A Living Art, Part 3
February 2, 2008
This is my third and final article in a series on the bioarts, a relatively new field in which artists are using living tissue and organisms to create their works. Earlier, I addressed the question, What is bioart? and also discussed some of the ethical issues with bioart in many of its current forms. Here, I briefly present my own views on the aesthetics of bioart. Aesthetics examines what makes something possess certain perceptible qualities to humans (such as beauty, ugliness, humor, tragedy, etc.) and it explores why we value things (man-made or otherwise) that have these characteristics.
A Vision for Bioaesthetics
I believe that the arts are crucial for society. They reflect/reinforce our values and give a forum for asking difficult questions, including ones that challenge cultural norms. The problem is not when taboo questions are asked but rather when artists choose to override basic ethical principles in making their statements. For instance, I could not respect the artistry of a movie that intentionally harmed animals during its filming, even if the director believed it was the “best way” to ensure that the drama was believable.
Along these lines, I have been disappointed with the works produced to date by most bioartists. On the one hand, some have created mesmerizing images through mapping biological processes, such as the activity of neurons in a mouse’s brain (pictured above). These works are fascinating to look at, but offer no philosophical substance or social commentary, apart from showing us the state of current technology. At the other extreme is the macabre works of artists-turned-biotechnologists like Oron Catts, who for a recent exhibition made a steak from artificially grown frog muscle cells, chewed it up, and then spit out the remnants for use in a later work.
Both categories of bioart strike me as circus acts: they only manage to dazzle or to offend their audiences. It seems that novelty and entertainment are the purpose – and all at the expense of a great deal of life. This debate has gone on for some time in the art world: whether art is “good” when it is (merely) new or daring, or if art is only truly “good” if it is ethical in its creation and, ultimately, genuine in portraying the inner life of the artist in some way. I argue for the latter perspective, and take issue with the ethically questionable practices that I have seen in many recent bioart works.
What I hope is that bioart will become a lens by which to examine our increasingly biotechnological society more clearly. Generally speaking, our art and our technology reveal who we are; illuminating this reality should be at the core of a bioart that is both daring in its vision and thoroughly ethical in its implementation.
If, for example, artists are disturbed by the dangerous rhetoric that pharmaceutical companies employ sometimes to convince would-be consumers that they need the latest medical “cure,” these artists should create works that bring attention to the tenuous psycho-somatic relationship that exists between legitimate disease and mere dis-ease with our bodies. Similarly, as more and more technological pundits insinuate that we are nothing but biological machines, bioartists should be at the forefront of challenging such a shallow understanding of human nature.
As I mentioned in my last article, art must continuously change and adapt to remain relevant to its culture. But, as Carol Gigliotti has argued elsewhere, the destructive and divisive works to date from most bioartists do nothing to transcend the ethical challenges that we face in using technology. Rather than diving headfirst into experiments that highlight the very practices they hope to decry, bioartists should raise awareness of these important issues, and do so in ways that respect life in all of its complexity and beauty.
