Left: Symbolic Species (2000) by Suzanne Anker. 2000. 24” x 36”. Silkscreen and pigment on frosted mylar.
Right: Measure of Time (2000) by Suzanne Anker. 24” x 36”. Silkscreen and pigment on frosted mylar.
Images courtesy of the artist.
.
Her words take me back to the realization I
had earlier in her lab. Scientists are confined (or
at least expected to be confined) to discussing
their work in ways that eschew abstract thinking or hypotheticals that cannot be tested. Artists are not.
in advertising and marketing, had become this
popular icon.”
In 1994, she put on an exhibition at Fordham
University called “Gene Culture: Molecular
Metaphor in Visual Art,” in which all of the
show’s pieces had to do with alterations of
For Anker, bio art brings to the rest of society nature in an artistic context. The show was
“ideas in which we are changing as human beprescient: by 2000, the Human Genome anings,” biologically and philosophically. There is a nounced that a ‘rough draft’ of the map of hurealm of discussion here that pushes us to conman DNA had been completed. The scientific
sider ways that technology and time are transcommunity erupted in excitement, but this enforming our species—in ways we both embrace ergy spilled over into other disciplines as well,
and repudiate.
and the art community also had its fair share of
works that sought to deliver some sort of message or comment about human genetics.
Anker began working in the iconography of
chromosomes in the late eighties. She saw geLike Anker, other artists had also already
netics as a way in which the body writes its own made the jump to bio art and were examining
storyline or script, and she was moved to be
new and radical ways to explore alterations in
more involved. “It appeared to me that somebiology and nature. Brazilian-American artist
thing had to be created as a platform in order
Eduardo Kac is generally credited with coining
to discuss these issues,” she says. “DNA, even
the term bio art during his work Time Capsule.
SciArt in America February 2015
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