Wish fulfillment and its discontents.

Abstract

At this year's Biennale international art exhibition in Venice, Italy, Patricia Piccinini, a Melbourne‐based painter and sculptor, presented sculptures of synthetic life forms (Fig. 1). Entitled ‘The Young Family’, ‘Leather Landscape’ and ‘Still Life with Stem Cells’, her art crosses the species boundaries between humans and other animals. Treading a fine line between the grotesque and the life‐like, Piccinini's art provokes deeply ambivalent emotions in the viewer. Her monstrous, mutant life forms are never repulsive, but also never take possession of our nurturing instincts. Rather, they convey their difference from and likeness to humans with an impressive dignity of their own. The interface between science and society conjured in these creatures, through the imagination of the artist and the impressive range of media she masters, is a superb example of how some of the seemingly intractable questions posed by the life sciences can be addressed: by exposing our ambivalent emotions and provoking further reflection and discussion. Figure 1. The Young Family , by Patricia Piccinini (2002). Silicone, acrylic, human hair and leather. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia. Another artist's work at the Biennale also addresses our understanding of humanity. Michal Rovner's projects are carefully choreographed configurations of people who, at first sight, appear to be forming and reforming new patterns. Photographed in black and white, Rovner's art resembles images from the early years of cinematography. The fascination that these ballet‐like arrangements evoke comes from the repetition of movements leading to change, and change leading to new repetitions. Images of the same people are projected as walking along horizontal lines, and bear a strong resemblance to patterns of genome sequencing (Fig. 2). In this artistic play of scale and size, of form and movement, of repetition, replication and change, the artist creates patterns with human figures, transforming them …