| Extempore Remarks
Mark Dery
Author’s Note: Despite the charitable reassurances of Suzanne Anker, Chair of the School of Visual Arts’ Art History Department, I feel the need to append a word of warning to the follow remarks, improvised from a rough outline at the Surrealism and the Cyborg: Visual Art and Technoculture panel moderated by Anker at SVA, October 24, 2000. What seems brilliant, in the heat of the moment, can look like a stream of zero-forehead Bush-isms in the cold, unforgiving light of The Morning After. My only hope is that readers might find the false starts, paths not taken, and glaring contradictions of the following an entertaining exercise in intellectual bungee-jumping. Where possible, I’ve massaged my run-ons and sentence fragments into something resembling English as we know it. Caveat lector.
– Mark Dery
"I’d like to begin with an autobiographical anecdote—a Norman Rockwellian idyll from the early 70’s, the heartwarming coming-of-age story of a young boy’s fantasies of carefree bestiality and do-it-yourself transgenic tinkering. When I was a kid, around the time that I started to make desultory inquiries about the birds and the bees, I stumbled onto what I thought was an extraordinary idea, which was: Why not just couple humans with animals? It seemed to me that you could produce Barnumesque chimera and wonderfully monstrous hybrids of the sort that were already flitting through my mental skies, nourished on a steady diet of The Fantastic Four, The Twilight Zone, and Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp.
My mother just waved me away, muttering darkly about the corrosions of popular culture. But I never forgot that fleeting glimpse of a future of gods and monsters. Now, it seems that I was only ahead of my time, because we live in the world I imagined. Genetic engineering and experimental surgery have ushered us into a post-modern version of P. T. Barnum’s Odditorium, a world of what Donna Haraway would call ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities.’ It’s a world of SF made flesh, in which the morning’s headlines bring news of the man with a baboon liver, tomatoes with moth genes, a hairless mouse with a prosthetic human ear sprouting from its back. The blurring of boundaries between Us and Them is a fact of life in the age of hybridized human cow cells and pigs with human hemoglobin. I’m not making this stuff up!
The creation of transgenic animals with human genes and early attempts at xenotransplantation, such as the baby with the baboon heart, are haunted by premonitions of genetic apocalypse. Scientists warn of bizarre new retroviruses that could leap the species barrier, unleashing gothic horrors straight out of H.G. Welles’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Again, this is not science fiction: Mad cow disease and Ebola virus are fearsome maladies that have spread from animals to humans, vaulting the species barrier. A medical ethicist named Harold Vanderpool worries that ‘we are thinking across a barrier that should never be crossed,’ sounding for all the world like the voice of hysterical rationality in a gothic novel. In William Harrison’s Conradian novel, The Blood Latitudes, nightmares about trespassing in the forbidden zone between species are rendered in fever-dream language. ‘Now we have Apocalypse," raves an African prophet of doom. ‘A pox of sex gone wrong, green monkey fever, because humans and the creatures of the night have copulated together. We have crossed over the boundaries of the species, a great inbreeding of monsters.’
So, you’re wondering, what does any of this have to do with cyborgs or Surrealism? Well, I think the science fiction of everyday life in the 21st century is wonderfully presaged by Surrealism, which is about these very sorts of misbegotten monsters and dreamlike hybrids. Art prefigures the collage sensibility that has now been literalized through the instrumental agency of what Haraway might call technoscience. Collage is, of course, the preeminent artistic technique of the 20th century, and there’s a marvelous trajectory, an intellectual arc, from Lautreamont to Max Ernst’s collage novels to the photomontages of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch to William Gibson’s reincarnation of Joseph Cornell as an artificial intelligence, in Neuromancer, to the marvelous contraptions of the San Francisco cyberpunk bricoleurs Survival Research Laboratories, who’ve gone skulking through BART tunnels in search of mummified roadkill, which they then reanimate with scavenged military-industrial detritus. Using the unconsidered rubbish and cast-off oddments of Silicon Valley and the aeronautics industry, they have created a Rabot, a mummified rabbit that runs backwards with the aid of machinery, and a centaur—a horse skeleton grafted onto a robotic chassis.
In mainstream pop culture, examples of the Surrealist collage sensibility live on in Jame Gumb, in Silence of the Lambs, who makes himself a "girl suit" stitched together from women’s skins. (Gumb is modeled on Ed Gein, the real-life serial killer. Speaking of serial killers, there are doctoral dissertations waiting to be born about Jeffrey Dahmer as avant-garde artist, the creator of installation art that makes Paul McCarthy look positively Spielbergian. One of Dahmer’s hobbies was trying to create zombies—poor man’s cyborgs. In a vulgar attempt at robotization, he drilled holes in people’s heads.)
So there’s this sense in which Surrealism prefigures, metaphorically, what is now literalized. One of Surrealism’s greatest hits is the exquisite corpse, and if you drill down through the Burgess shale of Surrealist discourse, you find this subterranean layer of anatomical metaphors and corporeal imagery that springs, ultimately, from Mary Shelley’s brow. Frankenstein’s monster is, after all, the original exquisite corpse. Shelley’s novel is a story about a collage come to life—an anatomical cut-up who prefigures 20th century experiments in textual surgery, most notably those of William S. Burroughs, a disgruntled former medical student whose corpus—whose body of work—is in a sense a Ripper-esque assault on the text, a logocidal attempt to, as he put it, ‘rub out the word.’
Of course, there’s a long-standing correlation between the book and the body, from the ‘word made flesh’ in the Gospel of St. John to ‘disjecta membra’ (the Latin term for fragments of poetry—literally, ‘the limbs of a dismembered poet’) to Lacan’s observation that ‘the body is like a sentence that can be broken down into separate parts, so that its true contents can be put together again in an endless series of anagrams’ to Melville’s Queequeg, whose tattooed skin is a ‘wondrous work in one volume’ to Laurie Anderson’s image of the body as a ‘nerve bible.’ The trajectory comes to ground in the Human Genome Project, the textualization of our genetic essence in an epic Book of Man.
So you have Frankenstein on one hand, in 1818, and then on the other you have Lautreamont, who published the first "Canon" of his infamous Maldoror in 1868 and whose marvelously pungent phrase is the Ur-quote of Surrealism, neatly encapsulating the Surrealist aesthetic of convulsive beauty: ‘Beautiful as the fortuitous meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’
Now, if this unforgettable quote is the primal scene that leads, arguably, to the birth of the 20th century avant-garde, how fascinating that it takes place on a dissecting table. There’s this quasi-medical imagery, in which the discourses of medicine and the avant-garde imagination are wonderfully intermingled.
Now, I’d like to fast-forward, up to the present. It’s no coincidence that Damien Hirst’s reconstructed creatures (fig. 1)(fig. 2)(fig. 3)(fig. 4)—cows sawed in half and rearranged into corporeal collages—appear at the very moment that transgenic animals engineered in biotech labs and cross-species transplants promise (threaten?) to literalize a century’s worth of Surrealist collage, pop assemblage, and postmodern appropriation. Hirst’s sculpture ‘Some Comfort’ is an exquisite corpse come to life (or, at least, living death, safeguarded from decay and suspended in time a vitrine full of formaldehyde). Grafted together from cows, it has eight legs and a head at each end. One head looks back on Frankenstein’s monster, the organic collage that prefigured our recombinant century, while the other gazes into the sci-fi future augured by genetically altered pigs that produce human hemoglobin, transgenic mice with human breast cancer genes, and the animal-to-human xenotransplants mentioned earlier, the possible source of species-leaping viruses yet unborn.
Some of the most noteworthy recent art embraces what I would call a wet aesthetic, a biotech aesthetic, an aesthetic of soft machinery. Most of you, I presume, are familiar with the self-styled ‘transgenic’ artist Eduardo Kac (fig. 5), who has created a real, live rabbit that fluoresces in the right light, thanks to the genes of a bioluminescent jellyfish. There are others who are engaged in less literal, more figurative, and arguably more surreal ‘biotech’ work that constitutes an artistic response to xenotransplantation and genetic engineering.
For instance, there’s a marvelous Australian digital artist named Patricia Piccinini, whose installation The Breathing Room features computer-generated images of hyperrealistic flesh—vast expanses of skin with pimples and moles and nameless little excrescences, all fastidiously rendered cutting-edge software and projected on big screens. On closer inspection, the flesh in question looks androidal, unreal, like something vat-grown. And then there’s Thomas Grunfeld, who grafts animals (preserved through the low-rent miracle of taxidermy) together into what he calls Misfits—a St. Bernard with a goat’s head and other assemblages that share cultural DNA with Rauschenberg’s ‘Monogram,’ the famous ‘combine’ of the Angora goat with the tire around its middle. Grunfeld’s work reminds me of the monstrous hybrid at the end of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, where Seth Brundel is joined at the molecular level with fly DNA as well as the Brutalist boilerplate of his rather gothic ‘telepod,’ a matter disassembler/reassembler. It’s an image worthy of Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonte or Dali at his most delirious. Deiter Huber, a German artist, has done a series of exquisite digital images that he calls ‘klones,’ many of which were on display at Ars Electronica 2000. They’re erotic images of monstrous hybrids, rendered, as in Piccinini’s work, with a fetishistic photorealism. Everything looks realer than real, despite its mindwarping impossibility: a wreath of ivy growing in a perfect circle with no roots; a couple tongue-kissing, their mouths joined by a single grotesque tongue; an adult mouth suckling at a full breast, the lips fused to the skin, as if joined at the molecular level. They’re deliciously bizarre images.
It’s too early to call it a movement, but I think these artists are onto something. The cyborg trope, which was spawned by Haraway (a luminously brilliant thinker, be it said), has given rise to a cottage industry in cyberfeminist discourse. Lesser minds than Haraway’s have worn that trope threadbare with overfondling; in every symposium I attend, there is at least one cyber feminist who owns the local franchise for the cyborg metaphor. Why is the cyborg trope obsolete—so, like, last five minutes? Because the cyborg is a cheat.
Personally, I don’t buy a lot of Haraway’s giddy rhapsodies about the cyborg as a poster girl for boundary dissolution, the end of binary oppositions, yadda yadda yadda. I would argue, conversely, that the cyborg is often an image of domination, in which the flesh cedes territory to the machine, both in reality (real-world cyborgs—you know, people with prostheses) as well as in fiction. In the images that flit across our mental movie screens in terminal culture, the cyborg is always an image in which the flesh is brutally invaded and dominated by the machine, whether you’re talking Robocop or T2 or whatever. I make this argument at great and tediously finger-wagging length in my book Escape Velocity, so I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that the flesh, in cyborg mythology, is almost invariably coded as feminine: It’s squishy, it’s oozy, it’s abject, it’s repulsive, it sweats, it menstruates, it defecates—in short, it’s an utter embarrassment to every would-be Extropian reading that stroke book for techno-weenies, Wired, with one prosthetic hand. The machine, by contrast, is this cool, bloodless Master of the Universe.
I think the cultural politics of cyborgs merit closer scrutiny. I’m ready to get with the program of a kinder, better cyborg, but no matter how hard I look in search of these ‘borgs that Haraway and her disciples talk about, all I ever find is RoboCop and Star Trek’s Locutus of Borg and Arnie kicking butt as The Terminator. Let’s look at T2, one of the most enduring images of the cyborg the pop unconscious has given us. What is Arnie in that film? He’s a robot—a machine sheathed in meat. He may be shrink-wrapped in cloned flesh, but he’s got no soft insides, no organs. Scratch the surface, the wimpy flesh, and a few millimeters down he’s reassuringly heavy metal, all kick-ass robotic endoskeleton. Even the T-1000, that wonderfully polymorphous perversity that can morph into seemingly anything is a robot, too, not a true cyborg. There’s no flesh on its bones whatsoever. It’s made of ‘mimetic polyalloy,’ this bastard offspring of a Bauhausian dildo and the Oscar.
So the celebrated cyborgs of postmodern theory are a cheat; there’s no chewy nougat inside. You peel away the flesh and it’s just one more clanking Frankensteinian robot. And nobody has any faith in robotics anymore, except the turbo-geeks like Carnegie Mellon’s Hans Moravec (fig. 6)(fig. 7), who preaches the gospel of posthuman epiphany—omniscient robots attaining technological transcendence and fanning out across the universe, consuming whole asteroid belts as they go, and meanwhile, back in Moravec’s laboratory, his robots stagger around in these simplified laboratory environments at a glacial pace. I mean, if these things make it across the room in one day, open the champagne! Nobody but artificial intelligence fundamentalists stakes his faith in a robotic rapture anymore.
Nonetheless, we have to be charitable to the fundamentalists. The future symbolized by the robot hasn’t arrived simply for the simple fact that it has been superceded by an alternate future: the age of soft machines. The hardware fetishists have AIBO, Friendly Robotics’ Robomow lawn mower, and British designer James Dyson’s robotic DC06 vacuum cleaner. But this is soft machinery’s world; they just live in it. On the eve of the new millennium, it’s already resoundingly clear that the life sciences own the 21st century. As the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling put it, in a piece of e-mail to a friend, ‘It’s all about goo now. Cloned sheep. Embryo stem cells. Tailored viruses that kill cancers. Growth hormones. Mutant houseplants that grow in the dark. Mice with human ears growing out of their backs.’
Even the design sensibility of the early ‘00s reflects our technological movement away from hard, dry robotics, toward squishy, slimy genetics: the shelves of stores like Target abound in translucent, biomorphic tools and toys whose amoebic aesthetic designers have dubbed the ‘blobject.’ We live in weird times, when technology means spliced genes, not buckets of bolts. We stand on the eve of what the fringe SF writer Paul Di Filippo calls the age of ‘ribofunk’ in his novel of the same name: customized children, cloned pets, salmon reprogrammed to grow at accelerated speed, potatoes that glow when the soil’s too dry (thanks to transplanted jellyfish genes), gene therapy that may one day engineer hemophilia out of existence, mighty morphin epidemiological mutations (badder by far than Ebola Classic), and the rising specter of eugenics.
It’s a post-, post-, postmodern world, dominated more and more by genomics, and any artist who wants to acquire target on the fast-moving zeitgeist is going to have to contend with that fact. "Science and technology multiply around us," wrote J.G. Ballard, in the introduction to the French edition of his novel, Crash. "To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute." The cyborg was the poster child for the ‘90s, a decade whose Trivial Pursuit buzzwords were virtual reality, smart drugs, mind machines (remember them?), and—buckle your seat belt!—the Net. Now, we live in the age of gels and goo and spliced genes—times that demand art that leaves a slimy trail. To paraphrase Haraway, I’d rather be a blobject than a ‘borg." |
|
 |
|
