Suzanne Anker

I will open this discussion with a key question: What do TV news programs, the infomercial, the docudrama, a collage by Max Ernst, PhotoShop software, Oncomouse, a Geep, the X-Files, the Simpsons, nuclear transfer and cloning share in common? Well, they all operate on the cut and paste format, which is a structural principle that is increasingly relevant to us. What happens in this method, often called collage, is that space and time can be conceptually distinct, allowing for new and disturbing categories to be formed, by fusing fact with fiction, desire with improbability, anxiety with emotional distance. And the demarcation of these boundaries has taken an asymptotic kind of twist, due to the nature of the binary code, which is zero and one. These digits also have a pre-history in the aesthetic break represented by Malevich’s exhibition 0-1.0 in which the first Suprematist exhibition supplanted the last Futurist exhibition, bringing into play the non-objective art world in the Russian avant-garde. Now computers have speeded up this matrix of media, which has the capacity to essentially convert the body into a series of redeemable coupons. And when we look at what is unfolding in biotechnology, such as the use of stem cells from umbilical cords and aborted fetuses to cure Parkinson’s Disease, or rare cancer cells, that are harvested by corporations in which the patient who has cancer fails to get paid, we wonder, in this novel conjunction, how the factory and the body have become a corporate merger. So the kinds of anxieties that these issues provoke, in terms of modifications as well as commodifications, of men and women and their fusion with animals, their fusion with machines, and the cultural fall-out surrounding these attitudes of mind, is the subject here tonight and its relationship to visual arts practice, what might be called cyborg surrealism.