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A Name for Everything: Genetics and Art
by Meredith Tromble
"Biologists," snorted my engineer husband. "They
like to name everything." It’s true. But who knew? Certainly
not this art-school-educated MFA, who made it all the way to postgraduate
studies without darkening the door of a biology classroom. But as one
of the first critics to write extensively on the subject, I would be teaching
a course in Art and Genetics. I needed more information about the scientific
half of the equation. After ascertaining that no frogs would be harmed,
I signed up for a summer genetics class through the University of California,
Berkeley.
It was like tackling Welsh. Take this sentence picked
from the textbook at random: "During the G1 phase of the cell cycle, all
ARS sequences are bound by a group of proteins (six in yeast), forming
what is called the origin recognition complex (ORC)."1
The authors are defining a term, but the sentence contains three other
terms I had to learn before I could put the main point together. Almost
every sentence of the text required that much effort. I resorted to slowly
reading it aloud as my long-suffering husband, the family scientist, listened
patiently and tried to help me keep track of the concepts.
Was it worth it? Did this plunge into science improve my critique of work
by artists like Shawn Brixey, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Carrie
Mae Weems, and so many others?
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| Paternity, Iñigo
Manglano-Ovalle (2000) Photo courtesy San Diego Museum of Art |
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In truth, it’s too soon to tell. My brain
is still reeling. But I notice a cluster of changes already. News reports
are more meaningful, for one thing; I understand the relative importance
of the scientific discoveries that are announced almost daily. But the
most interesting shift is that art related to genetics seems either sillier
or more profound. And striving to make rigorous, insightful work seems
more pressing.
Sheep to the right, goats to the left
Does it matter whether the "scientific" information incorporated in a
work of art is accurate? Lynn Hershman’s forthcoming film Teknolust
tells the tale of a genetic scientist who "clones" three immortal "self-replicating
automatons" from her own DNA.
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Tilda Swinton as the self-replicating automaton
Ruby in Teknolust, a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson (2001)
Photo courtesy Hotwire Productions |
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Right there, a literal-minded viewer will see a
small problem — if the scientist was neither immortal nor an automaton,
her "clone" would not be, either. Not to mention that in order to survive,
the "clones" must ingest genetic material — sperm — which they
drink with hot water like tea. This scene will have the geneticists in
the audience, the ones who’ve spent decades and gazillions of dollars
trying to maneuver genes into useful locations in the body, either marching
out of the theatre or subsiding into dreamy "if only" reverie.
The "science" in Teknolust is so fantastic that it can be understood
only as a metaphor for something else, and indeed Hershman’s story
explores her long-standing concerns of creativity and identity formation
with humor and guile. Yet the power of a metaphor arises from a degree
of correlation between the concepts. If one of the concepts is unsound,
the metaphor suffers. Glossing over a metaphor is a pardonable lapse in
Hershman’s work, but there have been cases — such as Eduardo
Kac’s infamous
transgenic bunny — when intellectually spurious works have been
hailed in the art community due to scientific naiveté. (For a detailed
account of the problems with Kac’s work, see Christopher Dickey’s
Wired article I
Love My Glow Bunny.)
One further comment on accuracy: with a bare minimum of biology at my
command, I started spotting malformed metaphors. How much more off-putting
would they be for a scientist? I suspect that some artists wouldn’t
care, and the feeling might be mutual — "Why should I care what an
artist thinks about this stuff?" asked one of my genetics teachers when
I told her about genetics-related art. I responded that artists have valuable
things to say about how her science fits into the big picture. But if
their work is ever to reach people like her — people with immediate
power to make changes — it must have some points of contact with
her reality.
The sticking point
Genetics is fun. That’s what kept bringing me back to class this
summer, despite the swarming terminology. It brings the micro and macro
levels of life within reach of understanding and links them in a continuum.
Every name I learned represented another node of a wildly beautiful, knee-bucklingly
complex system. But does the very process of naming and studying these
nodes endanger them?
Dr. Martha Crouch, a successful molecular biologist,
became so concerned about this question that she gave up laboratory research
to work with indigenous agriculture. "You have to think of the organism
as a bag full of interchangeable parts that you can manipulate in a very
linear way," she told an interviewer from Terrain. "You focus on
things that allow you to make everything in the world the same. The idea
that you objectified the organism, used toxic chemicals, solvents, mutagens,
and so forth to do your work, isn’t addressed. But of course the
method is part of the whole…and that method seemed toxic and limited
to me."2
Crouch continues, "If your relationship to the organisms you are studying
is one of making them into objects; if you then dissect them to wrest
the secrets of their being from them, then you’re exploiting them.
As far as I can tell, that’s what science has always been. I’m
not talking about knowledge. I think part of the problem is that people
today think of science as being the same as knowledge about nature. …
I’m not saying, ‘Don’t know anything.’ I’m saying,
‘Know it in context.’"
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Twined Bible (1999), Linda Ekstrom
Photo courtesy LIMN Gallery |
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Twined Bible by Linda Ekstrom offers
a telling parallel to unraveling the genetic code. Ekstrom cut a Bible
into one-line strips, then wove a length of twine from them. Every word
in the Bible is in the twine — but could you understand the Bible
by studying it?
I personally, however, am not so pure…
The holistic approach appeals to me. Here’s the thing, though. I
really, really enjoyed that genetics class. It was tough, but it was fascinating.
I didn’t feel the pain of the mice bred to develop excruciating diseases.
I didn’t hear the panting of cloned lambs suffocating because something
went wrong with their lung-development genes. I didn’t see the angry
descendants of the African American woman whose cells have become immortal
as the HeLa line of research cells. I just stumbled into an intellectual
adventure, a world where I could know more and more about life and marvel
at its wonders. And that felt like a very good thing. I don’t think
I was completely deluded in loving this adventure. I do think that facing
the contradiction between ways of knowing is imperative.
Seeing genetic science only as wonder or only as suffering is limited.
They are part of the same phenomena, and there is no way to have one without
the other. For some kind of cultural wisdom to emerge, our vision must
enlarge to see the boons and dooms existing in the same space. Only then
will we see well enough to thread our way through them. And that expanded
vision is the province of artists. When the photographer Catherine Wagner
visually equates MRI images of whole pomegranates with cell division,
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| Pomegranate Wall (2001), Catherine
Wagner |
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she is telling us a piece of what we need to know.
Pomegranate Wall balances on the boundary line between whole and
part without losing sight of either. When the artist/engineer Natalie
Jeremijenko displays cloned trees as public art, directing attention to
the interaction of environment and genome, she offers another clue, undermining
a dualistic analysis of individuals as shaped by either nature or nurture.
As biologists study and name molecules and chemicals, artists must study
and "name" the natural and social context of which they are a part; if
we keep talking to each other, perhaps we can move beyond "science" and
"art" to a way of knowing that is bigger than either.
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