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ART IMITATES LIFE-SCIENCE (page 3) Zaretsky, my nappy-haired bio-artist friend finds me at the entrance of the show, Hauser the curator trailing close behind. He is unshaven and sports a pointed-collar bat print shirt unbuttoned just a little too much. He smiles impishly, hand on hip in a playful posture that accentuates the roundness of his belly. To some, Zaretsky might look more like an amateur adult film director than a budding thirty-four-year-old artist incorporating scientific principles in his work. He represents the next wave of bio-art, having been under the tutelage of the movement's forerunners. Many members of this new wave will not be as lucky as Zaretsky. But with information on genetics so accessible and palatable these days (written in a digital language not so different from that of computers), we can expect to see more and more young renegade bio-artists cropping up in the future. Davis even admits that bio-art is already highly accessible: "Look in amateur science columns in Scientific American and they tell you how you can create your own recombinant DNA." Zaretsky didn't have to glean information from scientific texts and the Internet to learn about bio-art. He studied under impresario Kac in his graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While assisting the Brazilian artist in collecting research at a conference, he chummed up to Davis, one of the godfathers of bio-art, and a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This is when, according to Davis, Kac and Zaretzky were first introduced to genetic art. But Kac says he arrived at producing transgenic artwork, "progressively, by means of the natural evolution of my own work, spanning 23 years." Another case of he said/he said? Having gotten Davis' attention at that conference, Zaretsky seized the opportunity to ask if he could go work with him. Davis made the arrangements. So, after finishing up grad studies Zaretsky had the chance to learn from the master, as well as to inject his own brand of the whimsical in a project entitled "The Humperdinck Effect." The two experimented with the reaction of E. coli bacteria to the playing of lounge lizard Englebert Humperdinck's music. The bacteria, of course, reacted as if it was being 'attacked.' Davis swaggers around the exhibition space with an overcoat draped over his flannel shirt. He's a rugged but amiable looking man in his 50's with a peg leg--a sort of rough-around-the-edges anti-hero for the Post Human age. "He's Charles Bukowski," says Zaretsky, who divulges that there is a certain unspoken tension/rivalry between both his mentors. "It's like being the kid with divorced parents," he jokes. Both Davis and Kac have undeniably made vital contributions to bio-art. Perhaps, as science would indicate, tension begets creation. Davis is a limitless Renaissance man, able to evoke and provoke the spiritual, sexual, inter-galactic, poetic and even the elements of science that can go over the head of the average person. In his seminal 1986-87 work Microvenus, with Dana Boyd, he questioned the messages NASA sent out with its Pioneer probe in attempts towards extraterrestrial communication. These 'messages' were line drawings of a nude Caucasian man and woman. The man was devoid of facial hair and the woman of a vagina. During the second NASA Voyager probe, these childlike drawings were deleted, essentially censored. Davis felt that a message of such importance shouldn't be censored and should reflect symbolically and philosophically, the maw of creation, the vortex of life on this planet. So he chose, as his message, the symbol for the female Earth as it is written on a rune (the Nordic fortune telling stones), which also happens to be a symbol for a vagina. His means of conveying the message also greatly differed with NASA's. Noting that traditional storage media, like discs and circuit chips can't withstand extremely long-term environmental conditions, he chose an unlikely 'carrier' that could stand the test of time and space-like some interstellar Fed Ex envelope: bacteria. He first encoded the Venus icon into a DNA sequence. That sequence was synthesized in a DNA molecule, which was made into laboratory strains of the resilient E. coli bacteria. For non-scientifically inclined readers, think of all of this in terms of the web-based html language. In its raw form it's just a bunch of letters and codes but miraculously all of this translates into a living, breathing web page with formatted, text, graphics and scroll-down bars. |
"[Joe] Davis is a limitless Renaissance man, able to evoke and provoke the spiritual, sexual, inter-galactic, poetic and even the elements of science that can go over the head of the average person. "
Putting all her Eggs in one Basket: Chrissy Conant creates human caviar by putting her body (and eggs) through a dangerous process Tonight Davis is toting another symbol of womanhood, this one of a more pop cultural nature. He's made color copies of a naked Playboy bunny and turned her Day-Glo green in PhotoShop. He's passing the flyers around to incredulous exhibit visitors. "She's lovable and affectionate and I want to take her home with me," he tells people, mimicking Kac's words to the press about his Alba bunny. He also hands one to Kac, who smiles and graciously accepts the piece of paper, like he's just received a detention slip from the ominous school principal. He later explains, "The green photo of Alba is not visually altered…Under the right blue light, and seen through a yellow filter that blocks the incident blue, this is what they look like." I guess we'll never know for sure. Davis came from an architectural background and for a long time rejected science as a rebellious act against his father who was a chemist. But, as they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Despite the fact his somewhat fragile MIT post entails a nomadic work life (he is continuously moved from lab location to lab location), he is, "In the center of the universe," as he puts it. "Anything you can imagine is within a five-mile radius." Access to this kind of unlimited scientific data, tools, samples, materials, and minds seems to make Davis quiver with excitement. Conversely, it seems to make his blood boil that Kac's role in his bio-artist is played from a safer, artistic distance, conceptualizing projects and seeing them actualized with the assistance of laboratory professionals. "What if I am going to create a sculpture in marble but I won't pick up a chisel and a maul!" Continue to Page 4: A Real Living Doll
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