YOUgenics 3.0

Rebecca Zorach on YOUgenics 3.0

YOUgenics is about YOU: your body, the food and medicine you put in it,
the
institutions and practices in which it is embedded. In YOUgenics 3.0,
genetic engineering is the spool around which numerous issues–labor and
inequality and reproduction and consumption and militarism and
surveillance
(and their histories)–are wound. The third YOUgenics exhibition, which
ran
from December 8, 2004 to February 25, 2005 at the Betty Rymer Gallery
at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is part of an ongoing (and
ever-changing) project curated by Ryan Griffis. YOUGenics 1.0 and 2.0
were
at Orlo Exhibition Space, Portland, Oregon, in 2002, and Art & Design
Gallery, Southwest Missouri State University, in 2003. The entire
project
seeks to remedy a lack of public discussion around crucial issues of
biotechnology that affect all of us–and to do it in creative,
challenging
and sometimes surprising ways.

While the dominant discourses of education, politics and the media
construct
science as powerful, impressive, authoritative, arcane, and,
all-too-often,
invisible, a number of artists have, for years, been doing their best to
make these issues visible. Some of them have paid dearly, as in the
recent
FBI investigation and prosecution of Critical Art Ensemble's Steve
Kurtz.
Amidst the small flurry of press coverage of the issue, Richard
Roberts, DNA
researcher and Nobel laureate, was quoted as saying that "you could
teach
these skills to a high-school student, and you could probably teach
them to
an artist."

Because he was addressing the possibility of manipulating bacterial DNA
for
purposes of bioterrorism, in one fell swoop he both presumed the merit
of
the FBI's assertions and denigrated artists, whose practical and
intellectual capabilities he apparently feels are less than those of
high
school students.

In fact, artists–so YOUgenics asserts–have something to teach all of
us
about science. In their position as critical thinkers-cum-provocateurs
they
can reveal the vested interests and biases of those authorized to speak
from
a position of expertise; they can question established truisms and newer
forms of creeping groupthink; they might even do a demonstration of
basic
experimental science.

A program of events associated with the exhibition included a panel
discussion and video screening, as well as two performances, by the
cyberfeminist collective subRosa on February 18. (The performance
accompanied their digital installation and "Mapping the Appropriation of
Life Materials," a wall-mounted timeline of stem cell developments
that emphasized the conversion of "life materials," i.e. people's DNA
and
stem cells, into property.) As part of the performance, subRosa members
demonstrated the process involved in inserting an antibiotic-resistant
gene
into e. coli bacteria. Visitors were not allowed to have contact with
the actual
bacteria but were encouraged to practice (using only a heated loop)
streaking
the plate of a Petri dish as if with a bacterial culture. Since a
Bunsen burner
was not allowed in the gallery, we used a candle, and because of school
regulations the security guard had to be called in to stand at the
ready with
a fire extinguisher. Similarly, the yogurt the collective produced as a
second
part of the performance (to demonstrate an everyday use of bacterial
cultures)
could not be served in the gallery because of health regulations. At
the same
time visitors were encouraged to create collages