Gene Culture Molecular Metaphor in Visual

SUZANNE ANKER

Abstract the Cubists, Dadaists, and Sur- This paper addresses visual art’s relationship to realists, this technique creates and its attendant metaphorical represen- images that are psychologically, tation. By diagramming models of the ways in philosophically, and aesthetical- which DNA is visualized and comprehended as ly complex. a system of signs, parallel conceptions between The collage device, like film ’s engagement with abstraction, editing, joins disparate elements recontextualization, and duplication is compared in space and time, and in doing to genetic process and laboratory experimentation. so seemingly fuses fact with fic- tion. By raising questions con- cerning authenticity, reality, and The Chimera the of visually coded rep- resentational systems, collage has Chimera. 1. (a) A fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mytholo- had profound perceptual effects. gy having a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. (b) In his photocollage German Fig. 1. John Heartfield, German An imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts. 2. An Natural History 1934 (Fig. 1), Natural History , photomontage, illusion or fabrication of the mind, esp. an unrealizable dream. John Heartfield situates mem- 38 x 25 cm, 1934. Copyright © 3. An individual organ or part consisting of tissues of diverse bers of the German government Artists Rights Society (ARS), New genetic constitution [1]. in three biological stages of development. Following the evo- York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. he practice of art over the last several decades has relied heavi- lution diagrammed in the photograph, Heartfield comments on the ly on techniques of recontextualization. Whether in the form inevitability of Hitler’s rise to power by linking the Weimar Republic Tof installation, appropriation, or digitalization, relationships with fascism [2]. Here metamorphosis links natural history and polit- between parts and wholes, handmades and readymades, originals ical power. The politician is joined to the insect, and a visual muta- and surrogates saturate the discipline of art and its discourse. The transformation of material into metaphor by cutting and pasting is a Suzanne Anker, 101 Wooster St., #7F, New York, NY 10012, procedure familiarly known as collage. Here aspects of one image are U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected]. substituted and reconfigured as part of another. Originating with

© 2000 Suzanne Anker, received 26 January 2000 LEONARDO, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 371–375 , 2000 371 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409400552856 by guest on 02 October 2021 tion, a chimera, is created. to in this text, while sometimes beautiful, merase chain reaction) does in the labora- The chimera has appeared once again, more importantly employs the visual lan- tory flask what the Xerox machine does in not just in art but in itself. A recent guage or iconography of science as an index the office [7]. This method replicates DNA example has been created by David Ow, a of social and cultural codes. through instruction, and can make as many biologist at the University of California, as a trillion copies. Andy Warhol’s replica- Berkeley. He has fused the genetic material The Copy and the Copyright tion of images (Fig. 2) by photosilkscreen- of a firefly and a tobacco plant, forming Copy. 1. An imitation, transcript, or ing to all intents and purposes clones the phosphorescent plants, that is, tobacco that reproduction of an original work (as a Mona Lisa and a host of other cultural glows in the dark [3]. By understanding letter, a painting, a piece of furniture, icons. As Warhol said in the title of one of the ways in which aspects of one biological or a dress). 2. One of a series of his works, Thirty Are Better Than One kingdom can be useful to another, the goal mechanical reproductions of an origi- (1963) [8]. Copyright, normally associated of this type of research is to combat disease. nal impression. with the protection of artistic intellectual Nevertheless these experiments, by break- Copyright. 1. The exclusive legal right property, is now equally offered up to the ing boundaries, change our rela- to reproduce, publish, and sell the biological domain. Gene sequences, once tionship to living matter. For example, if matter and form of a literary, musical, they are translated into a letter script, can one is a strict vegetarian, would one be vio- or artistic work. be and are patented. lating one’s principles by eating a tomato Clone. 1. A group of genetically identi- The current artistic practice of appro- whose genetic material has been altered cal cells or organisms all descended priation, or the copying of one artist’s style with flounder genes for purposes of frost- from a single common ancestral cell or by another, is a form of cloning, a benign proofing? Are the boundaries between art organism. 2. Genetically engineered plagiarism. It tests the notion of the copy- and science becoming blurred as the collage replicas of DNA sequences [4]. right while at the same time challenging technique manipulates life? Are manipulat- the accepted value of originality. Appropri- ed life forms art? A 1993 article in The New York Times ation may copy form, but it does not copy This text explores the ways in which described the cloning of the first intent or historical context. Ronald Jones’ genetic imaging operates as aesthetic signs. embryo [5]. This method, although 1989 work Untitled (Core of the Human Addressing this subject from diverse direc- common in animal breeding or occurring Retrovirus) may look like a Brancusi, but it tions, the examples set forth range from naturally in identical twins, raises serious operates on totally different principles. While the Brancusi was created as a tran- scendent, spiritual form, the Jones is secu- lar in the extreme. It is a casting in bronze of the deadly HIV virus. The viewer is con- fronted with the fact that such a “signifi- cant” form can have unequivocally malignant power.

The Genetic/Aesthetic Matrix Matrix. Cyberspace, where “bright lat- tices of logic unfold across the color- less void” [9]. Genetics. 1. The scientific study of heredity. 2. Related to or determined by the origin, development, or causal antecedent of something; coined by William Bateson in 1902 [10]. . 1. A branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste; coined in 1825 by Fig. 2. Andy Warhol, Thirty Are Better Than One , silkscreen and polymer, 8 x 9 feet, 1963. Copyright © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual /ARS, New York. Baumgarten.

simulation to structural anagrams of poetic ethical questions concerning the integrity Genetic material, microscopic in scale, intent and include a broad variety of styles, and uses of life. Since embryos can be can be made visible by a number of labora- materials, and ideologies. We are used to frozen and used at a later time, identical tory methods, mapping devices, and dia- looking at illustrations in Scientific Ameri- twins could be born years apart [6]. grammatic models. Each representation can or at microscopic photographs and Cloning, however, is not the only way to focuses on different levels of cellular and remarking on their beauty. The art referred copy genetic information. PCR (poly- molecular organization, the double helix

372 Suzanne Anker , Gene Culture Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409400552856 by guest on 02 October 2021 being the most popular representation of internal biological language and a logo to animals, this concept is called “breed- DNA. Although it only became sharply vis- associated with the person’s identity in the ing”; when applied to it is called ible through a microscope in 1990, as a world. “eugenics.” Eugenics, needless to say, has a model it is the twentieth century’s iconic DNA sequencing can also appear as a questionable social and moral history. In molecule. In Tony Cragg’s 1988 work series of band patterns arranged in discrete Thunder Rumble (1994), Nicolas Rule relies Code Noah (Fig. 3), stuffed animals cast in lanes. As a genetic fingerprint technique, on family history to draw the bloodlines of bronze are welded together in a spiral this method of visualization is used in racehorses. The lines connecting different chain. Consisting of two intersecting forensic science to establish identity and generations are drawn in red. They seem to bands, this refers to the follow the gesture of gravity, index- physical structure of the molecule ing its capacity to form notations DNA. Has life itself taken the form by drips. Conceptual and diagram- of commodity culture? matic, Rule’s work creates the As physical structures located in visual lineage of a specialized and the nucleus of the cell, chromo- rarefied commodity, the racehorse. somes carry the molecular For the artist, painting is another sequences of genes. Chromo- rare and specialized commodity somes—the term is taken from operating in a system of scarcity Greek roots meaning “colored and manipulation. bodies”— appear in several styles Using glass, steel, and print, and sizes. They catalogue species Eve Andre Laramee questions the and gender information by func- power of scientific authority in her tioning as hereditary templates to laboratory tableaux. With alchemi- all life forms. Steve Miller’s Portrait cal apparatus, in Science of Approxi- of Isabel Goldsmith (1994) repre- mation (1993) Laramee points up sents a direct dispersion of human the ambiguity in measurement. Is under the electron the laboratory the place where sci- microscope. During their moment entific truths are found? Like of replication—a process that has Marcel Duchamp, whose works the dynamism of dance—the chro- used language and complex visual mosomes elongate, form chains, puns to expose language’s indeter- and then replicate into identical minacy, Laramee sets up a labora- pairs. Relying on the supravisual, tory intent on questioning the Miller has been working with a paradigms of experimental science. variety of technological imaging By intermixing quantifiable truth devices, from sonogram to CAT with intuition and belief, Laramee Fig. 3. Tony Cragg, Code Noah, bronze, 275 x 100 x 100 scan. In a manner reminiscent of a opens up possibilities beyond cm, 1988. From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ware Travel- visual autopsy, he reduces life to a formal scientific discourse. stead. By courtesy of Marion Goodman Gallery. series of clues. Geraldine Erman’s sculptural Whereas mapping in cytogenetics is family relationships. Dennis Ashbaugh pieces can be discussed in terms of eigh- based on physical structure of chromo- enlarges these images appropriated from teenth-century science, in which the somes, that of molecular genetics is based the laboratory’s sequencing gel techniques. homunculus and the preformation theory on smaller units known as genes. Molecu- He then embeds color within his canvas, of conception figured prominently: lar genetics codes the sequences of genes by saturating its surface. His technique is rem- using four letters representing the iniscent of a technician’s staining of micro- [It was] believed that human beings nucleotide bases A, T, G, or C [11]. Each scopic samples. In both cases subtle were created by God at once, at the person embodies his or her own particular contrasts are made visible within a beginning of time. Preexisting tiny variation of the sequence, making every monchromatic field. Ashbaugh’s painted germs (the fabled homunculi) were individual unique (at least biologically). “technographs” in terrupt technology’s immaterially encased in molds, or Kevin Clarke’s photographs combine a lab- coolness with an imposing phenomenal boxed—as an emboitment—within the oratory-derived alphabetical sequence with presence of sensual color and scale [12]. egg waiting to be actualized by the a symbolic icon. In Portrait of Jeff Koons When a genetic pedigree is represented, male sperm. Coming forth simply (1994), a cash register is superimposed on a a diagram is created that traces successive meant that beings were unveiled, molecular printout derived from a sample generations. By creating composites of revealed, or unfolded in successive of the subject’s blood. In Clarke’s portraits, family histories, traits may be selected out temporal generations [13]. the self is portrayed as the combination of as desirable or undesirable. When applied This conception of morphology is evi-

Suzanne Anker , Gene Culture 373 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409400552856 by guest on 02 October 2021 dent in Erman’s work through her portray- Organizing System: Artificial Muscle (1991) reproductive clones have become both con- al of the cell as an architectural bubble. is a set of photo stills made from a video- tiguous to and continuous with cartogra- Encased within, body parts are suspended tape. They expose the hidden world of phies of the natural world. Gene libraries as uncanny nightmares. muscle generation. In a miniature test tube and shotgun experiments use techniques of George Gessert is an artist who works (a pipette), Grey placed two proteins, actin colonization and splicing to create their with live DNA. Cultivating irises, as and myosin, which are the macromolecules quarry. Language expands the uses of life, Edward Steichen did with delphiniums, responsible for the formation of muscle methodically constructing cyborg scenar- Gessert’s experiment-like activities extend tissue. He then videotaped these proteins ios, and the lines between science and its the definition of live art. Performance art going through a process of self-organiza- fictions are constantly being reconfigured. converts gesture and body into real time; tion in which contraction, one of the When Robert Rauschenberg [18] said thus, like breeding, it has qualities of the muscle’s properties, repeats itself. There is a he wanted to operate in the gap between ephemeral. Some of Gessert’s experiments freeze-frame quality to this work that art and life, what did he mean? The defini- have been called “genetic graffiti” [14]. He recalls the stop-motion photographs of the tions of art and life are inescapably vague, has taken irises that he has cross-pollinated nineteenth-century photographer Eadward slippery. Is a virus a living entity? Is a and has distributed them into wilderness Muybridge. Unlike Muybridge’s, however, genetically altered organism in some way a areas. His dispersals of “fictional” genomes Grey’s photo sets are not based on external work of art? We do intuitively grasp the intervene in an ecosystem dominated by locomotion. He creates a muscular system ways in which both culture and science natural selection. outside the body and in full view. Artificial operate outside of the laboratory and spill Chris Doyle’s 1994 video installation life studies self-organizing behavior as clues over into our lives. However, this proposi- Greenbathing (the Kingdom-Switch Cycle) is to the ways in which narratives of behavior tion does not necessarily provide answers. a metaphorical attempt to replicate the are developed and information is stored in Instead it merely signals the issues and photosynthetic cycle in human beings. The memory. problems to be addressed in the contempo- installation consists of two wall-mounted Robert Lawrence’s Scripts for Perfor- rary theoretical domains of art, science, and monitors, both of which face upwards. The mance (1994) are printed texts that ques- culture. first has a tray of water containing green tion the use of genetically engineered life algae placed on the top of the lighted forms. They reveal deep anxiety about the Notes and References screen. The second plays a tape showing a sacred and personal implications of these 1. Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary , 1989. All person crouching in a small basin which forms in modern culture. Lawrence asks definitions are based on this text unless otherwise contains chlorophyll, algae, and water. As questions that have no real answers and noted. the person scrubs his skin, he appears to makes statements that give no real comfort. 2. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 60. bleed from the abrasions (this “bleeding” is “Ask yourself how deep you would want 3. David Ow, Keith Wood, Marlene De Luca, Jef- computer-generated). The basin becomes a the hole if you were burying genetically frey de Wet, Donald Helinski, and Stephen site of fluid exchange: blood is lost as altered bacteria. Ask yourself how deep you Howell, “Transient & Stable Expression of the chlorophyll is absorbed through the skin. would want the hole to be if it were your Firefly Luciferase Gene in Plant Cells and Trans- genic Plants,” Science 234, pp. 856–859. The artist traces this blood-chlorophyll grave” [17]. 4. Robert C. King and William D. Stansfield, A transposition to a piece of writing by the Science has always presented itself Dictionary of Genetics (New York: Oxford Universi- French philosopher-critic Simone Weil: metaphorically. An experiment maps a natu- ty Press, 1990). ral process by presenting convertible data in 5. Gina Kolata, “Researcher Clones Embryos of The source of man’ s moral energy is the form of charts, numbers, or visual images. Human in Fertility Effort,” The New York Times , 24 October 1993. Not considered a technical feat, outside him, like that of his physical Models, diagrams, or schemas are an integral this procedure was developed as part of an in vitro energy [food, air, etc.]. He generally part of scientific formulation and communi- fertilization technique by Robert Stillman at finds it and that is why he has the illu- cation. Those representations, while seeming- George Washington University. He made several embryos from one by physically dividing the sion—as on the physical plane— that ly objective, are at the same time forays into embryo several times. Each divided embryo would his being carries the principle of the ways in which thinking proceeds along then develop new cluster cells, allowing each to preservation within itself. Privation both traditional and experimental networks. grow into an identical fetus. alone makes him feel his need. And in Art’s role in this complex is to question 6. Gina Kolata [5] enumerates several of the ethical problems posed by this procedure. She states, “One the end of privation, he cannot help assumptions of the visual. A more profound Brave New World scenario made possible by turning to anything whatever which is and difficult role for art is to make visual embryo cloning is that parents might be able to save edible. There is only one remedy for those aspects of systems and ideas that inher- identical copies of embryos so that if their child ever needed an organ transplant the mother could give that: a chlorophyll-conferring faculty ently rely on nonvisual parameters of com- birth to the child’s identical twin, a perfect match of feeding on light [15]. munication. Genetics provides the maps of for organ donation. Or parents could keep a frozen biochemical futures and livingforms of cellu- embryo as a backup in case their child died, so that they create the perfect replacement.” Michael Joaquin Grey is interested in lar script. It is a particularly fertile and 7. Barnaby J. Feder, “ Dispute Arises Over Rights inventing self-organizing systems, art untapped field for visual participation. for Copying DNA,” The New York Times , 18 objects similar to artificial life [16]. Self- Chimeras, altered food products, and September 1991.

374 Suzanne Anker , Gene Culture Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409400552856 by guest on 02 October 2021 8. Kynaston McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective 15. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: 18. Emile DeAntonio, Painter’s Painting: The New (New York: M.O.M.A, 1989), p. 236. Routledge, 1987 [1952]), p. 3. York Art Scene, 1940–1960 , Turin Film Corpora- 9. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace 16. See Steven Levy, Artificial Life: A Report from tion (Montauk, NY: Mystic Fire Video, 1972) Books, 1984), pp. 4–5. the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology (New 10. King and Stansfeld [4]. See Appendix C York: Random House, 1992), pp. 5–8. Levy defines artificial life or a-life as “ the creation and (Chronology), p. 356: “ 1902–1909: W. Bateson Suzanne Anker is a visual artist working introduces the terms genetics, alleomorph, homozy- study of lifelike organisms and systems built by gote, heterozygote,” among others. humans. The stuff of this life is nonorganic matter, with genetic imagery. She teaches art histo- and its essence is information.” It is aimed at the ry and theory at the School of 11. A, T, G, C represent adenine, thymine, gua- “understanding of all complex non-linear systems nine, and cytosine respectively. The DNA double which are thought to be ruled by universal forces in New York City. This essay was original- helix is an architectural model held together by not yet comprehended.” The definition of life in ly written in conjunction with the exhibi- hydrogen bonds between specific pairs of bases. A this system should be “gauged on a continuum, and tion Gene Culture: Molecular Metaphor in and T always pair, G and C always pair. not granted according to a binary decision.” He 12. William S. Klug and Michael R. Cummings, goes on to say that “a complex system is one whose Visual Art held at Fordham College’s Plaza Concepts of Genetics (New York: Macmillian, 1991), component parts interact with sufficient intricacy Gallery at Lincoln Center in New York, pp. 460–461, and John J. Bozzola and Lonnie D. that they cannot be predicated by standard linear November 1994. Russell, Electron Microscopy (Sudbury, MA: Jones equations.” and Barlett, 1992), pp. 122–133. 17. “These Scripts for Performance are metaphorical 13. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging actions offered to viewers to encourage their partic- The Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine ipation in the conceptual completion of the work.” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 241. Robert Lawrence, “Electro-Mechanical Flight 14. George Gessert, “Notes on Genetic Art,” Sequence: Bumper Crop,” artist’ s brochure for Leonardo 26, No. 3, 205–211 (1993). installation, Dow Building, St. Paul, MN (1994).

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