Archive for the ‘Organisms’ Category

Propaganda stops thinking: an interview with Steve Kurtz.

Monday, April 12th, 2010

It reads like a movie. It is a movie. It’s the subject of a documentary called Strange Culture as well as an exhibition, and its main character, Steve Kurtz, tells his story in university halls and in newspapers.

The story goes: in 2004, Kurtz’s wife had a heart attack. The emergency officials that responded to his 911 call noticed blacked-out windows and various sorts of medical equipment. Folks who knew Kurtz knew that that the equipment was for his ongoing work with the Critical Art Ensemble. The Ensemble had, among other things, created an artwork by reverse-engineering GMO soy. The blacked-out windows? Well, Kurtz likes to sleep late.

But the aftermath of that call resulted not only in the death of his wife but an series of subpoenas and indictments that accused Kurtz of domestic terrorism and, when that wouldn’t stick, mail fraud. All charges were finally dropped in 2008 after years of legal fundraising and outcry. Kurtz was kind enough to give an interview to greenmuseum.blog to catch us up on how he’s recovering, and what sort of terrorist acts CAE is up to next. Read on. It’s better than a movie.

GM.B: How is life?

SK: Life is returning to normal. It’s certainly much more relaxed. My body is pretty much healed now after 4 years of neglect and stress.

GM.B: How has your perspective on the world changed since 2004? Has the trial upended or just confirmed your worldview of American government and power?

SK: My perspective is pretty much the same. Most adjustments stemmed from the removal of neoconservatives from positions of political power. It’s back to the global struggle against neoliberalism, as opposed to the more national struggle against neofascism (the neocons) in the US. It’s back to the future to take up where we left off in 1999.

GM.: Michale Brenson argues in his book “Visionaries and Outcasts” that the critical outsider role traditionally filled by the American artist has been scrambled and undermined since the collapse of the Soviet Union. What do you think the role of the American artist is?

SK: Who knows? There are so many art worlds and models of being an artist that no generalization really holds up. Critical Art Ensemble’s (CAE) role has been to produce anti-authoritarian narratives and images, invent tactics and tools for resistance, and explore new sites of contestation.

GM.B: Is it the responsibility of the artist to address critical issues like civil rights and the environment?

SK:I would say that’s a bit too prescriptive. There are so many issues that need addressing, and great disagreement about which are most important. Just don’t be naïve. All cultural production has a politics. One should be aware of the political economy that envelops us, and how one is navigating and negotiating it.

GM.B: What’s the difference between art and propaganda?

SK: Propaganda stops thinking. Overtly political cultural production advances it. Propaganda must exhaust itself on impact. It must leave nothing more to be said. The receiver of propaganda’s message must consume it as something self-evident and respond in an emotive manner. Cultural production creates situations for dialogue, exploration and experimentation, and even space for the interrogation of our most beloved narratives (human rights, social justice, free speech, world peace, sustainability, etc.).

GM.B: The trial has brought the work of Critical Art Ensemble national attention and had made you a kind of poster man for artists’ civil rights. Its artifacts were the subject of their own exhibition. You’ve been invited to speak on the subject extensively. How do you feel it will continue to shape your work and the work of the Ensemble?

SK: It’s an event that we are stuck with. We certainly minimize talking about it. The only reason we did an exhibition on the case was that we thought it would help with transparency while I was at trial. I never went to trial but the exhibitions had already been scheduled, so we went ahead with them. CAE has no plans to make any more work about the case. At the same time, while I like to think of case as in the past, I realize it is historic in its significance, so I have to be the poster boy to some extent, like it or not.

GM.B: What would your wife have thought of all of this?

About the case? She would have been off the charts angry. Hope was a very emotional woman who had a real problem with authority–especially when it is arbitrary in its use/abuse of power. I can remember in the days before she died, as rights were rapidly eroding–she would yell at the reports, “We’ll never give up; we’ll never surrender!” I think that is how she would have felt about the case too. As for the dismissal, she would have been delighted. She loved it when those brief glimpses of the impossible manifest themselves. It’s not often that we get to humiliate a US Attorney for four years.

GM.B: What are you working on now? What’s coming up in the future?

SK: CAE is making a temporary monument to economic inequality in the US. We are modeling the proportional spatial relationship between quintiles of wealth. While the first four quintiles, represented by a banner, will rise about 43 feet into the air, if we stacked on the proportional wealth of the top quintile, the entire monument would have to reach up another 257 feet. Since we can’t make a monument that high, we are going to use hot air balloons to take people up to this height.

The other project is about the use of the so-called “dirty bomb” as an instrument for state propaganda. I suppose this goes back to your earlier question. We intend to recreate the hype. With the help of a great curator in Germany, we have hired a professional demolition team to safely set off a bomb with a non-radioactive, metallic tracer simulant in an urban area in Germany. We’ll have people in Hazmat suits with metal detectors. However, we will also set up a PA system in the crater where a panel consisting of a nuclear scientist and a radiological weapons expert will speak to the public about the actuality of making, deploying, and detonating a dirty bomb. The reality is that weapon is basically a myth. For a truly harmful one to be built it would require state sponsorship. It not something any terrorist could ever do, nor is it a “poor man’s nuke.” If we don’t take the “dirty bomb” as a self evident threat (its propaganda form), and instead look at it from a reflective reasoned position, it’s easy to understand that there is nothing to fear, and that the state is using this image for other more nefarious purposes. For example, to produce fear in the population, unquestioned acceptance of authoritarian agendas, and ever greater budgets for the military.

GM.B: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

SK: “Never surrender.”

Tactical Biopolitics: a review.

Monday, March 1st, 2010

“How can we know for sure these days that the truck driver repairing his exhaust at the crossroads in your neighborhood is not a silent conceptual artist engaging you in a thought-through performative experience? ” asks Jens Houser in “Observations on an Art of Growing Interest,” part of the collection of essays in Tactical Biopolitics. An engaging overview of scientists as artists, artists as ethnographers, activists as sociologists, and women who do agility trials with their dogs as philosophers, Tactical Biopolitics presents the words and works of people who profoundly engage their ethics with their craft.

Largely centered around issues of biology and bioethics, the book often wades deep into the waters of scientific jargon and academic word-whirlpools. When it emerges into common reality, however, it does so resonantly. While artist Kathy High gives a factual breakdown of her reasons for working with a group of former lab rats (they were predisposed to have her same health issues), we get caught up in the story of the rodents, their namings and personalities. Donna J. Haraway manages to make us forget agility trials as a means to make dogs literally jump through hoops and see them instead as an exercise in human-animal communication.

The book emerged from a conference on BioArt and the Public Sphere at UC Irvine in 2005. It is, write editors Beatriz de Costa and Kavita Philip, “a hybrid, made possible by two recent histories: the enormously creative practices at the intersection of technoscience, activism, and art; and the explosion of cross-disciplinary conversations following Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics.

We see artists confronted with the ethics of working with living tissue, witness the affect racism has on modern scientific research, and learn of the evolution of activist’s tactics for getting AIDS medicine to patients who need it. We hear artists talking about life in labs, and scientist talking about the craft of ethical living. It’s a smorgasboard of modern ethical thought, of challenges to the definitions of professional fields. It’s fantastic reading for anyone interested in cross-disciplinary work. But largely, it is the story of people using the tools they have at their disposal to positively engage with an increasingly complicated and manipulated world. So while the authors featured in Tactical Biopolitics might not be the truck driver in your neighborhood, they are, like him, attempting to fix what’s broken.

Genetically Modified Music: Mixed Feelings.

Saturday, February 20th, 2010
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We’re at that point now. We can talk about growing music. Artist David Benqué‘s piece Acoustic Botany is a series of models and diagrams for a genetically engineered music and sound garden. It envisions insects created to chew in rhythm, flower pods designed to explode at certain intervals, and Lily Pads that amplify the death throes of bugs in a vascular speaker structure.

I gotta say this makes me just the slightest bit nauseous, and not for the obvious old-lady-with-a-clipboard reasons (nature is nature! etc). It’s because of the roles and responsibilities of the artist inherent in the work. Here I was all excited about environmental art because it’s such a great example of the logistical application of the aesthetic, of an artist’s capacity to engage and care, a unity of practical and aesthetic reason. Now, again, sing the the memes of art trumping reason, or at least twisting it severely to achieve its goals.

A genetically modified art installation, with no comment to make on genetic modification itself, no analysis really of the human/nature relationship, really just an artistic exploration of the fun and pretty things we could do with plants if given the opportunity to play with their DNA. And I bet it would be stunning.Bugs designed to chew in rhythm! What kind of glorious aesthetic high would visitors to this installation get? Awe and wonder of science, with a little bit of nature, maybe.

Benqué‘s vision is far from being realized, but it’s ready to start some serious conversations now.

Fungus Fight! No really, it’s for art.

Monday, February 9th, 2009

BF

On this blog there’s been some debate as to the preservation of environmental art and its merits. When does a work that is meant to decay become not-an-artwork, that is, just another rotting thing?

Curators in Venezuela are determined to never let it get that far– at least, not with traditional works of art. Paintings, tapestries and wooden objects in warm climes are prone to attack from fungi, insects, and bacteria. The curators have amassed for the 4th Cultural Heritage Conservation Forum in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

Of the tools used to combat art decay, one is bacillus thuringiensis, pictured above. It produces toxin crystals , when ingested by offending insects, causes a swelling that leads to a fatal rupture. Yeah, it makes bugs blow up. It’s also used as a pesticide in agriculture. One website describes the effect as “dying after indigestion.” The bacterium has also been spliced into genetically modified crops, creating, of course, controversy.
Whether the use of Bt to preserve works of art is a step towards ecological balance or yet-another example of our industrial-agriculturalized society (wah wah waaaaah), it at least highlights an important factor: that no artwork, whether designed to decay or not, is impervious to ravages of little hungry needling organisms.

Thanks to Current.

The Reclamation Project

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Reclamation Project

Now this is just beautiful. Xavier Cortada has helped to instigate waves of tree plantings and land restoration with his piece The Reclamation Project. He begins with legions of mangrove seedlings, artfully arranged in clear plastic cups. The seedlings can be adopted by individual donors or businesses. When they are ready, the teeny trees are then transplanted into areas where they will naturally thrive. In this way each plant begins its life as part of an art piece and matures as an act of restoration.

Begun in 2006 as a program partnered with the Miami Science Museum, the program expanded the following year to included native Florida trees on land. This season mangrove seedlings were adopted by several Florida schools and a host of local businesses. Growing, sprouting, planting as art. Beautiful.

Jason de Caires Taylor Underwater

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

lost correspondant

While the act of intentionally dumping stuff in the ocean to become artificial reefs may be controversial, it’s nice to look at the work of Jason de Caires Taylor, author of the purported “first underwater sculpture park” near Granada. His series of statues, mostly of human figures, were designed to be submerged and become a base for artificial reefs. Over time the pieces become covered in growth and color, the work constantly coevolving with its environment. But are they really reef-appropriate?

In theory, any hard surface can serve as an artificial reef. It needs to be made of something that won’t kill marine life, obviously, and weighty enough to stay in place– not ripping up existing reef, or washing up on shore like this experiement with tires. The shape and size also have an effect on what kind of marine life are attracted to the structure. Microscopic organisms constantly filter down to the cold bottom of an ocean and attach themselves to whatever rock cropping or tough hunk of something they can find. Artificial reefs serve as supplements to steadily eroded and destroyed natural reefs, which are threatened by anything from overfishing to sewage to coastal development.

In Truk Lagoon, a pool sheltered by a reef north of New Guinea, the WWII wrecks of some several hundred planes and fifty plus ships which have sunk to the bottom create a stunning and growing display. For more eco-friendly man-made underwater havens, check out Pam Ponce’s moon-shaped Ebb and Flow or Betty Beaumont’s Ocean Landmark, 500 tons of coal fly-ash blocks sunk 40 miles off the New York Harbor.

Not Polly: Brian Collier’s Starlings

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Brian Collier, Teach the Starlings
So apparently back in the day there was an Acclimation Society of North America (I know, yawn, but bear with me). Rather than, as the name suggests, making sure everyone was accustomed to the weather, this group sought to bring a bit of England to the colonies. One enthusiast named Eugene Schieffelin decided this meant introducing every bird ever referenced in Shakespeare’s plays into his new North American home.

So, with the following quote, the bard inspired a mass naturalization on a baffling scale.

Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him to keep his anger still in motion.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, 1:3

Many Shakespearian birds, such as bullfinches and nightingales, never quite settled here. But the current population of starlings, which have the ability to imitate human speech, is estimated to be now more than 200,000,000. They’ve got a kind of pesty rep.

Artist Brian Collier has decided to make Schieffelin’s impact audible. With groups of volunteers he wanders the streets, repeating Schieffelin’s name to various starlings with the intent that they learn it, and repeat it wherever they go. Someday the result may be that these swarms of starlings fan the skies, forever crying out the name of the man that imported them. Collier’s works frequently explore human impact on nature, viewing our current ecological landscape forever in the context of the human endeavors that shaped it.

Bio-techno-artistry

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Critical Art Ensemble

The blog Organism has recently discussed the first Biological Art workshop in India, the result of a patrnership between several artistic and scientific organizations in that country and Western Australia. Intended to educate artists about issues in biology and technology while giving them the skills to work with live organisms, the workshop will serve as a forum to discuss ethical issues surrounding biotechnology. Scientists will be invited to the resulting exhibition, which will include a public discussion.

The event is not dissimilar to the Technebiotics workshops held in the San Francisco Bay Area last year in conjunction with the Biotechnique exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The workshops involved everything from fermenting corn to extracting DNA from strawberries, from cultivating bonsai trees to working with bone marrow.

The Critical Art Ensemble attacks similar themes in its work, reverse-engineering GMO soy and corn, as in Contestational Biology, or creating transgenic organisms (by recombining DNA at the cellular level) and then offering them up to consumers, as in GenTerra. Spooky powerful stuff.

But even just taking a tally of live creatures can be haunting, as when artist Brandon Ballengee surveyed the species of edible aquatic life for one location in his piece The Ever Changing Tide. Displaying a specimen of every species found in the Flushing area seafood markets, Ballengee hoped to draw attention to declining biodiversity. He notes, “In 1992, artist Mark Dion in his work ‘The Report of the Department of Marine Animal Inventory of the City of New York China Town Division’ surveyed the China Town markets, photographing and identifying various species of fish. Almost a decade later, many of the species Dion collected have suffered from population declines and some have even become commercially extinct.” After the exhibitions the specimens became part of the permanent collections of several museums.