“New Transgenic Monsters: Bioart and Teratology”
In this paper I wish to summon a set of images from a
teratological hybrid menagerie and imaginary and concentrate on selected
representations of these creatures in contemporary bioart, reflecting on the
manifold/multiple ethical and political implications pertaining to the
potential creation of similar beings in the not too distant future. Bioart
provides visual illustration of what might be called a new, updated
teratology, although of course the profound fascination human beings
have always felt for the contemplation of marvels, wonders and monsters
has never been absent. Nowadays, bioart confronts us with a new series of
teratological beings that breach species boundaries, calling into question
not only the presumed water-tight barriers delimitating species but also the
very feasibility and ethics of potentially bringing similar creatures into
being.
I will first turn briefly to a number of artificially created animal
hybrids in Margaret Atwood‟s recent novels Oryx and Crake (2003) and
The Year of the Flood (2009) which find visual represetation in the work
of several bioartists such as Eduardo Kac, Alexis Rockman, Thomas
Grünfeld, Bryan Crockett and Catherine Chalmers, all of which can be
said to move in analogous terrain, tapping into similar anxieties, while
productively engaging in a critical dialogue across different media.
Atwood‟s Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood
(2009) can be described as biodystopias that chronicle the destruction of
the planet as a result of the spread of a virus that kills most human beings,
animals and plants. Amongst the survivors are Jimmy the Snowman, the
protagonist and narrator of Oryx and Crake and the Crakers, a new
species created by Crake, the scientist who helped engineer the deadly
virus and wishes to rebuild the human race by designing what he
considers as the perfect human being. New hybrid forms of animals and
-1-
plants abound, produced in the laboratory by means of genesplicing
techniques. such as rakunks (hybrids of rats and skunks), wolvogs
(hybrids of wolves and dogs), spoat/gider (goat crossed with spider), the
liobam (a cross between a lion and a lamb) and pigoons, pigs specially
engineered to serve an array of medical purposes, in particular organ
transplants. Indeed, the pigoons in Oryx and Crake, described as much
“much bigger and fatter than ordinary pigs, to leave room for all the extra
organs” (25) are strongly reminiscent of the transgenic pig in American
artist Alexis Rockman‟s The Farm (2000), with its organs ready for
harvesting and be used for transplants. This was precisely the goal of one
of the projects in which Jimmy/Snowman‟s father worked, in the
OrganInc Farms, the “Pigoon project”, whose aim was
to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a
transgenic knockout pig host –organs that would transplant
smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off
attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there
were more strains every year. A rapid-maturity gene was spliced
in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready
sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow
five or six kidneys at a time (22).
In addition, the pigoon‟s organs “could be customized, using cells from
individual human donors, and the organs were frozen until needed. It was
much cheaper than getting yourself cloned for spare parts” (23), a
scenario described in Ishiguro‟s Never Let Me Go (2005) which in turn
prompts references to Michael Bay‟s film The Island (2005) and Michael
Marshall Smith‟s Spares (1996). In the biotech research corporation in
which Jimmy‟s father, a genographer, worked, scientists were
experimenting with creating all sorts of animal hybrids and chimeras, an
activity that made them feel “like God” (51). They had created pigs with
human brain tissue, considered by Jimmy‟s mother, a microbiologist, as
-2-
“immoral . . . sacrilegious” (57), a view shared by many nowadays as they
contemplate contemporary scientific developments. The scientists had to
get rid of many of those experiments, which turned out to be dangerous,
like the snat, a blend of snake and rat, but the rakunks became very
popular as pets, until after the waterless Flood which decimated life on
Earth. In Oryx and Crake there are also genetically modified chickens
which consist of only their edible parts, such as breasts or legs, with no
heads, only a mouth and a digestive tract, ready to eat in two weeks with
no need for growth hormones since the quick growth rate is already built
in. Since they feel no pain, the scientists responsible for their creation
believe there will be no negative reactions from the animal welfare
groups. They are thinking of calling them “ChickieKnobs” (203).
Alexis Rockman‟s The Farm (2000) can be seen as a forevision
of the many types of genetic manipulation described in Oryx and Crake.
The Farm, deceptively at first reminiscent of a children book‟s
illustration, graphically depicts the kind of dystopian future where
bioengineering dominates the world, a future that in many ways is already
our present. As Rockman elucidates, his works depict how “our culture
perceives and interacts with plants and animals, and the role culture plays
in influencing the direction of natural history”. The Farm shows an
intensely cultivated soy bean field, with genetically modified vegetables
such as square tomatoes and soy beans. Reading the painting from left to
right, we can see images of a series of animals as they are now and, as we
progress to the right, as they will probably in the future, having been
genetically modified as consumer products with no consideration for their
well-being. Their function is the sole motivating factor, as in the creation
of a mouse with what seems an ear on its back, standing in for lab mice
used for research, a square cow with several udders, so shaped
presumably to make more room for bigger organs or more meat, mirroring
-3-
the square tomatoes, a pig with organs grown for human transplants and a
featherless chicken with six breasts and six wings, reminiscent of those
portrayed in Oryx and Crake.
Transgenic animals are already with us, being created in
laboratories all over the world mostly for research purposes. Hybrid
animals abound in the natural world and Atwood‟s hybrid menagerie of
creatures finds its place alongside the less exotic, more parochial and
mundane examples like the mule. There are, however, other hybrid
animals that have been created through human intervention and live
mostly in captivity, such as the liger, a hybrid of lion and tiger. In
Chimeras,
Hybrids,
and
Interspecies
Research:
Politics
and
Policymaking (2009) Andrea L. Bonnicksen considers the effect of
animal-animal hybridization, looking in greater detail at the example of
ligers, the result of the fusion, with the help of breeders, of lion sperm and
tiger eggs, since lions and tigers do not normally mate or share the same
territory. According to Bonnicksen, both the physical and psychic wellbeing of ligers is likely to be affected so she concludes that “until
ethologists develop more refined methods of measuring animal wellbeing, answers about the impact of hybridization remain incomplete”
(71). Atwood‟s novels and Rockman‟s The Farm effectively call attention
to the potential dangers posed by new genetically engineered animals and
plants that enter the food chain and refashion human consumption in
unexpected ways that can bring about unforeseen diseases. These
monstrous creatures could have been appositely placed in 17th century
cabinets of curiosities or have been displayed in freak shows, but as
Atwood abundantly demonstrates they could become an integral part of a
future world where unbridled genetic engineering experiments have
changed the human and animal landscape almost beyond recognition.
-4-
Another intervisual reference in Oryx and Crake can be seen
with reference to the Children of Crake, the new, posthuman beings
fabricated by Crake who are luminescent to indicate when they are
actively interested in sexual activity. In addition, they all have green eyes
which become “luminescent in the semi-darkness, just like the rabbit:
same jellyfish gene” (102; emphasis mine). The intertextual reference
here, I believe, is to Eduardo Kac‟s GFP Bunny, also named Alba, his
famous and controversial bio art rabbit engineered with the green
fluorescent protein (GFP) derived from the Pacific jellyfish Aequorea
victoria, which glows green under a specific wave-length of light. For
Kac, the “tangible and symbolic coexistence of the human and the
transgenic shows that humans and other species are evolving in new ways.
It dramatizes the urgent need to develop new models with which to
understand this change and calls for the interrogation of difference, taking
into account clones, transgenics, and chimeras” (Telepresence & Bio Art:
Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots, 292), a call very similar to that
sounded by Donna Haraway throughout her work.
German artist Thomas Grünfeld‟s series of taxidermic pieces,
Misfits (1994-2006), can also be profitably placed alongside Atwood‟s
hybrids. Grünfeld juxtaposes different animal parts in each of these
provocative taxidermic sculptures. These anomalous pairings include a
sheep‟s head on a dog‟s body, as in St Bernard (1994), a squirrel with a
parrot, an ostrich with a bull‟s head, another ostrich paired with a
giraffe‟s head, a bird with a pig‟s head, amongst other, equally bizarre
and anomalous animal fusions, which call attention to the weird and
uncanny creations that may be fabricated in laboratories in the foreseeable
future. Reminiscent of creatures from a Medieval bestiary or from a
number of paintings by Bosch these hybrid or chimerical creatures raise
fears about the potential creation of similar beings with recourse to
-5-
biotechnology, but also awe and wonder, as well as feelings of curiosity
about the capacity of new technologies to radically change the human and
animal landscape of our world by creating completely new species.
Another iconic figure in Rockman‟s painting is the genetically
engineered mouse with what looks like a human ear on its back, a copy of
a similar mouse created in the laboratory, in 1995, by Dr Charles Vacanti,
an anesthesiologist at the University of Massachusetts and Dr. Linda
Griffith-Cima, a chemical engineer at MIT, in order to exemplify a
procedure for manufacturing cartilage structures to be transplanted into
humans. This mouse prompts reference to a series of other iconic mice
such as Bryan Crockett‟s Ecce Homo (2000) and Catherine Chalmers
Rhino (2000), both figurations of the Oncomouse, as well as Australian
artist Stelarc‟s implant of a human ear on his own arm (thus
metaphorically and symbolically placing himself in a continuum with
Vacanti‟s mouse and other laboratory animals used for medical
experiments and subjected to suffering), and Donna Haraway‟s reflections
on the Oncomouse.
Bryan Crockett‟s Ecce Homo (2000), drawing on Christian
iconography, clearly stands as a figure of suffering and scapegoating,
arousing pity and discomfort in the onlooker, with its hands raised as if
asking for pardon or pity, or even in a gesture that could be interpreted as
blessing.i It can be seen as a stand-in for Jesus‟ passion and agony with
the aim of saving humankind from sin. The torture inflicted on the mouse
as an experimental animal is parallel to that meted out to Jesus in his
excruciating journey through the stages of the Cross. Referring to the
Oncomouse Donna Haraway uses words that shed light on Ecce Homo, a
pitiful Christian image of anguish and distress (I‟m using the word
“pitiful” in the sense employed by Paul Virilio in Art and Fear). Haraway
argues that although “her promise is decidedly secular, s/he is a figure in
-6-
the sense developed within Christian realism: S/he is our scapegoat; s/he
bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a powerful,
historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of
salvation--a „cure for cancer‟” (2008, 76).
Catherine Chalmers‟s Rhino (2000), in turn, part of the
Transgenic Mice series, is another powerful image that elicits feelings of
horror, repulsion and pity due to the presumed suffering of the lab mouse,
subjected to genetic experiments. Like Crockett‟s Ecce Homo it can be
inscribed in what Virilio describes as “pitiless art” (Art and Fear, 27).
Virilio feels extremely uncomfortable with contemporary art, and in
particular with genetic art, which he considers to be steeped in impiety
and whose ethos can be compared to the horrors and experiments on
humans perpretated by the Nazis. He sees contemporary art as complicit
in the malaise and lack of direction that he considers as characterizing our
times. According to Virilio the words “PITY and PIETY are
consubstantial” (39) and he regards contemporary art as a “profanation of
forms and bodies” (27), a view I find too radical and not fully fleshed out.
Indeed, in Agamben‟s wake in Profanations (2007), I believe in the need
to profane what was once deemed unprofanable and immutable, like the
impermeability of species boundaries.
Conclusion
What all the works I have briefly analysed alert us to is the
enormous potential of the biosciences to impact not only on the
evolutionary process but also on our sense of the human condition itself,
along with the human genomic make-up, which may be radically altered
by genetic engineering so that virtually new human and animal species
could arise. The drive to create life, new human beings and life forms is
thus seen, in these works, to take over, speed up and complexify the work
-7-
of evolution. As Mitchell Whitelaw notes, the concept of evolution has
become “the most powerful organizing narrative of contemporary culture”
(5), a concern that includes such ideas as the very creation of life and the
radical change and improvement of the human being, fantasies fostered by
developments in the biosciences. For Eduardo Kac, the “urgent task is to
unpack the implicit meanings of the biotech revolution and, through art
making, contribute to the creation of alternative views” (2005, 255). We
can thus establish a fertile dialogue between the visions suggested by
bioart, science and those from literature, which may be seen to crossfertilize in provocative and productive terms, suggesting new paradigms
and scenarios.
The works briefly considered here help us take the pulse of
contemporary technological advances and, more importantly, envisage
potential outcomes and their consequences, thus becoming cautionary
tales interpellating the choices we make with respect to the future. The
contemporary world is undoubtedly characterized by the predominance of
a genetic imaginary which clearly encompasses, in a conspicuous fashion,
a hybrid imaginary. If we are all cyborgs and “chimeras”, as Haraway
asserts (“A Cyborg Manifesto”, 150), we are also all hybrids.
Furthermore, as Kac points out, the Human Genome Project has shown
that in the genome of all human beings there exist sequences derived from
viruses
which in the course of a long evolutionary process became
imprinted in our genes. This means, as Kac stresses, that we carry DNA
from non-human organisms and that ultimately, “we too are transgenic”
(2005, 292), a sobering, provocative thought.
The new human-made, teratological beings considered here assault
long held notions about the impermeability of species and the sanctity of
the human. The deeply transgressive nature of these creatures, along with
their enforced spectacularization as art objects, forces us to deal with the
-8-
potential of biotechnologies to alter, sometimes beyond recognition, the
human and animal landscape we are used to inhabiting. The feelings of
horror, revulsion and uncanniness that many of these works elicit, often
reverberating with a sense of heretical impiety and irreverence, alert us to
the power of science to produce unimaginable monsters and all sorts of
mutant beings, as well as to the urgency of the need for ethical boundaries
to be drawn to scientific research. From this vantage, bio art can also be
said at times to be engaged in the profanation of what was once
considered holy and inviolable, in Agamben‟s terms, such as species
boundaries and to provide visual representations of the kind of unholy
alliances Donna Haraway talks about, hybrid fusions and chimerical
beings. As Yves Michaud asserts, the “true significance of bio art for 21st
century art is its devilish transgressive power, its capacity to produce
monsters and to circulate transgressive objects” (117), a statement which
indeed captures the drive behind the most subversive and provocative bio
art pieces of our time.
Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio, Profanations. Trans. Jeff Fort. Cambridge, MA, MIT,
2007.
Atwood, Margaret, Oryx and Crake. London, Bloomsbury, 2003.
-- . The Year of the Flood. London, Bloomsbury, 2009.
Bay, Michael. The Island (US, 2005).
Bonnicksen, Andrea L., Chimeras, Hybrids, and Interspecies Research:
Politics and Policymaking. Washington, D. C., Georgetown UP, 2009.
Chalmers, Catherine. Rhino (2000)
Crockett, Bryan. Ecce Homo (2000)
-9-
Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto”. In Simians, Cyborgs, and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London, Free Association Books,
1991.
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncomouseT
M
: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge,
1997.
-- . When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London, University of
Minnesota Press, 2008.
Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go. London, Faber and Faber, 2005.
Kac, Eduardo. GFP Bunny (2000)
-- . Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots.
Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Michaud, Yves. In “Critical Anthology”. Eduardo Kac
. Catalogue of
the exhibition "Eduardo Kac". Ed. Angel Kalenberg. Instiuto Valenciano
de Arte Moderno (IVAM), 2007, 107-125.
Rockman, Alexis. The Farm (2000)
Smith, Michael Marshall, Spares. New York, Bantam, 1998.
Virilio, Paul, Art and Fear. London, Continuum, 2006.
Whitelaw, Mitchell, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. Cambridge,
MA, MIT, 2004.
-10-