The Artists in the Hazmat Suits - NYTIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/arts/design/03kenn.html
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July 3, 2005

The Artists in the Hazmat Suits
By RANDY KENNEDY

IN a certain part of the art world, the story is recounted like a slowly
unfolding nightmare: On the afternoon of May 11 last year, Steven Kurtz, a
respected artist and professor at the State University of New York at
Buffalo, called 911 to report that his wife, Hope, 45, was not breathing.

The police arrived to find Hope Kurtz dead, and in a hallway they found
something else - a biological lab, with an incubator, centrifuge and
bacterial cultures growing in petri dishes. Windows nearby were covered with
foil, and on the shelves sat books like "The Biology of Doom" and "Spores,
Plagues and History: The Story of Anthrax." The F.B.I. was called in. Agents
in white biohazard suits scoured the house. Subpoenas - citing sections of
the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act - were issued to Mr. Kurtz and
other members of an art group he and his wife helped found, the Critical Art
Ensemble. And in the summer of 2004 Mr. Kurtz was indicted by a federal
grand jury on charges of mail and wire fraud, accused of illegally obtaining
two of the bacteria samples in his lab, crimes that could send him to prison
for up to 20 years.

While the bare facts of the case lent it the contours of a doomsday episode
of "CSI," information that emerged later changed the picture considerably.
Medical examiners found that Mrs. Kurtz's death was not suspicious; she died
of heart failure. As artists, she and her husband had long worked openly
with biological and chemical agents, which they used at exhibitions around
the world, including a 2002 show involving genetically altered plants at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Most significant, the bacteria
cultures in Mr. Kurtz's lab were determined to be essentially harmless. One
is used in high-school science experiments and is available on the Internet
for educators to buy.

But federal prosecutors have continued to pursue the case, which could come
to trial later this year. In the process, they have transformed Mr. Kurtz
into an unlikely art world martyr-hero and shone a spotlight on an emerging
art movement that blurs the lines between art and science - especially the
science of genetics and biotechnology - and also the lines between art and
activism.

Called bioart or wetware by some of its practitioners, the field is growing
rapidly in the United States and Europe, and it is producing bizarre and
sometimes disturbing work that seems sprung right from the pages of Philip
K. Dick or Koji Suzuki, except that the science involved is not fiction.

In many ways bioart represents a logical next step in contemporary art,
which has eagerly embraced new approaches and nontraditional materials:
video and computers beginning in the 1960's and 70's, digital technology and
the Internet in the 90's.

But bioart can credibly claim to have made a more revolutionary break with
tradition. Instead of finding ways to represent and distill life using paint
or marble or pixels, the artists use life itself - bacteria, cell lines,
plants, insects and even animals - as the medium to ask the questions that
art has always asked. In ways that art has not been in a long time, the work
can feel genuinely subversive, even dangerous.

Certain aspects of this kind of living art have been around for a long time.
Some bioartists credit the photographer Edward Steichen as the founder of
genetic art: in the 1930's at the Museum of Modern Art he showed a
collection of giant, alienlike delphiniums he had mutated using selective
breeding and chemicals. Biological elements have also played a part in the
body-art movement and in some well-known contemporary work, like the
lifecycle-behind-glass gross-out of Damien Hirst, in which maggots hatch,
become flies, feed on a rotting cow's head, then die on a bug zapper. (That
piece was bought by the collector Charles Saatchi in 1990 for what was said
to be less than