The New Science on the Art Scene
by Shannon Gulliver
I went to New York City in search of contemporary art. All I found was blood, guts and gore - biology class art, I guess you could call it. Several artists, from those consecrated in the uptown museums to the unknowns in Brooklyn, seem to be tapping into our millennial fascination with science. If Modernism was about exploring industrialization, and Postmodernism was about confusing it, today's art is about celebrating the hyperrealization of industrialization - biology and technology brought to full-tilt: a world so rationalized that science has risen to the level of art.
I started on the Upper East Side and trekked on down to the outer burrows, to find that science is indeed the sujet du jour, the next big thing. The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum at 91st street is having its second triennial, which exhibits both functional and decorative designs ranging from interiors to fashion to film. Walking through the museum halls, I was struck by the number of pieces coming out of MIT labs - since when are those nerds producing works of art alongside their differential equations? MIT artist Benjamin Fry has painted maps of human chromosomes right onto the museum walls. According to my pending B.S. in molecular biology, Fry's pieces accurately represented the human genome, yet were surprisingly beautiful. By turning cutting-edge science into interior design, Fry secularizes it for the lay-person to appreciate.
Down the hall, fellow MIT artist Cynthia Breazeal humanizes physics in a similar way - she has created a robotic garden engineered to react to human emotion. I blew a kiss to a flower, which responded by lighting up and bending towards me. Another recoiled in disgust. The mechanical flowers were almost too opinionated - botanical technology was hurting my feelings.
Heading downtown to 57th street, the hub of Very Expensive Established Art, I found more robots that, though less emotio-technologically advanced than the MIT design, were just as cute. At Leo Kaplan, Ed Zucca's adorable "Lumberbot" (2002) stood sentry at the gallery door over Zucca's new collection of "Mystery Science Lamps," a group of anthropomorphic light-up sculptures.
At another 57th street institution, newcomer Katy Stone put a biological spin on her forms. Curling, neon strips of mylar fluttered from the walls of the gallery, specimens of galactic vegetation. Stone claims to "allude to unnamable organic processes" with "recurring themes of vital fluids like water and blood." Her bodily functions are very pretty, though -raw goop dolled up into wall hangings. Stone sees her art as "a coalescence of drawing and painting, sculpture and installation." What postmodern nonsense! I preferred Stone's focus on the pieces' biological references - these ideas were new and interesting.
The works on 57th street were pleasant to look at - they were aesthetic - but not philosophically gripping. So on down to Chelsea, where the fluids flow more freely and the tech is rougher around the edges. True, Chelsea these days seems to have gentrified itself towards a Postmodernism just as refined as 57th street's Modernism, yet some of its artists continue to value philosophical raunchiness above beauty. Pretty colors give way to putty gray. The biological art here is derisive rather than celebratory, as it was on 57th street (recall the cute robots and lovely genomes).
At Spike Gallery on the West Side Highway, Allison Hiltner's "Organ Donor Vending" (2002) shows us the ugly side of science. The piece is an oversized vending machine which, for the cost of a quarter, dispenses an anatomically-correct liver, kidney, or other organ, complete with a price tag. I removed a kidney from the vending slot and admired its weight, a bit confused as to how much it was worth: Hiltner's $200 price tag, the cost of an actual organ transplant, or the gallery's price of $9000 for the entire piece?
Hiltner criticizes medical breakthroughs like the human genome project that she says "reduces the body to maps and data sheets." She aims to "transform the experience of our physicality back into the tangible." Yet wasn't this also the goal of MIT artist Benjamin Fry, who turned maps and data sheets into wall decoration? Whereas Fry aesthetizes science to make it accessible, Hiltner vulgarizes it. "Organ Donor Vending," according to Hiltner, is "meant to reflect the comic absurdity, hopeful optimism and at times misguided dependence, that encircles the belief that eventually science and technology will cure our bodies of their transitory nature." Her work is intellectually playful rather than simply being attractive and, for this reason, is more effective than the more cautious work of the 57th Street artists.
Feeling revived by this funky new artist, whose next project apparently involves taking over a gas station, I headed to Brooklyn, the hotbed of art on the cusp of major breakthrough. I wanted to see if this scientific infatuation was bleeding down into the raw talent, the as-yet unestablished, unrepresented, unappreciated Brooklyn upstart artists. On a corner in Bushwick, I met a young goth-punk photo school student, Chloe Wagner, who took me up to her apartment/studio to see her work.
Wagner specializes in what I would call "anatomical collage," combining her own drawing and photography with found objects and images. Her best piece was "Fetus," a collage centered on a Leonardo Da Vinci anatomical drawing of a fetus. Wagner surrounded this image with photographic close-ups of raw meat. A pair of forceps stolen from a high school biology lab lay across the collage, poised to tweeze the Da Vinci baby's head. It was an innocent revelry in grossology, a youthful fascination with innards. The science here was so elementary - the crude forceps, the ancient anatomical diagram, the meat that Wagner claimed came out of a meat tenderizer advertisement. This was biology at its most tangible - more so than Fry's artistically-rendered genome or Hiltner's vended organs.
I could not help but draw parallels between Wagner's work and that of Matthew Barney's, which has struck a chord with edgy downtown artistes and uptown museum boardmembers alike. For Barney, creator of the much-hyped set of films entitled The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), science is a tool with which to describe human desires and actions. He crosslinks it with our fantasies rather than using it to explain them because in his world, science and fantasy are inextricable. Barney's grossology is as nasty as that in Bushwick, but it has matured into a restrained version of bodily fixation. This restraint is key: it is interesting art that utilizes the ugly to make the beautiful moreso. His product is modern, postmodern, and scientific all at once. It satisfies the modern rear guard and the tired postmoderns, all the while pointing the way towards a new science.
Promising artists like Hiltner, Wagner, and even Stone are following Barney's pointer and getting on with things: picking up the pieces of postmodern fragmentation and reshuffling them. If going biophysical is the way to shake things up, then so be it. Perhaps science is not rising to the level of art, but rather art is succumbing to science. Either way, artists had better be on guard, lest they lose their hold on the realm of aesthetics to this new science they so embrace.
Images (counter-clockwise from top right): Cynthia Brezeal, "Cyberflora" (2002); Benjamin Fry, "Chromosome 14" (2001); Katy Stone, "Calamity Blooming" (2002); Allison Hiltner, "Organ Vending" (2002); Leondardo Da Vinchi, "Views of a Fetus in the Womb" (c. 1510-12) (Note: this is not an actual reproduction of the artwork of Chloe Wagner)