Posted on Sun, Aug. 07, 2005
San Jose Mercury News
ALIVE or almost: Female artists ponder the meaning of life in the age
of genetic engineering
Mercury News
When Dr. Frankenstein returned to the lab to
build a mate for his monster in the 1935 sequel to the original film, it seemed
the big issue was dating etiquette.
Since then, the stakes of such meddling have grown a wee bit higher.
In ``Brides of Frankenstein,'' which has just opened at the San Jose Museum
of Art, 15 women have taken up video, robotics, animation and computer games,
among other media, to explore the implications of the burgeoning potential of
genetic engineering and the ways that galloping computing power are letting us
take evolution into our own hands.
Guest curator Marcia Tanner reached across the country and the globe for
these artists and returned with a selection that focuses less on the broad,
societal implications posed by genetic engineering and more upon the personal,
emotional and existential issues it raises.
Their work ranges from the suitably Gothic -- a grainy film of a woman
endeavoring to bring a clay form to life -- to the nervously funny -- a pair of
robotic, aluminum lower torsos fitted with a girl's tap shoes that throws noisy
tantrums when you pass.
Of course, artists always have served as the canaries in the coal mine of
society. Duchamp's 1912 ``Nude Descending a Staircase'' can be seen as a fair
representation of the impact of industrialization, with its fractionalizing of
the self into sequential actions.
Artists' specific interest in genetic engineering has been on the increase since
1996, when the cloning of Dolly the sheep and subsequent breakthroughs -- last
week's announcement that South Koreans have cloned a dog, for example -- have
started making science fiction real.
In essence, the questions are much the same as when Mary Shelley first posed
them with her novel ``Frankenstein'' in 1818: Is there a point at which
scientific prowess becomes hubris? And if that happens, is there any real
chance that humanity can stuff the genie back into the bottle?
Now that commercial pet cloning services and the like have begun to appear
(see www.savingsand clone.com), the issues have taken on greater urgency
than before.
``Brides'' places a greater premium upon aesthetics than did the more
broadly framed and didactic ``Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human
Genomics,'' which passed through the Berkeley Art Museum in the fall of 2003
and considered such issues as ownership of genetic material, transgender
sharing of traits and the rise of technology-worshipping cults.
This is particularly true in the first room of the San Jose show. Elizabeth
King's video of a meticulously constructed mannequin, digitally modified to
imbue it subtly with life, and Katherine Wetzel's photographs of same, draw
their unnerving power precisely from the attention given to the way the
mannequin was made.
These works are ideal openers. The unease we feel -- at the sight of a
customarily inanimate object given life -- is the very sensation that resonates
throughout the show's eclectic offerings.
Andrea Ackerman's projected video ``Rose Breathing: Version 1'' might be
described as Georgia O'Keeffe meets ``Blade Runner.'' An enormous rose, its
petals digitally modified to resemble flesh and pulsing open and closed as if
breathing, manages to be at once sexually alluring and carnivorously menacing,
a enormous Freudian party favor.
Cow gut on the wall
In ``Breath 1: Pleasure,'' 2000, Sabrina Raaf gives new meaning to the term
``art from life'' with a series of what appear to be large petri dishes hung on
the wall and connected with white wires. The dishes have been covered with
veiny cow gut and filled with a thick clear liquid in which blood red ``cells''
of some sort are floating. A computer program alternately illuminates and dims
the collection of dishes in what seem to be different breathing patterns, from
normal to panting. Yikes.
Tanner, who once served as executive director of the San Jose Institute of
Contemporary Art and is now an independent curator based in Berkeley, may have
been onto something when she limited this exhibit to female artists. The
implicit question is whether the gender with the power to create life might
respond differently than its counterpart to the era of customized life from a
petri dish.
Indeed, the show resonates with underlying feminist issues, since men
continue to dominate the fields of technological innovation and entertainment.
Doubtless that's why Peggy Ahwesh, in ``She Puppet,'' 2001, took a male fantasy
-- ``Tomb Raider's'' Lara Croft -- and re-edited footage from the video game to
reflect Croft's existential tragedy: She is a woman trapped alone in the world,
in a body she never asked for.
At other times, though, ``Brides'' seems like a Disneyland animatronics
exhibit run off the tracks and into the wild.
Wind-up dogs, skinned
Tamara Stone's ``Are You Afraid of Dogs?'' 2001, features a shelf of
mechanical toy animals, their synthetic fur removed to reveal the skeletal
plastic and wires beneath. The animals leap into motion and sound when you
activate them, leaving the viewer uncomfortably uncertain whether to view them
as life or as technology.
In the grotesquely fleshy category is Patricia Piccinini's ``Siren Moles:
Exellocephala parthenopa,'' 2000, which features two highly realistic-looking
hairless creatures simply sitting in their vitrine and breathing ever so
faintly.
Shows like ``Bride,'' engaging and topical as they are, run the risk of
subordinating art to social commentary, which is fine as long as everyone
realizes how impermanent that approach can render the art. The smallest
unanticipated technological inflection can send the world hurtling in a
different direction -- and leave works like these looking like so many riffs on
the dangers of monorails. Who in 1986, after all, anticipated the
world-altering impact of the Internet?
I have a similar quibble with the show's title, a concession to marketing
that threatens at times to subsume the intentions of the individual artists. It
also seems to betray some lack of confidence that a South Bay audience would
visit if the show wore a less flashy moniker. Imagine the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art feeling the need to call its current retrospective ``The Wizard
of Trifles'' instead of ``The Art of Richard Tuttle.''
Still, as a series of thoughtful snapshots of individual emotional reactions
to the dilemmas posed by our current technology, ``Brides'' is apt indeed. We
are at once gods and potential victims of our own god-like powers, and there's
no doubt that we have some serious thinking to do, however the future unfolds.
Looking out from the gallery, it is possible to see Viola Fry's enormous
ceramic, a piece of the permanent collection, of a man in a suit standing in
the museum lobby. Frankensteinian though it is, it seems positively quaint
compared with what's happening in ``Brides.'' It's a Brave New World, and
artists have taken notice.
`Brides of Frankenstein'
Works by 15 artists
Where: San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S.
Market St., San Jose
When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays.
Through: Oct. 30
Admission: Free
Information: (408) 294-2787, www.sjmusart.org