Summer has begun, which means that my first semester has finished. It seems too soon for reminiscing, but last week, as I watched a bio-artist tear the head off an almost fully-developed chicken embryo, I knew this semester had been something special.
The compulsory class I took was simply a lot of theoretical reading and not so interesting to me. I guess it was good background, (by which I mean, I will forget it all very quickly). The other course, (As I wrote about a few months back) however, was extremely interesting. See, most of the time when you sign up for a course, you do it because you want to learn more about a certain subject. It increases the depth of knowledge about something by a small fraction.
This course was about an aspect of art I knew nothing about. It was like discovering a magical closet in my room that goes into Narnia, except with weirder shit inside.
I now know about artists growing tissue into a leather jacket, a guy who inserted his DNA into the veins of a petunia flower, a guy who is campaigning to the Dutch royal family to allow him to engineer an orange pheasant for the royal family to hunt... lots of things that can only be described as "weird shit".
I even met some of these artists. The problem with studying art history, as one of them pointed out, is that most artists we study are dead. (or maybe this makes it easier as they can't argue your points. You see, since I got help for my final essay from the artist I am writing about, he asked me to send a copy of it when I'm done. I don't want to! It's like censorship.)
I went to a few different conferences and talks in the field of "bioart", and it was an experience. One artist, while she was speaking, wore an ironing board with a plant on it, connected with tubes to her nose to reduce her carbon emission. She made her point about "carbon guilt", but she kept it on for the next 3 hours, while listening to the other speakers, as if this is what she always wears. SHE WAS WEARING A PLANT! That's not normal!
Another speaker happened to be who I am writing about for my final essay for the course. In a nutshell, he goes around the world and collects tadpoles and frogs and documents the deformed ones. (Huh, that is basically my whole essay reduced to one sentence). He spoke a little bit, and then, like Oprah's car giveaways, he brought out a bunch of aquariums filled with tadpoles, and he gave a spoon to everyone. No, we weren't going to eat them, but we were supposed to help identify if they had any abnormal limb-growths. The first one I checked had three legs! I had found my first tripod! Aren't I lucky? So yeah.
Another speaker (the pheasant guy), joined a class, and the end-of-semester dinner. I have no way to explain him, so instead, I will write down some of the notes I wrote while listening:
- "humane sacrifice"
- "brainus" lollipop (a portmanteau word of brain and anus)
- "Mouse brain attenna"
- "around your anus like a circus" (I forget the context of this)
- "interspecies-hereditary-expressionism"
Then was the workshop in the university laboratories where we injecting salmon semen into chicken embryos. Yes. And, no, I don't know why. I mean, I am an art history student, so of course I know why. I just am not going to tell you and look suave with my hand-made bow tie. So, this artist was showing everyone how to take a fertilised egg and open a hole in it without killing the chicken so we could look at it, and douse it with salmon semen. Then we could close it up and incubate it and see our creations. Although, legally we would not be allowed to let them hatch anyway. But we could imagine chickens that swim upstream, and that's the beauty of it.
So, he tried showing how to open the egg, using an egg fertilised 4 days earlier (they hatch at 21 days). It just looked like a normal egg. He cracked open another one. Nothing. Then he took out an egg from another carton. It was 17 days old. Even he looked nervous about this. He opened up a window, and the other teacher shreeked, "oh my god, it's still moving!" Uh oh...
It was like that scene at the start of Jurassic Park where the scientist is helping a dinosaur come out of it's egg while Sam Neill looks on in horror. You monstor! The egg was broken too much to be closed up again, and soon the gloopy embryo with a moving 17-day old almost fully-formed fetus was sitting in a peitrie dish.
"Now what do we do?" He asked us, and he was totally serious. Some girls were all "We have to save it! Put it in the incubator! One actually took matters into her own hands and put it there. Most people were all "We have to kill it humanely!). So right there, we had an urgent ethical/moral discussion, which lasted about half an hour and culminated in a vote. 6:12 in favour of putting it down.
But then, who was going to do the deed? And how? By now the embryo had stopped moving, and was probably dead, maybe. But we had to make sure it wouldn't just die slowly in a paper-waste basket. Unable to come to a concensus, the artist/teacher tore the head off, in a feat of immense strength. Classy.
Then most of the class continued the salmon-injecting into the younger embryos. (note, only a small percentage of the class comes from an art background.) The details I loved most about the aftermath were:
- To show respect, a piece of foil was placed over the beheaded embyos eyes.
- The artist/teacher asked a girl to demonstrate the salmon-semen injection by volunteering himself.
- Seeing an egg-yolk with a tiny beating heart.
- Naming her "Yokey".
- The same girl who put the 17-day old embryo in the incubator took it away to dissect it.
The point is, again: Weird shit. I don't know whether all of this art is 'good art', but I now know that it exists. I think I understand a lot of what the artists are trying to do, and I believe that they mean well. At the least, it was incredibly interesting, raising questions within bioart, but also general artistic, ethical, aesthetical and practical questions. It was rare experience where in the space of a few months, an entirely new field was opened up to me, and I frolicked through them, picked some flowers and stayed a while. It has been a good first semester.
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