Biotech Aesthetics:
the role of artists in the organization of culture
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‘[T]he withdrawal of the experience of aesthetic pleasure from art’
– Alexander Alberro on the meaning of conceptual art in October (Fall 1994)
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Judith Reodica, hymNext (2004)
New Literary History (2007) on ‘Biocultures’
• ‘In Bio Art an artist utilizes
emerging biotechnologies
from the scientific and
medical fields in the
creation of an artwork. In a
semi/living, preserved or
documented form,
presented are the
complexities of ethics and
aesthetics from the new art
movement which can
include the methods
involved with its creation’
• ‘The hymen tissue cultures
were a combination of my
vaginal cells, rodent
smooth muscle tissue and
bovine collagen scaffolding
grown in nutrient media’
• ‘My cells are in the
sculpture because I wanted
to myself to be a new art
media. In each sculpture,
my DNA is a personal
signature’
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Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny (2000)
green florescent protein
• Chicago-based Kac collaborates with
research lab in France (INRA) to
create independent, living work of art
• Kac: ‘Transgenic art is a new art
form based on the use of genetic
engineering to transfer natural or
synthetic genes to an organism, to
create unique living beings’
• Kac wanted Alba, name of the
transgenic rabbit, to live with his
family
• INRA refused to release Alba; led
Kac to create an entire GFP Bunny
series of works
• Transgenic art ‘is not a
breeding project’; it
‘must be done with
great care, with
acknowledgement of
the complex issues thus
raised, and above all,
with a commitment to
respect, nurture and
love the life created’
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Bio Prefix
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‘Bio’ is the new ‘post-’ or ‘cyber-’ prefix
Roots of bio: Greek zoê is cited ‘the course of human life’
‘Bio art’ has been mooted as an instructive umbrella term
Bio artists are not nominalists, but the power to name can be
viewed as necessary in order to generate change
• Consistent with the stance of Marcel Duchamp (1957) on
‘the creative act’ that ‘the artist goes from intention to
realization through a chain of totally subjective reaction’
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Knotty Questions
• ‘What does it mean for a society to bring into existence a
rabbit that glows green?’
• Are bio artists transgressors by challenging ‘western edifices
of humanity and humanism’?
• ‘But what if biotech is not really about hyper-rationality but
really about something else – like aesthetics, for instance?’ ‘It
seems that we haven’t really considered the aesthetic of the
biotech industry’
• As humans we need to rethink our understanding of our
relationship with our own identity/body, other animals, as
well as the concept of life itself
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Point of Entry
Artists
• ‘Pioneers’
– Eduardo Kac (transgenic forms), Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
(SymbioticaA ‘an innovative laboratory dedicated to researching,
learning, critique and hands-on engagement with life sciences’;
established in 2000 at UWA), Marta de Menezes (butterfly wings as
the canvas), George Gessert (breeds, makes, and exhibits hybrid
irises), and Joe Davis
• ‘Interesting Cases’
– Paul Vanouse (‘intersection between big science and popular
culture’), Stelarc (‘reservoirs of organs, or bionic hybrids’), and
Adam Zaretsky
• Noted
– Julia Reodica, Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble, ORLAN, and
Kira O’Reilly (‘biotechnical practices with which to consider the
body as material and site in which narrative threads of the personal,
sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations’)
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Bio Artists in the Organization of Culture
• Zaretsky (2004): ‘We [bio artists]
are major players in a sort of
• ‘Whether Mr Mutt
offshoot of the art scene insofar as
with his own hand
we are not making art about
made the fountain or
biology, we focus on bringing our
not has no importance.
He CHOSE it. He
outsider ideas to life’
took an ordinary article
• Kac: ‘You have to use these
of life, placed it so that
[biotechnology] tools because of
its useful significance
the kind of work you want to make
disappeared under new
title and point of view
is of that kind, but the work is not
– a new thought for
identical to the process that leads
that object’ (Duchamp
to its making; the work is poetic,
1917)
it’s imaginative, it’s subjective, it’s
meant to resonate in all these ways’
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Damien Hirst ≠ Bio Artist
• Bio art is not simply
appropriation
• Hirst’s works are not
actually alive; he has
appropriated a onceliving animal
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Pathways in Biotech Aesthetics
• Artists talking bio art
• Art/science intersections
• Distribution and reception of bio art
• Being human today
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Artists Talking Bio Art
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Defining an Artistic Practice
• Kac identifies himself as a ‘bio artist’; also ‘biological arts’
(Catts), ‘emergent media’ (Vanouse), ‘medical artist’ (Reodica)
• O’Reilly: ‘I love it when different artists use different words to
describe their practices even if they’re in similar realms.
Because it allows us to play with language and allows us to play
with representation and the kind of cultural ideas that are
associated with language and terms and expressions and so on,
so I try not to be too definitive about bio art’
• All accept ‘bio art’ has gained recognition as a shorthand
• What is bio art? Is bio art a movement (that is a tendency or
style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal)?
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Bio Art as New Media
• Catts: the act of defining bio art is ‘problematic’; ‘an
artist who engages with biological arts’
• Catts on SymbioticA: ‘It’s not so much an ideological
definition or something which is based on any type of
manifesto, it’s really about access to resources, it’s a
very pragmatic kind of approach’
• Vanouse prefers ‘emergent media’: ‘I think it’s more
to do with using the tools of molecular biology as a
kind of inscription-making practice; a way of making
things visible’; ‘It is about the sort space between
things, between inert and living things’
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Role of the Artist’s Body
• Stelarc: ‘Using living material [his own body], and using it in
such a way that you can create sort of sculptural forms that
weren’t possible before’; ‘that allows you to explore the
notions of what’s alive, what’s dead, what’s partially living’
• O’Reilly on inthewrongplaceness (2005-09): ‘Involves a piece
with a dead pig, where I move this pig around the space over
4 or 5 hours and the audience come in and touch my body
and pig’s body so it’s a very visceral, direct encounter’;
‘There’s no technology involved whatsoever, but its genesis
is completely from animal research and science in the
laboratory [SymbioticA residency in 2004] so it’s a very
different journey’
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Engaging Duchamp
• Kac: ‘Clearly, bio art is in vivo [within a living organism], that’s
number one, it’s not about appropriating life that has been
made already, it’s about inventing something that wasn’t there
before. Or, in some cases using the tools of molecular biology,
which are the new media of creativity, but using these tools,
these media, in ways that do not go back to known art forms
based on appropriation and representation and traditional body
art or performance or things that we already know, otherwise
there is no point, there’s no need, right? … So bio art is
something new, is something that we don’t have from
Duchamp, we don’t have from Picasso … we don’t have from
anybody and none of these artforms lead directly to it because
they’re all either counter to representation or based on
representation, it’s still the representation versus abstraction
debate that exists there’
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Bio Art as Art Movement?
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•
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Art movement as a ‘residual of modernist nostalgia’?
Bio artists acknowledge they have relations and exchanges
Resistance to ‘movement’ description
Stelarc: ‘I don’t think it would be very interesting if that [being
part of a movement] was the case’; ‘We do very much come
from different directions’
• Catts: ‘There’s no one direct kind of philosophy that drives us’;
‘A bunch of people bundled together’
• O’Reilly: ‘Partnership’; ‘Happy sort of convergence of ideas but
also divergences’
• Kac: ‘The existence of a traditional early twentieth century
apparatus [manifesto] shall not be the guiding principle to
define whether or not we are looking at a movement’
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Notion of Community
• Vanouse: ‘I think that we’ve been in the same ghetto together for
some time, and some of us escape more than the others, but we’ve
sort of been in this ghetto for a while together. So I think that
cohesion’s back’
• Kac: ‘The point of manifestos with worked-up rhetoric – that’s a
little passé, but if you look at the writings of these artists, these are
not timid writings, these are assertive writings that establish
concepts and parameters. So … all of these writings are engaged,
they inform the public of the new aesthetics, they put concepts in
circulation, they coin words as I have also’
• Vanouse: ‘The other thing I think is very cohesive about this
particular group is … that basically when you have a group of
people who are also curating and writing, and parts of the bigger
structure of festivals and things like this, that you wind up getting
this kind of peer review system of people that … in a sense really
trim the fat … and they kind of know where the bullshit is … ’
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Notion of Community (cont’d)
• Kac: ‘My opinion, I think we are, I think bio art is a
movement, and as a movement is the first art movement of
the twenty-first century, a movement that doesn’t need the
traditional manifesto, the works speak for themselves. We
are before entities that art has not seen before and we see a
group of artists that know each other, that meet, that
exchange ideas, that have a friendly relationship with each
other, that appreciate each other’s work, that have
occasionally invited each other to participate in this book and
that conference and that exhibition or this and that. So there
are exchanges on many levels, and then you have a certain
common aesthetic, not in the specific outcome of each artist,
but in the general principle of working with the medium’
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Bio Art as Artist-led Initiative
• Bio art is an artistic community interested in a
process of creativity using biotechnology
• Collective response – from an aesthetic perspective
– to relations between art and science
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Art/Science Intersections
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Arthur Danto, ‘The artworld’ (1964)
• ‘To mistake an artwork
for a real object is no
great feat when an
artwork is the real
object one mistakes it
for. The problem is
how to avoid such
errors, or to remove
them once they are
made’
• Distinction between
Andy Warhol’s Brillo
Box (1964) as art and
an ordinary Brillo box:
‘It is the theory that
takes it up to the world
of art, and keeps it
from collapsing into
the real object which it
is …’
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Making Art from Science
• Art projects from living material blur the dividing
line between art and science
• Catts: ‘Engage and manipulate life, but also present
this manipulated life in an artistic situation’
• The manipulation of life by artists – or the removal
of scientific utility from biotechnologies – can make
bio artists appear frivolous
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Bio Artists ≠ Practicing Science
• Frustration that their work is labelled ‘part of science’ (Catts)
or ‘artistic research’ (Stelarc) even though biotechnology plays
an essential role in the artistic practice
• Stelarc: ‘I respect the [scientific] researchers that I work with.
They’re essential to facilitate, assist and realize some of the
works’
• Kac: ‘So I purely and simply make art, and I use the media of
my time, as Nam June Paik used video in his time and László
Moholy-Nagy used photogram in his time, and others have
used media objects such as the Impressionists who used the
new brushes and the new paints in tubes. It will be obvious in
about one hundred years, or even fifty or … when the novelty
wears off and then the artwork stands on its own … without
coinciding it historically with these developments’
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Artist/Science Diversion
• Stelarc on fundamental differences between the way art and
science operate: ‘Irritation I have that for universities to
authenticate artistic practice they have to sort of justify or recategorize it as a form of research. …. And of course we all
explore and test and experiment, but, you know, as artists I
think our agenda is very different, and the trajectory of art I
think, often is to unsettle, to surprise, to shock, to provide
alternative paradigms … and often art has no aim and it
doesn’t have a predictable outcome’
• Catts: ‘I have a fairly snappy response to [artworld] people
… because usually they would say what you’re doing is
science and not art, so … I managed to offend quite a few
people by responding and saying you obviously don’t know
what science is if you think that what we’re doing is science’
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Bio Artists ≠ Science Communicators
• Catts: ‘Role of bio art in science is secondary’; ‘I’m
very suspicious of artists who claim they’re
contributing to science’
• Kac: ‘Science is in the eye of the beholder, which
means that you can, if you want, you can see science
as everything. … But let’s be clear that you are
doing that, not the artist …’
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Distribution and Reception of Bio Art
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Audience Reception in Validating Artists
• Distribution (or
intermediation) is about
exposure and reputation
• The reception of Duchamp
valorizes the importance of
reception
• Who and what gets
distributed and how?
• ‘In the final analysis, the
artist may shout from all
the rooftops that he is a
genius: he will have to
wait for the verdict of the
spectator in order that his
declarations take a social
value and that, finally,
posterity includes him in
the primers of Artist
History’ (Duchamp 1957)
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Hierarchy of Authenticity in Bio Art
Living, Preserved, and Documented
• Kac: ‘From my perspective the one thing I would
signal as we begin this conversation is that there is a
difference between the market of bio art and the
market of bio artists. It’s an important difference
because when I sell a photograph, it’s a photograph
even if it is part of the GFP Bunny series it’s a
photograph, it’s not alive. We’re only talking about
the market for bio art when it is itself living … in
strict non-metaphorical, non-representational
biologically true life’
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‘Living’
• Bio art is living so dies by nature
• Difficulties encountered by bio artists in displaying
semi-living organisms, which require sterile
environments and bioreactors (i.e., devices used for
growing and sustaining living cells and tissue outside
of their environment) in order to survive
• Catts: ‘A very versatile [exhibition] space that has
the same type of resources that a good biological lab
would have’
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‘Preserved’
• Bio artists have developed ways to preserve their
works for display
• Catts and Zurr: ‘The killing ritual’ in order to stop
the growth of works like Pig Wings and Semi-Living
Worry Dolls, which are preserved in glycerol
• Reodica (hymNext project): Growing hymens until
they reach the desired size, then quickly stopping
their growth, and coating them in latex
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‘Documented’
• Catts and Zurr had shows of large digital prints of
photographs of their semi-living sculptures in the
mid-1990s
• Catts: ‘Very traditional [exhibitions] in the sense of
what we were showing was a representation of the
process ... and the objects that were developed in
the laboratory’
• Reflected technology constraints and curatorial
choices by exhibition venues
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‘The Genuine Article’
• Kac and Stelarc identify their non-biological works
as extensions – or auxiliary works – of the original,
living, biological ones
• Stelarc: ‘I think in a sense what you do seamlessly
interfaces with everything else that you do. In other
words, it’s convenient to kind of separate things and
say oh, this is just documentation or this is just
performance and this is what really is the artwork.
But I really, I’ve never really done that and, so if I
look at a videotape of my past performances, to me
that documentation is a kind of additional sort of
half-life’
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‘The Real Thing’
• Catts: less emphasis on documentation; Pig Wings
collected by MoMA (New York); disappointed ‘just
the prints’
• Catts: ‘SymbioticA lost interest in selling anything,
because it was much more interesting for us to
show the living sculpture. .... And then we were
getting more and more concerned ... some of our
work questioned the whole notion of the
commodification of life. ... So at the very same time
of critiquing commodification of life, actually trying
to commodify a thing in an artistic context and sell
it, was problematic. So since 2000 I don’t think
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we’ve sold one work ...’
Being Human Today
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‘Visceral: the living art exhibition’ (2011)
Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr
Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin
• ‘There is something
that makes us a little
uneasy, perhaps even
queasy, about the idea
of creating art works
from living tissue’
(Director, Science
Museum)
• Exhibited works form
‘a series of
provocations and
puzzles around the
nature of living and
non-living, asking us to
consider the myriad of
possible implications of
our new biological
toolkit’
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Posthuman Defined (I & II)
• Posthuman I: implies the demise of humanism, the
traditional humanist belief that ‘man is the measure of all
things’; questioning assumed qualities of being human such
as self-awareness, consciousness and reflection; poses
opportunities for new ways to understand what constitutes
being human
• Posthuman II: traditional views of being human were
challenged in the 1980s and 1990s by Stelarc and ORLAN; A
Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1985); How We Became Posthuman
(Hayles 1999) opportunity to ‘configure human being so that
it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines’;
Jens Hauser’s ‘satellite bodies’ (destabilizing our definition of
being human)
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Posthuman Defined (III)
convergence of biology and technology to the point where they are indistinguishable
• ‘Extropianism’ – theoretical
and technical inquires into
the next phase of human
condition through
advances in science and
technology – results in
technophilic accounts
• ‘Critical Posthumanism’
with political and sociallyrooted basis highlights the
processual character of the
posthuman; bio artists
interrogate and create the
possibilities for the
emergence of new
relationships between
human and machine,
biology and technology
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Critical Posthumanism of Bio Art
(critique of the biotech industry through aesthetics)
• GFP Bunny ‘may reveal us to ourselves as well as anything
might: as a mirror held up to nature’; Kac sought to
demonstrate the role of genetic engineering in normal,
domestic lives. Has the distinction between art and reality
collapsed?
• Zurr and Catts cite Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming animal’
– that is until there is no longer man or animal – in discussing
the Pig Wings project; ‘Physical actualization will severely
challenge current belief systems, which are unable to account
for developments in biological technologies’
• ‘Can “life” be reducible to number?’ Thacker draws reference
to the use of ‘parallax’ by Žižek that at the core of humanity
is something ‘inhuman’
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Duchampian Lessons
on the role of artists in the organization of culture
Contemporary art can certainly be considered one of the most powerful and
recognized generators of meaning existing today
Bio art can be provocative and distributing
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• Free Exchange of Ideas
• Pluralism of Values
• Emancipatory role of bio
art with artist-led initiatives
• Catts: ‘Bio artists can make
scientists more aware of
the social role they’re
playing and not just as
value-free knowledge
workers’
• Bio art represents an
artistic practice outside
monied contemporary art
world of commodified
objects
• Democratic, celebrates the
validity of differences, and
help keeps alive
distinctions between the
business world and the arts
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