.

 

 

On the fearful side are pieces such as Christa Rupp’s New Labels for

Genetically Engineered Food. Rupp displays 30 plastic salad bar containers

with stenciled bogus health warning labels like " Original DNA Product. " In

Genomic License No. 5, conceptual artist Larry Miller offers official-

looking certificates to gallery goers so that they can " copyright " their

personal genetic codes, declaring themselves " Original Humans. " Miller

claims that over 2,000 people have used his forms to declare themselves

exclusive owners of their unique genetic code. I turned down the offer to

sign a certificate. Anyone who wants to reproduce my genetic code may do so;

I’m still the original.

 

 

The " subversive " anonymous art cooperative ®TMark produced a spoof

Powerpoint presentation called Bio Taylorism, supposedly showing the

" benefits " of biotechnology for corporations, complete with charts and

graphs, that are supposed to gloss over the purported risks to human life

posed by biotech. It’s an exercise in clever, if routine, corporation

bashing.

 

 

Far more fascinating than such predictable protests are pieces that use and

celebrate biotechnology as a new medium for artistic expression. Take the

installation Genesis, by Brazilian-born, Chicago-based artist Eduardo Kac.

Upon walking into a darkened room, viewers see a large circle of light on

the far wall—the projected image from a micro-video camera of a

bacteria-laden petri dish in the center of the room. On the other walls glow

various texts, including a verse from Genesis: " Let man have dominion over

the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living

thing that moves over the earth. " On a different wall, Kac has translated

the Bible verse into the dots and dashes of the first electronic language,

Morse code. He then translates the Morse code into the ACGTs of the genetic

code, assigning word spaces to adenine, dots to cytosine, letter spaces to

guanine, and dashes to thymine. The " art gene " version of Genesis is

actually produced by stringing these DNA bases together. Then the DNA bases

are inserted into the living E. coli bacteria in the petri dish that viewers

see projected before them. By activating an ultraviolet light over the petri

dish, viewers can cause the bacteria to mutate, thus becoming co-creators

with Kac.

 

 

Earlier this year, Kac, working with scientists at France’s National

Institute of Agronomic Research, created a transgenic female rabbit, named

Alba, that glows green under ultraviolet light. Alba glows green because the

EGFG (enhanced green fluorescent gene) taken from a species of jellyfish was

inserted into her genome when she was an embryo. So now she produces the

glowing protein in her fur.

 

 

HeLa, by Christine Borland, also uses video technology and a petri dish to

raise questions of ownership related to cells and tissues. Her video camera

magnifies HeLa cells and displays them on a flat panel screen. HeLa cells

come from a 31-year-old black woman named Henrietta Lack, who died of

cervical cancer in 1951; her cells have survived her for nearly 50 years as

the first and most famous " cell line " used in biomedical research. Lack’s

family didn’t find out about the cells until the 1970s, and even today there

is no settled legal principle that says who owns tissues and cells once they

’re taken from a patient: Do they belong to the patient, or are they common

property that can be appropriated by researchers? Borland’s treatment leaves

the question open for viewers to contemplate.

 

 

Other artists explore how biotech might shift our definitions of identity.

Kevin Clarke’s Portrait of James D. Watson is a large-scale piece that

juxtaposes metal lab shelving reminiscent of the three-dimensional structure

of DNA with giant photographic panels of an actual DNA sequence taken from

Watson’s own genome. (The Nobel Prize–winning Watson, of course, is the

co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix structure, which marks the beginning of

the genetic revolution.) In a similar vein, Portrait of Isabel Goldsmith, by

Steve Miller, starts with cultured chromosomes taken from Goldsmith’s white

blood cells. He photographed them under an electron microscope and then

numbered and classified them by size. Both of these works underscore the

fact that our DNA is not our identity—thus correcting the confusion at the

heart of Larry Miller’s Genomic License No. 5.

 

 

There’s another neat riposte to Miller: One Tree, by Natalie Jeremijenko,

stations cloned trees in the gallery to make the point that, while

genetically identical, " they are not the same. " Clones are nothing new

(indeed, every Granny Smith apple is clonal) and each clone’s response to

its environment makes it different from the others. Contemplating these

leafy clones, the fear of cloning stoked by hysterical headlines about Dolly

the Scottish sheep drains out of viewers.

 

 

Sculpted by Bryan Crockett, Monument to Man is a seven-foot-high, heroic

pink-marble statue of the famous Oncomouse, the first transgenic animal ever

patented. The Oncomouse has tumor-causing genes inserted in its genome so

that it can be used for cancer research. The actual Oncomouse is hairless

(thus pink-skinned) and only a few inches long. The statue is startlingly

lifelike, and its dynamic posing recalls classical works like the Laocoön.

On one level an absurd statue of a giant mouse, Monument to Man also wryly

honors humanity’s growing biological ingenuity and would be the perfect

complement to the lobby of some brash, self-confident biotech laboratory

that wants a work of art to symbolize its creative activities.

 

 

Another artist, Brandon Ballengée, is testing the line between science and

art. His installation of photos, gurgling tanks, and texts looks very much

like the science fair project of a precocious high school student. Ballengée

is trying to recover an extinct species of African frog through a controlled

breeding experiment. By cross-breeding closely related frogs, he hopes to

recreate the phenotype, or physical appearance, of the extinct variety,

which featured shortened limbs and snout. While some may feel momentarily

woozy over Alba the glowing green bunny, surely many will applaud Ballengée’

s aesthetic attempt to revive a species. In the hands of humanity, biotech

may restore creatures long gone, save those now here, and create novel ones

for us to enjoy.

 

 

At the beginning of the 19th century, Mary Shelley memorably and fearfully

imagined that science would beget monsters. Two hundred years later, artists

are taming those monsters and, in the process, turning them into works of

art.