ART IMITATES LIFE-SCIENCE (page 2)
The opening of "L'Art Biotech" is a scene of total madness. It's a Thursday night in this college town, and hoards of people, young and old, local and international cram into the large lobby of LU. Straight ahead is a bar where some hipsters occasionally look up from their drinks to glance at a video screen that flashes images from LU events. Bodies also spill over into the bookstore that features tomes by some of the participants in the "L'Art Biotech" show and symposium: Body Bazaar by bioethics lawyer Lori B. Andrews, and limited edition Alba booklets by Kac, among others.
I follow a twentysomething couple clad in trendy retro 80's clothing upstairs to the galleries, where the official opening festivities for the show are taking place. In one of the first rooms I enter, I am immediately beckoned by the wall projection of a DNA sequence (of A's, C's, G's and T's), as if to say, 'welcome to the world of bio-art.' It's part of Kac's "Genesis" installation. He's taken a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis (which is projected onto the opposite wall), translated it into Morse Code, converted the code into DNA base pairs (the ACGT's) and then genetically incorporated that into bacteria (projected on another wall). The sentence is: "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
A stylish, obviously European, thirty-something guy with ash blond hair, wearing a pin striped jacket and red shirt scurries nervously past the "Genesis" installation. His name is Jens Hauser. He's a German reporter for the European cultural TV channel ARTE, and the organizer of this unprecedented group show. One of the first things he tells me is that he hasn't slept in three days-so preoccupied has he been with this massive undertaking. He sweeps me through the crowd as we search for Adam Zaretsky, a New York bio-artist friend of mine who invited me to the conference. Reporters from various European TV stations and their companion camera people dot the gallery space. "Nantes is a town full of rumors now," Hauser tells me furtively. "And not only of green rabbits. This started weeks before this opening." So, the choice of Nantes and LU was not random. The German reporter knew that a buzz could be created in this little college town and that LU-with its infamous reputation for risky arts programming-was the perfect place to for a show like "L'Art Biotech."
Hauser has been following the fledgling bio-art 'beat' since the late 90's. His first exposure to it was in 1999 at Ars Electronica, an annual art + technology festival that has been taking place in Linz, Austria since 1979. That year's theme was "Life Science." It was there that he first met Eduardo Kac. "I remember having been quite aggressive towards Eduardo in Linz," he admits. "My first contact with biotech art was quite uncomfortable, as it probably is for most people, hearing that biotechnology was being used as an artistic medium."
Once he got past his initial reaction, he became fascinated with the medium working on related documentary films and reporting on it whenever he could. But, he was shocked to discover that even his own progressive network ARTE would refuse to accept his feature bio-art proposal. So he took it upon himself to independently accomplish a mammoth task: amassing the major players of the movement from all over the globe in one place for the first time to exhibit their work and discuss it in a companion symposium, along with French writers, scientists and art critics.
"My first contact with biotech art was quite uncomfortable, as it probably is for most people, hearing that biotechnology was being used as an artistic medium."
-Jens Hauser, show curator
Flower Power: In an unintentional homage to Edward Steichen, George Gessert hybridizes irises to his tastes
Events like Ars Electronica's "Life Science," which Hauser describes as "the first important impulse on the actual movement," and the subsequent "Next Sex" (2000) were certainly the harbingers to "L'Art Biotech." So was the "Paradise Now" exhibition (2000) at the Exit Gallery in New York. All featured various bio-artists and artists who worked with scientific themes. But never before have some of the true pioneers of bio-art like Eduardo Kac, Joe Davis, Oron Catts and George Gessert exhibited work dealing with 'living systems,' (rather than conceptual models) in one place.
Call it a movement-which, for all intents and purposes, I have in this article-but bio-art is still young and not entirely marked by cohesiveness. There's some evidence of collaboration within this "community" on joint projects but not much indication of the sort of intense mutual reverence and creative partnerships of George Braque and Pablo Picasso or Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. There is definitely acknowledgement and respect. But a remnant of the competitiveness of the scientific world seems to lurk in the dark corners of this bio-art 'movement.'
Continue to Page 3: Not your Average Joe