Adam Zaretsky is a transgenic artist, which is another term for (or a related genre of) bioart.
Everytime someone chooses someone to make a baby with, they are making a freak for their own pleasure.
This podcast is filled with so many good quotes!
Zaretsky is an artist who is consciously engaging with the freaky, the queer, and the unsettling, the taboo. He talks about strange visions for worlds, such as people becoming flat and photosynthetic, and imagines what the aesthetic result could be.
Scientists are leading contemporary art right now
Some of the activities and concepts he talks about in this podcast include:
- Creating a ‘farm’ where participants pay to be ‘forced’ into labour in the daytime and provide ‘samples’ over the night. He says this is a win-win, because the participants get their kicks, the project becomes financially sustainable and gets the samples it needs, and in the meantime they are producing organic food stuff
- Wanting to be a banker, a pornographer and a communist
- By calling something ‘art’, he releases it from the utilitarian need to be useful (as in science), and he is engaging biotechnologies for the purpose of experience and exploration (nothing more or less)
- ‘Deviant’ art – revolt as an aesthetic goal
- The urge to create transgenic humans as part of his work- actually splicing DNA from different animals (including humans) and then raising them as children
- A scienctific experiment that put an eye on the back of a frogs head to solve blindness, which he loved just for what it was without application
I am very much a fan of the way Zaretsky talks about his work. It is shocking, it’s novel. It’s not what we encounter usually in the art world (or education), but his conviction is compelling. I would definitely suggest his work for the future of the SciArt module as an example of someone working directly with biotechnologies to confront us (in a potentially uncomfortable way) with the possibilities of the world through these technologies. He is clearly engaging with ethics as we understand them in institutions and society more broadly, but asking what their function is and how we navigate them in a critical way.
References:
Love + Radio. (2016). Doing the No No: Interview with Adam Zaretsky. Season 5. [Online] 2 December 2016. Available from: http://loveandradio.org/2016/12/doing-the-no-no/ [Accessed: 13 January 2017].
Photo from the article:
Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology (2016). Who’s Afraid of CRISP Art? By Eben Kirksey [Online] Available at: http://somatosphere.net/2016/03/who-is-afraid-of-crispr-art.html [Accessed 13 January 2017].