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Bios, Techne, Logos: A Timely Art Career |
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If the arts have traditionally been envisaged as representing reality, those that practice what is known as BioArt actually create reality: instead of representing a rose, they create a rose, and in so doing cross one of the mythic frontiers of contemporary art, the boundary between art and life. Mónica Bello and Ulla Taipale (Cápsula) will run a seminar and a workshop on BioArt at the CASM in February in conjunction with the UB. To mark the occasion and as an introduction to the subject we are pleased to publish a text by the art critic and exhibition curator Jens Hauser, who presented a major exhibition entitled L'Art Biotech in Nantes in 2003.
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JENS HAUSER
Bio Art isn’t just a hybrid; it’s also a proliferating mutant term. Biology’s ascent to the status of ‘hottest’physical
science has been accompanied by, on the one hand, the inflationary
use of biological metaphors in the scholarly disciplines
that study culture and, on the other, a wide range of biotech
procedures that are simultaneously providing artists with
the themes for their work and the expressive media
with which to realize them. As this has transpired, the
evolution of the term "Bio Art" has somewhat resembled the recent hyperbolic career path of the gene-hype launched by techno-industrial special interest groups in the 1990s that, in the wake of its zenith in conjunction with the media frenzy surrounding the Human Genome Project, has been slowly subsiding in the last few years: Bio Art has not unfolded and developed in accordance with prescribed master codes of a determinant post-avant-garde manifesto; instead, it has been subject to a process of social drift and diverse influences from its aesthetic environment. For a long time, the dominant element of Bio Art was "Genetic Art" that was purportedly synonymous with it; however, with the demystifying abnegation of the primacy of the genetic paradigm as ultimate Jacob’s Ladder, artistic protagonists expanded their horizons to take in other fields and methods: cell and tissue cultures, neuro-physiology, bio-robotics and bio-informatics, transgenesis, synthesis of artificially produced DNA sequences, Mendelian cross-breeding of animals and plants, xeno-transplants and homo-grafts, biotechnological and medical self-experimentation, and subverting the visualization technologies of molecular biology in ways not foreseen in the users’manuals.
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| Extra ear, The Tissue Culture and Art, 2003 |
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The
typological dilemma is reminiscent of the difficulty
of defining
media art as an artform. What is it exactly that
is essential to and definitive of it: that it
produces
art with the help of media, or that artists’
encounters with certain subjects are thematicizing
and changing the way media are being used?
In contrast with the technologies deployed in digital
media art, bio-technologies as artistic
implements have not yet been democratized, 
even if biotech home studios as new manifestations
of pop culture might almost be upon us, 
In this way, the notion of Bio Art, a concept already
pregnant with meaning, is still additionally contaminated
by art that regards biotechnology from the safe
haven of purportedly critical distance, and conceptualizes
it purely as another topic. It would be safe to
say that nobody today would even think of categorizing
Miltos Manetas' conceptual oil paintings depicting
joysticks, computer mice and tangled thickets
of
cables and wires as Computer Art or Media Art.
But then we are confronted by an absolutely grotesque
state of affairs in which the idea persists —
and even in specialized publications that should
know better — that a work can be ascribed
to Bio Art based upon the content it represents.
Bio-fictional manifestations such as chimera-sculptures,
DNA-portraits, chromosome-paintings or mutant-depicting
digital photo-tricks are no more examples of Bio
Art than Claude Monet’s impressionistic
paintings could be classified as "Water
Lilies Art" or"Cathedral
Art". |
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These conventional
artforms in which exclusively metaphoric and iconographic
reference systems are operational serve above all to satisfy
the content-demands of traditional art museums in which establishment
curators are beset by the pressures exerted by the challenges
of biotechnological perspectives: on the one hand, they must
take a position on an issue of pressing importance to society;
on the other, curators — overtaxed by the conceptual
demands of the issues, ignorant, intellectually lethargic  or
made insecure by the fact that such works are hardly objets
d’art in the conventional sense of the term —avoid
the awkward terrain of formally innovative Bio Art that confronts
biotech with the paradoxical application in actual practice.
Out of the countless exhibitions staged in recent years that
have dealt with the subject of biotechnology, those in which
biotechnologies have been utilized as a tool can be counted
on one's fingers.
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| Things get even more convoluted in the case of Media Art installations that are based on so-called genetic algorithms. Are computer simulations of biological processes Bio Art? Hardly! After all, isn’t this a priori an effort to instrumentalize such programs to purvey aestheticizing, pseudo-scientific, significance-endowing illustrations  and, via informatics, to permit the myth of the artwork as living organism to sprout up and blossom again? Despite the ever-growing importance of research in the field of bio-cybernetics and, on the other hand, synthetic biology that seeks to design new functions for living organisms, it remains the case that art whose sphere of operation is the interface of the organic and the mechanical and that reflects the fascination of bio-informatics and bio-computing above all generally remains arrested in a cybernetic ideal.  Nowadays, though, this is once again being confronted with concrete, carbon-based material. 
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| Untitled, The Tissue Culture & Art, 2000-01 |
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CÁPSULA
CÁPSULA is a platform for observation and exploration of the new awareness brought about by science and nature, and of the forms in which both are integrated in numerous creative proposals.
Started by Mónica Bello and Ulla Taipale, its purpose is to generate interdisciplinary projects by combining ideas from areas such as science and culture, and also collaborative projects by facilitating meetings, communication and discussion among various agents.
At present, CÁPSULA is investigating the relationship between art and life sciences, or what has come to be known as Bioart. |
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To phrase this in the highly fashionable parlance of genetics:
these a esthetic hybrids cannot be explicated by means
of the visual analogy of the phenotypes of such works,
but instead by means of their conceptual genotypes. The
‘mutation’ that Bio Art has been undergoing
can currently be described by four hypotheses:
- Bio Art is increasingly re-materializing itself. The former fascination with the "code of life" is receding and making way for a phenomenological confrontation with wetwork. Artists are using concrete, organic material and, simultaneously, clear critiques of genetic fetishism.
- Instead of representational objects, graphic depictions or simulations, transformational processes with performance characteristics are now the center of attention. They establish interrelationships between biotechnologies and their philosophical, political and economic framework conditions.
- Bio Art is increasingly attracting the interest of performance artists, or of those specializing in Body Art. The dialectical relationship between real presence and metaphorical representation is comparable with that of performance art, where the artist brings his own body and his own real biography into play. Likewise, the viewer who is experiencing Bio Art must switch back and forth between the symbolic realm of art, and the ‘real life’ of the processes that are being put on display and that is being suggested by organic presence.
- Bio Art is first and foremost an art of transformation in vivo that manipulates "biological materials at discrete levels (e.g. individual cells, proteins, genes, nucleotides)"
 and creates displays that allow audiences to partake of them emotionally and cognitively. But it does not permit itself to be nailed down with a hard and fast definition ofthe procedures or materials that it must employ. Even if we can consider the "manipulation of the mechanisms of life" as its medium, this assumes a very wide variety of forms both with respect to discourse and technique.
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See Hans Ulrich Reck: Mythos Medienkunst, Cologne, 2002.
Interest in acquiring lab skills to handle real "wet biology" is increasing exponentially—for example, 92 artists from all over the world applied for the 10 openings for participants in the most recent "Art and Biotechnology" workshop organized by SymbioticA and Artscatalyst last March in London.
See
Eugene Thacker and Natalie Jeremijenko: Creative
Biotechnology. A User's Manual, Newcastle, 2005.
The case for media art is made in Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito: “Looking for art in all the wrong places”. In: Ars Electronica 2001. Takeover, Vienna, 2001, pp. 28-33.
See Richard Hoppe-Sailer: “Bioplay. Medien – Simulationen – Natur?” In: Hans Werner Ingensiep and Anne Eusterschulte (Eds.): Philosophie der natürlichen Mitwelt,Würzburg, 2002, pp. 257-272.
For an elaboration of the explanatory model of cybernetic worldviews as general paradigm and ersatz for classical humanistic ideals, see: Céline Lafontaine: L'Empire Cybernétique. Des machines à penser à la pensée machine, Paris, 2004.
The most prominent example of this confrontation of immaterial code and real, trans-genetic bacteria is certainly Genesis by Eduardo Kac. See Ars Electronica 1999. Life Sciences, Vienna, pp. 310-311.
Eduardo Kac. Introduction to the book Biotechnology, Art and Culture, M.I.T. Press (forthcoming in 2006). |
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