Artweek
October 2002

Excerpt from: "The Missing Link: Art, Biotechnology, and the Disappearance of Difference"

by David Spalding

The idea that genes are connected to behavior carries the potential for people to ignore the historical forces that bring people to where they are. The danger lies in assuming that this new science, along with computer technology, will put us on a level playing field.

--Carrie Mae Weems, quoted by Meredith Tromble in "DNA and Difference," Limn

Are we really the same? Reviewing recent discourse surrounding the Human Genome Project, you might think so. According to zoologist Scott Edwards, "The prevailing view of scientists who study genetic variation in the human species is that human races are nonexistent, and that the concept of human race is a barrier to further biological and cultural and moral understanding of the human condition." This claim should be taken as a warning. Genetics does not have the best track record when it comes to dealing with race: witness the eugenics movements of the early 20th Century, which used scientific arguments to pass anti-miscegenation laws throughout the U.S. Now, after playing a central role in earlier genetic research, race is being dropped from the equation, disappearing along with the tangle of attendant class and gender issues that inform our daily lives.

My fears about the elision of difference have largely been confirmed by much of the recent artwork I've seen dealing with bioengineering, genomics and biotechnology. Large-scale DNA portraits and fuzzy photos of cellular structures seem like uncritical confirmations that deep inside, we're really not so different. Below are interviews with three artists whose work challenges this leveling gensture, probing instead at the links between biotechnology and the dense network of race, class, and gender issues that we must all navigate.

Seattle-based photographer Susan Robb's work borrows the tools of the science lab, using mimicry to question the authority and ethics of scientific discourse. Robb's Macro-Fauxology series--a group of twenty color photographs arranged in a grid, each image enclosed in a frame resembling a petri dish--is the result of her restaging of actual experiments used to map the human genome. San Francisco artist Stephanie Syjuco appropriates the visual vernacular of technology in ways that defy expectation. Blurring our conceptual categories, Syjuco's uncanny projects are inflected by her own cultural experiences as a Filipino woman. Los Angeles artist Kori Newkirk is well-known for his inventive use of culturally-coded materials: his pomade wall paintings and curtains made of beaded, braided hair extensions use markers of the African American body to provoke larger discussions about ethnicity and identity, memory and history. Newkirk's and Robb's work was included in Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics at the Henry Art Gallery, and Syjuco's work is currently on view at the San Jose Museum's Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950-2000.

Stephanie Syjuco

Artweek: In sculptural work such as Condensed Home Entertainment Systems (2001), the surfaces of your "consoles" are covered in wood-grain contact paper. It's as if you've replaced current high-tech devices (with their usual matte-black or silvery finishes) with what appears to be an earlier incarnation of technology. Where does this aesthetic come from?

Stephanie Syjuco: I was thinking specifically about how whenever I traveled to the Philippines, I felt stuck in a certiain visual of technology. There, people don't get new items, they just keep recycling the same tape player or record player. When I was creating this new body of electronics, I was looking at how technology is generally experienced by the larger majority of the people on this planet. A lot of people thought my work was retro. It's actually current, although it might not be viewed that way in the West.

AW: So your work is addressing uneven rates of technological development?

SS: Yes. Only recently did I become a U.S. citizen. I had this idea in the back of my mind that these objects I was making were an extension of what was being made in the Philippines. And generally, all of these electronic gadgets are not made anywhere in the Western world; they're made offshore, inplaces where people will probably never utilize them. The function of these pieces are purposely amorphous; they are meant to be unfamiliar. I wanted the work to ask: if the folks overseas made things for their own use, what would they look like? Would they have anything to do with our own visual vernacular?

AW: In light of your investigations into perceptual frameworks, how do you think the human genome project is reframing your ideas about what it means to be human?

SS: I think one of the problems about genetics is taht scientists are invested in finding the things that make everyone common, thereby erasing differences. The differences can show up as genetic glitches. It's as if they want to affirm that we're all the same, and that does a huge disservice to the social and economic dissimilarities amongst people. A genetic blueprint doesn't present a portrait of a person if the social and economic factors are dropped out of the picture.