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Ten years after co-founding the art and science research laboratory , Oron Catts is co-curating Visceral: The Living Art Experiment at the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He tells Amanda Gefter how both the exhibit and his work challenge our perceptions of the meaning of life.
What is the idea behind Visceral?
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It is based on the notion of an ongoing experiment. For instance, American artist Paul Vanouse鈥檚 installation is a live experiment in which he creates images by running pieces of DNA through a reactive gel using electrophoresis. The work questions the validity of DNA fingerprinting by showing us that what we perceive to be a scientific representation of the world is very much a constructed image rather than a representation of reality.
We also have quite a few works that use live tissue. My co-curator Ionat Zurr and I are growing our version of Guatemalan worry dolls using living tissue (pictured). When we first did this in 2000, they were the first tissue sculptures ever grown in a gallery.
It鈥檚 the 10-year anniversary of SymbioticA. Has it developed in the way you expected?
Zurr and I developed the idea for an artistic project where living tissue could be a medium for artistic expression. Three years into our project we realised there was a larger interest from artists who wanted access to laboratories. Today we are the only place in the world to offer a masters of biological arts, which is a science degree, and we鈥檙e now going to offer a PhD. We have set several international precedents for what artists are allowed to do in the context of biotechnologies. It has far exceeded our expectations.
How did you get into bio-art?
In the mid-90s I was studying product design and I was interested in life science. I was struck by the possibility that biotechnology would need designers. I wanted to scrutinise the notion that life is becoming a raw material, and I identified tissue engineering as my technology of choice to do so. Professor Miranda Grounds at the University of Western Australia kindly invited me to visit and learn the techniques. Zurr soon joined me.
In 1999 I gave a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology鈥檚 Media Lab, where I met Joseph Vacanti, one of the founders of the field of tissue engineering. He invited Zurr and me to spend a year with him in his lab at Harvard Medical School to learn sophisticated tissue-engineering techniques.
What鈥檚 your favourite piece of work that you made?
In Vacanti鈥檚 lab we grew a steak using tissue engineering: in vitro meat. We were not allowed to eat it, because it had been grown in his lab. Later, we built a lab in a French gallery, where we grew in vitro meat, made of frog cells, as an installation/performance piece entitled Disembodied Cuisine. For three months we fed the steak every day. On the last day of the show we made a dinner of the meat. The texture was horrible, and the taste was hard to determine. I was paranoid about health and safety so we used two well-known antibacterial agents 鈥� garlic and honey 鈥� as the sauce. That bit was really good!
Do people have ethical concerns about your work?
Our work is about raising ethical issues, probing the area between how we as a culture see life and what鈥檚 happening to life in laboratories. It is a zone of discomfort, and we explore it without promoting it.
All of the work at SymbioticA has to be approved by ethics and health and safety committees. To a large extent we have been scrutinised in a much harsher way than scientists. The fact that art doesn鈥檛 seem to have any utility means we can鈥檛 hide behind the rationale that we鈥檙e trying to save life or feed the world. So when we start to work with these technologies and manipulate life, as artists, removing the utility of the practice, we are distilling out the most important ethical issues.
鈥淎s artists, when we manipulate life we are distilling out the most important ethical issues鈥�
What do you hope viewers will take away from Visceral?
I hope they will come into the gallery thinking about life in one way, and leave confused. As artists I don鈥檛 think our role is to provide opinions, but to raise questions. We should create a situation in which people will engage with the idea that something strange is happening in the life sciences and that it needs their attention.
What they choose to make of that realisation is up to them.
Profile
Oron Catts is a co-founder and director of SymbioticA at The University of Western Australia. He also founded the