Transgenesis as Art, Art as Infection

Abstract

Adam Zaretsky’s performative art involving biotechnological methods occupies a particular place in the field of biotechnological art: His highly subversive modus operandi unfolds as provocative VivoArts hands-on workshops and lectures sharing lab skills with the untrained. His purpose is to directly include a larger public in the processes of genetic engineering in order to demystify these procedures that usually take place in scientific laboratories, and to viscerally confront participants with the actual questions arising from experiencing transgenic technology as ‘non-utilitarian research creation’. Zaretsky stages macroscopic actions with kitchen and household products, blood, excrement or executed animals, and uses sexually connoted metaphors such as ‘penetration’ and ‘injection’, in order to address biopolitical issues on the microscopic scale. His strategy can be analysed in the light of philosopher Vilém Flusser’s premonitory vision that molecular biology would become an everyday tool, and of molecular biologist François Jacob’s claim that evolution needs to be considered a phenomenon of tinkering, rather than of engineering.