It's art, Jim, but not as we know it

SCIENCE GALLERY:It's easy to think of exhibitions as collections of inanimate objects, but 'Visceral' at the Science Gallery is a different beast altogether, as AIDAN DUNNEdiscovers

HERE USED TO be an annual event called the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. It was a showcase for contemporary art, but Visceral at the Science Gallery in Trinity College gives the term “living art” a whole new meaning, because the 15 artworks it features are indeed living. As in, they are alive or, more precisely, they are “semi-living entities”. And as gallery director Patrick-John Gorman puts it: “There is something that makes us a little uneasy, perhaps even queasy, about the idea of creating artworks from living tissue.”

Visceral marks the 10th anniversary of SymbioticA, an artistic laboratory devoted to a hands-on engagement with the life sciences. It’s based at the University of Western Australia in Perth and headed by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. Catts, resident in Dublin for the duration of the exhibition, looks the part. With his serious demeanour, his long, dark, combed-back hair and neat goatee, he could be a research scientist from central casting. But he’s not.

“This is art, not science,” he is at pains to emphasise. “I’m a staunch believer in the integrity of disciplines.”

SymbioticA is located in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the university, but the people who spend time on working residencies there are artists. Catts himself originally studied design. But as he did so, it dawned on him that we live in an age when engineering has moved wholesale into the area of “living systems”. And, as he put it, once the engineers move in, designers quickly follow. The possibilities of tissue engineering intrigued and disturbed him. “I thought: We don’t really have a cultural language to deal with all these questions.” And he has since set about addressing them from a cultural rather than a strictly scientific standpoint.

People from all over the world go to work at SymbioticA, for minimum residencies of three months. Artists need time to acclimatise.

“We’ve worked out the typical lifecycle of a resident,” Catts says with a mischievous smile. “Initially they’re very taken by what you might call the mise-en-scene of science. Then they find out a bit about the way it works, how science is done, the technology, they become adjusted to it. Then they have a kind of existential crisis, and they wonder about the nature of what they are doing.” That’s the point at which he reminds them they are making art, not science.

It is art immersed in science, though, and dealing head-on with the issues raised by developments in biological sciences. One of the artists taking part is Kathy High, from the US. Her project is called Blood Wars and the title describes it pretty accurately. She was prompted, she says, by her own experience of autoimmune disease and was tutored by an immunologist. In the laboratory setting – the fully equipped lab is there in the gallery – she takes blood samples from paired volunteers. Squeamish visitors have been taken aback by this.

“Then we separate out the white blood cells from each sample, inject them with different fluorescent stains and put them together in a Petri dish.” Over a 13-hour period a time-lapse camera provides a highly magnified account of what ensues. More often than not the adjacent sets of cells vie for dominance. “Often there is one clear winner,” High explains, “but sometimes not. Odd things happen, some cells don’t compete. Some can self-destruct for no clear reason.”

The time-lapse films of the magnified, green- and red-coloured cells are curiously compelling and aesthetically striking.

Upstairs in the Science Gallery you’ll find one of the largest exhibits, a huge, very strange and rather brilliant installation called Silent Barrage. It’s a collaborative work involving a group of artists and scientists, and Dr Steve Potter’s lab at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. Collectively they call themselves Neurotica. A whole room is filled with pillars, between which you can walk. Little automated devices, “pole robots”, scurry up and down the pillars intermittently, spinning around them and inscribing them with bands of ink lines.

At the heart of all this architectonic activity there’s something tiny. “They’ve grown nerve cells,” Catts explains, “over an array of electrodes.” You can see them on screen. Your movement through the room can trigger bursts of neuronal activity that set the pole robots noisily running up and down and busily scribbling away.

It’s bit like walking through an ingeniously simplified model of a brain, and it’s really enjoyable, if slightly spooky, but in this case there is also an underlying aim to the methodology, Catts notes. That is to try to learn about the uncontrolled bursts of activity that are characteristic not only of cultured nerve cells but also in epileptic attacks.

There’s much more, each project taking off in some new, disconcerting direction. Canadian Tagny Duff shows a set of miniature handmade books fashioned from what turns out to be discarded human and pig tissue, preserved in a portable freezer unit. Equally chillingly, Abhishek Hazra from India imagines a future time when human breast milk has become a prized resource in biotechnological warfare. Australians Tanya Visosevic and Guy Ben-Ary show a nano film, viewable through a microscope. American Paul Vanouse wittily uses the DNA of an “industrially produced organism” to make us wonder about the supposed infallibility of the individual DNA fingerprint. “A DNA fingerprint,” as Catts puts it, “is a constructed image.”

In the end the show isn’t about technology, though there’s a lot of technology involved. “From my perspective,” Catts says, “the show is about life. What we see are non-verbal representations of what life is and what it means to be ‘alive’. We cover a wide spectrum, from strands of DNA to cell tissue to organisms to ecosystems. The idea of life being a raw material that can be engineered is disturbing but it’s one we have to deal with.”

One of the issues attendant on using living tissue is what happens to it when the exhibition ends. “Do you just flick the switch and let it die?” So Visceral is building to a climactic event on February 24th called, appropriately, The Funeral.

“These are real ethical questions. What respect do we accord the life we’re working with?” If it interests you, you can attend, for a last look at the exhibition and a discussion on just how alive biological art can be.

Visceral at the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Pearse Street, Dublin 2. It ends on February 25th. Admission to The Funeral is free, but booking is essential at sciencegallery.com/events, or call 01-8964107