Biological Transgression
It is tricky to define Jens Hauser. He is a writer, a cultural journalist, a video maker, and an art curator focusing in art, science and technology interfaces. Hauser has organised “L’Art Biotech” at the National Arts and Culture Centre Le Lieu Unique Nantes in 2003; in 2008 he has curated sk-interfaces exhibition in Liverpool, among others. Hybrid talked with Hauser about the boundaries of Art and Science.
Can you please define bioart in terms of practice and mediums?
The notion of ‘bioart’ itself is problematic; it is being used – mainly by outside observers - primarily in the quest for a generic term to deal with a still unclear post-digital paradigm. Biology's ascent to the status of the ‘hottest’ physical science has been accompanied by the inflationary use of biological metaphors, but more importantly by a wide range of biotech procedures that are providing artists with new expressive media that they appropriate. ‘Bioart’ is often used as a murky terrain vague-like catchword in which the necessary ontological differentiation between bio-media and bio-topics is abolished.
On the one hand, art in which the use of biological metaphors serves to fuel bio-political discussion can get along fine with conventional techniques – on the other, art that utilizes biotechnology does not necessarily address thematically linked issues. The medium can, but does not need to meet the message. What has emerged in the last 15 years is that artists incorporate diverse fields and their related methodologies such as cell and tissue cultures, neuro-physiology, transgenesis, synthesis of artificially produced DNA sequences, controlled Mendelian cross-breeding of animals and plants, biotechnological and medical self-experimentation, etc. Art that involves such methods has become a process-based art of transformation in vivo or in vitro that manipulates biological materials at discrete levels and creates displays that allow audiences to partake of them emotionally and cognitively. Indeed, in the larger realm of ‘Bioart’, there is no reason why other biological disciplines, even those focusing on observation rather than on manipulation such as cognitive ethology, would not become a field of artistic inquiry as well.
Can an artist play a role in the advancement of knowledge or simply should question it?
Questioning established knowledge is a crucial method to contribute to its advancement - let’s take the whole deconstructivist school in philosophy as an example. I further suggest that one often assumes that the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ overlap, but they are indeed no synonyms. Large areas of knowledge arise otherwise than by scientific practices, and the history of science is shaped by scientific models being replaced by other ones. To my opinion, art in our highly mediated age of the techno-sciences can be seen as an ‘incubator’ in which new aesthetics and trans-disciplinary models of self-understanding breed and hatch. Especially the field of media arts has modified a certain view of art, from being primarily guided by intuition or the quest for the sublime to producing knowledge. Nevertheless, I doubt that so-called ‚sci-art’ whose aim would be to illustrate scientific knowledge fullfils automatically this role. To quote Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the arts transform weltanschauung into emotional form "with means largely comprehensible by sensory experiences on a nonverbal level. Otherwise any problem could be successfully solved only through intellectual or verbal discourse."
What are the ethical limits of biological art?
Why should ethical limits for artists be different per se from other members of society? In my curatorial practice, I have often witnessed that artists in this field become automatically suspicious because people tend to project their own fears in regards to the “biotechnological revolution“ onto the artist’s supposedly transgressive potential. When artists use biotechnological tools, they subvert them to non-utilitarian ends in order to make us think about how we relate to the world. Because of the symbolic and iconic character of their work, artists whom I know therefore rather think twice how to display and frame the perception of their works. They indeed become welcome ersatz targets, or sometimes respected epistemological commentators on otherwise relevant ethical questions to society at large. And here, it becomes quite obvious that very often the ‘ethical’ concerns are in fact religious ones, at least moral ones of ‘right or wrong’ that vary culturally, and from one believe system to another. The ethics of the artists can apply to their actual conduct (for example in the lab), or to the models s/he produces as a philosophical contribution to examine value-bearing properties of what is considered ethical and why.
Do you believe biological art is accessible to the general public or is kept in the realm of a selected few?
First, I believe that ‘being accessible to the general public’ is not an appropriate criteria to look at the quality or complexity of good art, unless a direct and wide social impact is centrally part of the artistic intention; most of the art we would qualify today as masterpieces or paradigm shifts have not been perceived as such in their times. So far, it is true that only a restricted audience has had the chance to experience such artistic displays or strategies directly in the few exhibits or performative situations. The main reason for the limited exhibition record of wet art lies in the fact that this art is simply very difficult to display live, and that cultural institutions underestimate the task, or only display documentation. On the other hand, art involving biotechnologies is massively coveted by multiple socio-political actors for its ability to generate discussion around bio-political and ethical issues. It is currently addressed less as art and more as a discursive and often instrumentalized form of contributing to ongoing public debates beyond the aesthetic realm. The paradox is that, like a book that hardly anybody has read but everybody is talking about, this art is mainly presented via and judged upon secondary texts, documentation and other mediated paratexts.
