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THE AESTHETICS OF CARE? The artistic, social and scientific implications of the use of biological/medical technologies for artistic purposes. Presented by SymbioticA: The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory & The Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 5 August 2002. The Aesthetics of Care? Symposium is part of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) 2002. Supported by ISBN: 1 74052 080 7 All copyright remains with the authors. Cover Design Edited by Oron Catts The Aesthetics of Care? is published by SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, 35 Crawley Avenue, Nedlands 6009. Western Australia. August 2002. www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au 1 9 –9.15 Oron Catts – Welcome 9.15 – 10 Professor Lori Andrews Morning Session 10 – 10.20 KDThornton: The Aesthetics of Cruelty vs. the Aesthetics of Empathy 10.20 – 10.40 Stuart Bunt: A complicated balancing act? How can we assess the use of animals in art and science? 10.40 – 11.00 Laura Fantone: Cute Robots/Ugly Human Parts (A post-human aesthetics of care) 11.00 – 11.10 Questions 11.10 –11.25 Morning Tea 11.25 – 11.45 George Gessert: Breeding for Wildness (presented by Adam Zaretsky) 11.45 – 12.05 André Brodyk: Recombinant Aesthetics (adventures in paradise) 12.05 – 12.25 Peta Clancy: Gene Packs 12.25 – 12.35 Questions 12.35-1.30 Lunch Feeding Session of the semi-living objects 1.30-1.50 Julia Reodica: Test Tube Gods and Microscopic Monsters 1.50- 2.10 Redmond Bridgeman: The Ethics of Looking 2.10- 2.30 Marta de Menezes: The Laboratory as an Art Studio 2.30 – 3.00 Guy Ben-Ary/Thomas DeMarse: Meart (AKA Fish and Chips) 3.00 – 3.20 Ionat Zurr: An Emergence of the Semi-Living 3.20 - 3.30 Questions 3.30 – 3.45 Afternoon Tea 3.45 – 4.05 Amy Youngs: Creating, Culling and Caring 4.05-4.25 Grant Taylor: The obscured ideologies of Artificial Life and William Latham’s Mutant Monsters 4.25– 4.50 Steve Baker video: Kac and Derrida: Philosophy in the Wild? 4.50– 5.10 Adam Zaretsky: The Workhorse Zoo Bioethics Quiz 5.20-5.30 Questions 5.30 – 5.55 Break 6 – 8pm PANEL DISCUSSION Professor Andrew Brennan, Chair in Philosophy, UWA Professor Stuart Bunt, SymbioticA Director Oron Catts, SymbioticA Artistic Director and BioFeel Curator Sue Lewis, Research Ethics and Animal Care Manager, UWA Heidi Nore, Animal Rights activist Adam Zaretsky, Vivoartist and Educator 2 Oron Catts I would like to welcome you all to The Aesthetics of Care? - the first of an ongoing series of SymbioticA symposiums. Since SymbioticA’s inception in 2000 we have had artists working in our art and science collaborative research laboratory, utilising the knowledge and facilities available in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia. One of SymbioticA’s main premises is to act as a porous membrane in which art and bio-medical sciences and technologies could mingle. Artists are encouraged to employ biological techniques as part of their practice and undertake research in a co-operative and collaborative, rather than competitive manner. The cross fertilisation of ideas, skills and knowledge between different artists and scientists is key to our existence. We now receive on average three requests per week from local and international artists wanting to be artist-in-residence at the lab. In accepting proposals we have had to find a medium between the merit of the work being proposed and the ethical implications of the research to be undertaken. Our innate curiosity and wish to experiment is tempered by social, ethical and epistemological issues. The level of manipulation of living systems that biotechnology is starting to provide is unprecedented in evolutionary terms. The way in which humans choose to exercise these technologies on the world around them hints at the ways they will be used on each other. In The Aesthetics of Care? we will explore how artists are utilising this new knowledge and the skills that will be acquired by artists venturing into this new realm of operation. How will the general public respond to living biological systems presented as art? In particular how do we deal with the ethical implications of using living systems in artworks? We do not foresee any resolutions being reached at the end of today’s proceedings. Rather, we hope to generate an ongoing dialogue on where we have come from and where we are going that moves beyond the human-centric discourse of bioethics. We see it as a continuation of SymbioticA’s ongoing commitment to open discussion regarding its role in the realm of biological art expression. We are proud to have such an eclectic group of presenters from legal, 3 scientific, philosophic, academic and artistic backgrounds who will explore the complexities of the inspiring and alarming arena of biotechnology. The Aesthetics of Care? is presented by SymbioticA and The Institute of Advanced Studies, The University of Western Australia. Lori Andrews Lori Andrews is distinguished professor of law at Chicago-Kent, United States of America: director of IIT’s Institute for Science, Law and Technology; and senior scholar of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. She has been an adviser on genetic and reproductive technology in the United States to Congress, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes for Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and several foreign nations including the emirate of Dubai and the French National Assembly. She served as chair of the federal Working Group on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project and recently served as a consultant to the science ministers of twelve countries on the issues of embryo stem cells, gene patents, and DNA banking. Andrews has also advised artists who want to use genetic engineering to become creators and invent new living species. Professor Andrews is the author of nine books, including The Clone Age, published in 2000, in which she unmasks the bizarre motives and methods of a new breed of scientist, bringing to life the wrenching issues we all face as venture capital floods medical research, technology races ahead of legal and ethical ground rules and ordinary people struggle to maintain both human dignity and their own emotional balance. 4 KDThornton The Aesthetics of Cruelty vs. the Aesthetics of Empathy “It is not at all a matter of vicious cruelty, cruelty bursting with perverse appetites and expressing itself in bloody gestures, sickly excrescences upon an already contaminated flesh, but on the contrary, a pure and detached feeling, a veritable movement of the mind based on the gestures of life itself…” Antonin Artaud, Theatre of Cruelty Non-utilitarian animal use documents as far back as 4000 years ago in China, Egypt, Rome, and Greece.1 Some forms of these ancient carnivals, circuses and agricultural fairs are still with us today, though their numbers and frequency are dwindling. Zoos and menageries are usually state institutions, but for the renegade freelance roadside attraction, or private zoo. Before art became institutionalized in museums and galleries, exhibitions at agricultural fairs were the primary form of art exposure for most North Americans.2 Exhibitions involving live specimens are on the increase in recent years, in art, science, and nature museums. “A number of museums have discovered what zoos have always known: visitors are fascinated by live animals.” 3 In keeping with that observation, I will focus upon live animal use in aesthetic practice, and will not address the use of corpses, techniques of preservation, such as formaldehyde, mummification, taxidermy, representations of animals,4 or the genetically modified innovations of recent times. Artists are incorporating live animals into their work with ever-increasing frequency. If one adopts the “artist as visionary” model, some of these artists may be preparing society for the greater changes ahead in the fields of biotechnology or further along, the dissolution of speciesism. More cynically, considering the static environment of the typical art institution, the inclusion of dynamic or controversial content may often operate as an attention-getting strategy in the (forgive me) dog-eat-dog world of contemporary art. Works using animals are tied to their precedents in popular culture, ranging from menageries, circuses, religious sacrifices, sadistic entertainment and some forms of harvest or collaborations with domesticated animals. Generally, animal-works fall into one of the four following categories: 5 Appears in Popular Culture as: Represented in art as: Zoos, Menageries objects Circuses, Animal Acts performers5 Sacrifice: cock+dog-fighting, factory farms victims Cultured pearls, honeybees, free-range farms, etc. co-creators In art, one may find the earliest example6 of animal use to be Philip Johnston’s 1934 installation America Can’t Have Housing at MOMA, a tenement slum re-creation that included cockroaches.7 Another early work, Salvador Dali’s Rainy Taxi at the International Exposition of Surrealism at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris (1938), incorporated snails. Almost twenty years later, 1957 saw an exhibition of paintings and drawings created by chimpanzees at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, curated by Desmond Morris.8 From its beginnings in 1958,9 Hermann Nitsch commissioned the slaughter of animals in his Orgien Mysterien Theatre.10 According to various reports, these domestic animals were either diseased (refused by the slaughterhouse), sedated, or already deceased before slaughtering. In his public statements he professes either a more humane death than the abattoir, or at worst no different than such, and his events are regularly protested by animal rights organizations.

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