The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age

by Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, 2004
216 pp., illus. Trade, $45.00
ISBN 0-87969-697-4.

Reviewed by George Gessert

ggessert@igc.org

The Molecular Gaze surveys recent art involving biotechnology, genetics, and DNA. This terrain is full of pitfalls not only because biotechnology presents profound social and ethical challenges but because the art under consideration does not comprise anything like a traditional school or movement. Artists have come to genetics and biotechnology by many different paths. Although these converge in art that in one way or another involves DNA, nothing like an identifiable look has resulted. Nor is this kind of art associated with any one place, even for purposes of exhibition.

Anker and Nelkin negotiate this complicated terrain with mixed success. Like many books of art commentary, The Molecular Gaze reads as much like a collection of notes as a work with a beginning, middle, and end. The authors use art to illuminate a variety of subjects: eugenics, commoditisation of life, chimeras, "designer babies", childbirth, and genetic reductionism (which defines people in terms of their DNA.) There is insightful commentary on how scientific discoveries change meaning as they move out of the laboratory into the larger culture, and on how molecular vision, which has come to dominate the assumptions of the biological sciences, borrows metaphors from texts and codes.

The most provocative chapter is on the new grotesque, freakish or malformed human figures that have appeared in art over the last decade and a half. These works range from Jake and Dinos Chapman’s sculptures of conjoined children and Cindy Sherman’s dismembered mannequins to Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs. Some of this work reflects the hopes and fears unleashed by biotechnology, but most does not, and at times the discussion wanders far afield.

The Molecular Gaze is a strikingly uneven book. It is handsomely laid out, and has more than 130 illustrations, many of them full-page and in color. But its visual wealth and many insights are mixed with misinformation and confusion. There are many factual errors. Some are minor; for example, there are two dwarfs in Velazquez’s Las Meninas, not one, and the most prominent is female, not male. And——disclosure——I was surprised to read that my work with plants involved "fictional genomes" when actually the plant genetic systems that I work with are intractably real. Other errors would be minor if a central feature of The Molecular Gaze were not its investigation of relationships between art and science. SymbioticA does not produce transgenic art but tissue culture art. And, without explanation the authors ascribe awareness of evolution to Daumier, working in the 1830s, a generation before Darwin published Origin of Species.

There are omissions, notably of Marta de Menezes, Heath Bunting, and Karl Mihel and Kim Trang. Brandon Ballengee, Adam Zaretsky, Natalie Jeremijenko, Heather Ackroyd, and Dan Harvey are mentioned in a footnote but not discussed. Computer-based genetic art, an important field, is given just two short paragraphs. The most troubling omissions, however, are historical perspective and ecological vision. The Molecular Gaze does not claim to be a history but includes enough history, especially in the beginning, to give the impression that the past is covered. This is far from the case. There is no mention of animal breeding for aesthetic purposes, and only one passing reference to plant breeding, even though these are arenas in which art and genetics have been intersecting for centuries. Steichen’s 1936 show at MOMA gets only a fleeting reference. The early literature of art and genetics is almost completely ignored. Helen and Newton Harrison are not mentioned, and ecoart is not discussed, even though much of it has genetic dimensions. The section devoted to chimeras and transgenics does not include so much as a thumbnail sketch of transgenic art’s history, all of which is recent and well within the scope of a book concerned primarily with contemporary art. Inadequate historical perspective encourages a false sense of newness about much of the work discussed.

Most art concerned with biotechnology and genetics is done in traditional mediums, and The Molecular Gaze appropriately gives such work a preponderance of attention. Living art, however, gets short shift. Living art is a genuinely radical development. Until the 20th century art was by definition made from dead matter. (Performance and landscape gardening are exceptions that proved the rule.) No painting, photograph, or sculpture in stone has self-interests or value beyond what people assign it, but living art has its own interests, and, if it is sentient, its own desires quite independent of human beings. Control over living creatures means something quite different from control over inert matter. What do genetics and biotechnology imply about our relationships with other forms of life? What does it mean to bring consciousness to evolution? What roles do plants and animals play in human psychogenesis? Living art is ideally suited to engage such questions.

However, the only artist working with living things who gets anything like informed discussion is Marc Quinn, who uses living genetic art to update portraiture. Quinn is a powerful and accomplished artist, but by focusing on people he avoids most of the questions that living art raises. In The Molecular Gaze, artists who do engage these questions are either not mentioned or else treated summarily. So human-centered is The Molecular Gaze that it could have been titled The Anthropocentric Gaze.

Eduardo Kac is too well-known to ignore but is treated with a mixture of fascination and hostility. He has created several major live transgenic works, but the authors mention only GFP Bunny, the famous fluorescing rabbit. Alba is described as ‘allegedly luminous.’ Anker and Nelkin (or perhaps only Anker, since Dorothy Nelkin died before The Molecular Gaze was completed) repeat speculation that Alba’s green color in photographs is a result of Photoshop manipulation and write that Alba died under ‘vague circumstances.’ The author(s) suggest that Kac may be engaged in ‘commercial spectacle,’ and allow readers to conclude that Alba never existed or else did not fluoresce sufficiently to photograph.

How fair is this? Throughout The Molecular Gaze the authors show no awareness that unverifiable claims are not unique to GFP Bunny, but characterize many works of art that involve DNA. No gallery-goer can see the bacteria in a David Kremers painting, or determine that they are alive, much less genetically engineered. Can we be sure that Laura Cinti’s cactus has a human gene for keratin? Are the cells in Gary Schneider’s photographs his, and not someone else’s, or for that matter a starfish’s? Does Ronald Jones shape his sculptures of cancer genes to look more Arp-like than they actually are? Anker’s own work invites such questions. Are the chromosomes depicted in Zoosemiotics: Primates, Frog, Gazelle, Fish, which appears on the book jacket, really of those creatures? Viewers are free to dismiss any work that requires too much knowledge or faith, but we have more to gain by taking a cue from conceptual art and engaging such work on its own terms——unless, of course, there is good reason not to. The crucial test with art that involves genetics or DNA is whether an unverifiable claim is within the realm of possibility. Alba easily passes this test because, as almost everyone knows, several different kinds of animals have been genetically engineered to fluoresce. It is a minor mystery why GFP Bunny inspires the author(s) to indulge in attempted character assassination.

There are additional problems, but little would be gained by dwelling on them. The Molecular Gaze would have been a better book if it had been either more ambitious, and covered more territory, or else more modest, and stuck to what the authors know best: the new, grotesque birth, and the metaphors by which we understand molecular biology. By trying to be comprehensive without doing the necessary work, The Molecular Gaze ends up being at times both untrustworthy and out of touch.

The Molecular Gaze includes sufficient information to be useful as a reference, but only for those who already know the subject extremely well. For those who do not, the pictures are worth a look, but even here one should proceed with caution. The photograph of mice with fluorescing ears and tails that is juxtaposed with Alba represents only one kind of gfp mice. There are others with much more uniform fluorescence.