Nataša — CAE — Art as Next Terrorist Suspect
Topic(s): Censorship | Comments Off on Nataša — CAE — Art as Next Terrorist SuspectArt as Next Terrorist Suspect
Nataša Petrešin
Due to an overall danger of various forms of terrorism, paranoia as a state-of-the-art has developed after 9/11 into an actual reality of the globalised world, the one which is burdened by the past colonial, social and psychological exploitation of the inferior or minor layers of society and by the ever-present cultural and capital hegemony of the First World over the Third World. What is happening before our eyes, which are pinned to the mass media and the World Wide Web, seems like the most tasteless and worst case scenario, yet we all participate in it. The narrow-mindedness of the most powerful states that still decide the fate of most geopolitical situations on our planet includes searching for scapegoats. The search allows them to avoid (and for how long?) all real, effective and realisable solutions, ones that in any case are not in their interests. Dr. Steven Kurtz, the founder of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble and associate professor at the art department of the University of Buffalo, and Dr. Robert Ferrell, Kurtz’s collaborator and professor of genetics at the University in Pittsburgh, charged with mail and wire fraud in a federal court arraignment in Buffalo this spring, are such scapegoats in an absurd and terrifying court process. The trial, which is actually only now beginning, brings forth catastrophic consequences to the freedom of creativity and artistic expression, to unrestrained artistic and interdisciplinary research, and to the right of all individuals and lay audiences to knowledge concerning the biopolitical mechanisms that directly steer the course of bare life.
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is an art collective consisting of five activists coming from the fields of computer graphics, performance, photography, film, video and text art. Since the foundation of the collective in 1987, they have been one of the key elements in international theoretic discourse and artistic activist practice, civil disobedience, resistance and the basic right to knowledge. The group has been exploring the kinships between art, science, technology, political activism and critical theory. Their artistic mission involves interventions, introducing the potential of tactical media, capital and power in the information society. Most recently they have revealed the strategies, interests, dangers and manipulations with which hermetically sealed scientific circles and the escalating development of the biotechnological industry are misleading the public. Critical Art Ensemble has defined the role of the artist as one according with the transforming nature of engaged art. They see the artistic position and function as an operation by a public amateur within a system of transparent financial support for the arts and visibility in the public domain. Working as a collective for many years, they have created performative, interactive and participatory projects, advocated the methodology of and necessity for interdisciplinary research and published five books.
In recent years, CAE has unfailingly demystified the strategies of the biotechnological industry in their participatory projects, wherein they develop practical models and situations where the audience can confront its own fear of science: “By interacting with us and our models [where the audience can develop harmless transgenic bacteria, raise bacteria found within their bodies and take them home, or observe the process of identifying genetically modified organisms in the most common food products] they hopefully developed some understanding of the potential risks involved in the positive use of transgenic organisms.” Acting out the role of amateur biotechnicians and scientists, the collective’s own term for their performative methodology is “contestational biology initiative”. This format has allowed them to investigate the methods, equipment and databases of the professional scientific sphere in search for answers to politicised questions about the representation and control of food products that the biotechnological industry has achieved under the supervision of multinational companies. In these projects, analogical to their earlier critical projects about the Internet, tactical media and hacktivism, Critical Art Ensemble have succeeded in establishing their main thesis about the necessity and right of all individuals to information, about “knowledge as a commons which is as vital as the air that we breathe.”.
Let me summarise how the story evolved from a tragic event into an absurd court process. On the 11th of May, 2004, Steve Kurtz’s wife Hope suddenly died. The emergency medical team discovered that the cause of death was heart failure. Since Hope’s death was unexpected, the local police searched the apartment. On Steve’s table they found scientific material – equipment for biological research and for identifying genetically modified organisms, basically the material for the CAE project Free Range Grain. The police considered the material suspicious and called in the FBI, the material was impounded for examination, the equipment was confiscated and Steve was detained, disregarding his hurtful situation. Despite the analysis of the seized materials by the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State, who declared that they posed no risk to public safety, and despite the fact that the same materials can be obtained legally by anyone, the investigation continued with a view to unearthing evidence to charge Steve with possession of a potential biological weapon and therefore being capable of committing a terrorist act. The artist thus became an amateur terrorist. Subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury have been served also to some other members and collaborators of the collective, to scientists and artists who hold academic positions and are public personalities. Autonomedia, the cult publishing house that published CAE’s books, was most recently subpoenaed. Kurtz and his colleagues have been charged under Section 175 of the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 as expanded by the USA Patriot Act – a very sensitive law after 9/11 – which prohibits the use of certain biological materials for anything other than a “prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose”. In his text, posted on the nettime mailing list, Konrad Becker commented upon this Act as “justification for a campaign not only against immigrants, but also against critical journalists, scientists, and recently also artists,” adding that “Steve Kurtz has publicly denounced the patenting of the biosphere and the role played by corporations, and recently examined the transgenetic contamination of food products. His attempt to use artistic means to make the genetic manipulation of the food chain and the practices of the bio industry visible have meant that state authorities dazed by paranoia now view him as a ‘terrorist’.” On the 30th of June, Steve Kurtz was arraigned and charged in the Federal District Court in Buffalo. The court could not charge both defendants with bioterrorism – as it was listed on the original search warrant and subpoenas – but managed to charge them with mail and wire fraud for obtaining the harmless bacteria for their artistic and scientific research, with a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment. As stated in the press release of the CAE Defense Fund, the laws in this indictment are generally used against people defrauding others of money or property. Historically, they have been used when the government has been unable to show any other criminal intent. The bacteria are meant to be used only for scientific purposes and are labelled as property. Due to the market-driven control of scientific research, they are protected under copyright laws and also protected as a type of military secret. In the opinion of the so-called ‘leaders of the free world’, these are the very issues that make scientific and economic progress possible. Using the University of Pittsburgh’s laboratory under what were termed ‘fraudulent pretences’, Robert Ferrell obtained three harmless strains of bacteria and delivered them to Steve to be used in his future projects (GenTerra, 2001) – illegally from the judicial perspective. Even the possession of grain that CAE used in their projects in museums in America and throughout Europe was perceived to be problematic (Molecular Invasion, 2002). The trial has just begun, and under the conditions of arraignment Kurtz is subject to travel restrictions, random and scheduled visits from a probation officer, and periodic drug tests.
Since the beginning of the harassment, the CAE Defense Fund (www.caedefensefund.org) has been the source of financial, moral and information support. It produces accurate reports on the course of events, publishes comments from fellow scientists and artists, collects signatures for a public support letter and also donations to pay the fees of the lawyers of both defendants. Professors, journalists and the employees of Nature magazine, UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego, have responded with similar statements about the threat to academic collaboration, interdisciplinary research and the freedom of expression: “We see here a pattern of behaviour that leads to the curtailing of academic freedom, freedom of artistic expression, freedom of interdisciplinary investigation, freedom of information exchange, freedom of knowledge accumulation and reflection, and freedom of bona fide and peaceful research. All of which are fundamental rights and cornerstones of a modern academic environment.” In spite of the massive support of cultural circles, one should not overlook the somewhat reactionary opinion of Coco Fusco, who in the beginning of June posted on the nettime list her own opinion on the support that she thinks “would best be directed at public officials, law enforcement and the media, rather than continuing to preach to the converted.”. Fusco also noted the similarity with the situation in the 1960s, when the FBI, as now, worked with other branches of government and organisations to generate far-reaching campaigns against leftists. At the same time, Fusco expressed the wish that people concerned about the Kurtz case – which has the advantage of very good media and financial support – should also show concern for all other cultural interventionists who are confronted with the same, if not even greater, repression and are unable to achieve the same degree of visibility.
Contemporary visual, performative and media arts with a critical stance can be regarded as temporarily occupying both symbolic and real space and time, performing consolidated rituals, gestures and interaction between the audience and the work of art, while also enabling the emergence of necessary new meanings and interpretations within the commodified interaction between the audience and art. Irit Rogoff talks about the viewers’ shift from an analytic to a performative function of observation and participation as the “potential of performative audiences to allow meaning to take place in the present” which also allows that “criticism does not have to be enacted at a distance but can take place and shape in the realm of the participatory… There is no meaning then if the meaning is not shared,” she writes, quoting Jean-Luc Nancy. Despite the popular belief in its harmlessness, contemporary art represents itself with the laws of transgression, direct confrontation and awareness about responsibility towards oneself and others. This fact and the seriousness of the Kurtz and Ferrell case are proof that the general harmlessness of the art world is relocating into a zone of urgency and direct influence that satisfies all the preconditions for the emergence of “a new political space… that seeks out, stages and perceives an alternative set of responses”. Bojana Kunst believes that today these radical art projects “use the same procedures as we ourselves do in our private or public activities; they succumb to the same bureaucratic laws and participatory problems. Nevertheless, their gesture can still be uncivil – they still somehow don’t succumb to the strict contemporary demarcation of territories and to the division of labour… the critical potentiality of these kinds of projects can be grasped precisely through the connections and transgressions they establish, through their performative gestures: the political power of the project is revealed by the situation through which it establishes itself as project”. At the same time, as Stephen Wilson claims, arts can function as an “independent zone of research, where abandoned, discredited, and unorthodox inquires could be pursued”, taking into account alternative criteria, and offers models for the future. “Our culture desperately needs wide involvement in the definition of research agendas, the actual investigation processes, and in the exploration of the implications of what is discovered. Artists can contribute significantly to this discourse by developing a new kind of artist/researcher role.” Positing the characteristic uniqueness of the artistic experience against the repeatability of the scientific one, and understanding artistic research as a form of shared knowledge built on anti-universality and openness, Tere Vadén sees its contribution in “calling into question and bringing forth of non-conceptual interpretations and skills in open and shared ways” and avoiding illustrations of existing conceptual knowledge, which is what scientific research traditionally does.
So how does one create a protest within such a rise of restrictions against freedom? Brian Holmes talks about creating a theatre or some other type of symbolic or real space for generating discussion and for performing it publicly and collectively. Recalling the term ‘strategy of overidentification’, which Slavoj Žižek used in the beginning of the 1990s to denote the essential political and aesthetical position of the NSK movement and their seeming ambivalence towards ideological and post-ideological questions, I could mention two recent examples of artistic activism that, in this rather pessimistic situation, offer us some optimistic views and motivation for further resistance. Echoes of the strategy of overidentification can be found in the confusion of identities which The Yes Men use in their media activism, and also in the action of Inke Arns and Christian von Borries, where they proclaimed themselves Hermann Göring’s grandchildren in late September 2004 in Berlin. In the pre-election situation in the US, The Yes Men have organised a tour across the States in which they perform propaganda as passionate Bush supporters, leaving behind an atmosphere of doubt, confusion and disbelief among the local inhabitants. A similar cultural intervention was realised in Germany by Inke Arns, a curator and theoretician, and Christian von Borries, an orchestral conductor. Angered due to the insensible public support of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection of contemporary art, Friedrich Christian being the grandson of Friedrich Flick, a war criminal and owner of the army factory in the Second World War, that is being displayed in Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and has been opened by the German premier Schröder, Arns and von Borries proclaimed themselves for the grandchildren of the notorious nazist and were giving away the invitation cards for Göring’s Collection before the opening of the F.C. Flick’s Collection. Their action did not aim to attack the collector himself, but they criticize obvious avoiding of the recent painful history with the excuses that the art and politics must be separated in this particular case, whereas it is clear that the capital invested in the collection is of dirty heritage, and the whole situation unambiguously tries to cleanse the dark family’s history.
Bearing in mind the absurdity of the CAE trial, and despite the fact that we agree with Coco Fusco’s comment, we must become fully aware of the appearance of a new chapter in art activism that will be marked by a general cultural fear and a threat to the freedom of expression, research and activism. The freedom of interdisciplinary collaboration and research, the validity of artistic research driven by subjective experimentation in the face of scientific research, and the possibility of collectively producing results for improving, raising awareness of and shifting the contemporary state-of-the-art – all these have been affected. As Claire Pentecost put it in her lecture about the Kurtz case: »Steve and Robert have been punished because they were sharing information and knowledge and disregarding the militarised trends”.
The writer is an independent curator based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.