Paradise lost and found

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2002

* Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York September 15, 2001 - January 6, 2002

* MELISSA PEARL FRIEDLING is a film and video artist and writer, currently teaching filmmaking in the Department of Art Media Studies at Syracuse University.

As it turns out, I have the same birthday as Dolly the sheep. I used to brag about having the same birthday as RT.

Barnum and Jean Cocteau, but now the historical celebrity I hope to share some astrological mojo with happens to be a white, fluffy, suspiciously grinning, genetically engineered barnyard animal. Dolly was cloned using a mammary cell from a six-year-old sheep and named, accordingly, after Dolly Parton. As soon as the news of Dolly's birth was released publicly, discussion immediately turned to the next logical step: human cloning. And, more specifically, debates raged over who would be a likely candidate for immortalization through cloning: Albert Einstein? Lady Diana? Leonardo da Vinci? Britney Spears? Today, a San Francisco company calling itself The DNA Copyright Institute (DCI) offers (for $1500) to record and store the DNA fingerprints of high profile celebrities who worry that their DNA might be "stolen" and cloned, protecting the patent 'author' from those who would hijack a few celebrity cells for the coveted code to their genetic genius. (1) It is to questions of the cult of celebrity, artistic singu larity, body as property and the obsolescence of human mediocrity that the curators and participating artists in "Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution," collectively engage.

The show, first mounted at Exit Art in Manhattan and currently on tour at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, addresses the relevance of the self-identical, unique individual in the age of human genome mapping, genetic patents, stem cell research and cloning. Author and Director of the Institute for Genomics and Bloinformatics at the University of California, Irvine, Pierre Baldi, argues that such a logocentric world view is not only irrelevant, but is also essentially "wrong" and "the result of evolutionary accidents"--and the conceptual equivalent of believing the earth is still flat. (2) Baldi argues that evolution has unfortunately wired us humans to understand ourselves as unique individuals with brains that cannot yet adequately appreciate the universe of all possible living beings available in a world transformed by the Internet and cloning technologies. Baldi's project is to try to get our heads around the vast possibilities opened up when the boundary between self and other is blurred and t he limit between self and world evaporates.

Certainly, this kind of conceptual boundary-crossing that Baldi wants to orient us toward has been taken quite seriously in the intellectual work of continental philosophy and social theory since 1968. But it seems that lately, many contemporary scientists, writers and artists are only able to speak of genetic engineering's actualization of such trespasses with tongue in cheek (even Baldi tries to illustrate the baroque obsolescence of sex by describing two computers literally mounting one another in order to exchange data). (3) The naming of the most famous cloned sheep after a famously big-breasted country singer marks one of the playful jokes that emerges as a kind of post-evolutionary Freudian slip. Such jokes appear symptomatic of the anxieties flowing from the conceptual, and now literal, erosion of the limits between human and animal, celebrity and obscurity, commodity and humanity. Not surprisingly, such jokes pervade the biotech industry. A Texas-based company, hysterically named Genetics Savings and Clone, charges $1000 to collect and cryogenically store cells from a family cat or dog, and $250,000 to clone it. (4) The puns are indicative of popular anxieties and, to be perfectly Freudian, rooted in the unconscious of a collective psyche struggling to understand what it means to be human in the time of cloning. And the jokes emerging out of genetic science and industry are as complicated and simultaneously transparent as much of the art that addresses the subject.

Visual puns and jokes pervade the "Paradise Now" galleries. For example, Bradley Rubenstein's "Puppy-Dog Eyes" series (1994-1995) appears as one such symptomatic response to the genetic revolution." His series of smiling elementary school portrait-type photographs are each carefully altered so that the figures stare out through the big black vacant eyes of their own pets. They call to mind both those androgynously identical boy-girl pairs of big-eyed-waif Keane painting or spooky possessed Children of the Damned alien hordes. Perhaps the punch line of Rubenstein's genetic joke is that it may represent the next marketing boon for a company like Genetics Savings and Clone--chimerical animal-human clones that not only immortalize one's pet, but also one's child in a hybrid form--for a substantial fee. Certainly, Rubenstein's pet-children are no joke to the legions of investors in biotechnologies who project profitable futures in such human-animal hybridization. The laboratory creation and propagation of cloned, chimeric and transgenic human/animal hybrids is already a reality as sheep have been "pharmed" to express life-saving medicines in their milk, pigs have been altered to be used for xenotransplants of vital organs, and oncomice (customized mice with an a human gene capable of manifesting cancer) have been engineered and patented for cancer research. One of the leading and most outspoken critics of the business of biotechnology, Jeremy Rifkin, along with biologist, Stuart Newman, has filed a patent for a "humanzee," a humanchimpanzee chimeric animal. They haven't created such a hybrid, and don't want to. Rather, their patent application is to prevent others from making a humanzee, or any other human-animal combination and to challenge the current patent laws. Ironically, Rifkin argues in his book. The Biotech Century, that the most horrific consequence of the age of biotechnologies is its creation of a new category of rogue artist that sees "nature as a 'creative advance into novelty"' and, according to Rifkin, "serves the ends of a eugenics future." (5) What is ironic about Rifkin's dystopic formulation is that Rifkin's own conceptual patent application is itself a kind of performance art/novelty act, or at least, an artistic strategy engaged by several "Paradise Now" participants, including Larry Miller who copyrights an individual's DNA and displays the documentation on the gallery walls. What Miller's and Rifkin's patents demonstrate is a kind of hysterical response to the loss of self-determination and "natural" selection that the vanguard creative individual must cling to.