Book chapter
Making Monsters: Bio-Engineering and Visual Arts Practice
Corporeality and Culture, pp.71-84
Routledge
2015
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Abstract
It is not often that a headline in The New York Times is used to report the death
of an artwork, but this is the strange fate that awaited the Tissue Culture and Art
Project’s Victimless Leather during its exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA) in New York, in May 2008 [see Figure 4.1]. Victimless Leather, a tiny
tissue-engineered coat exhibited in an enclosed incubator, is a bio-sculpture: a
living organism grown onto a polymer structure that has been cut into the
desired shape (in this case, that of a tiny coat), and then seeded with mouse
fibroblast cells. The tissue is cultivated in sterile conditions, and the resulting
piece exhibited in an incubator, so that it can continue to be nourished with
antibiotics, serum and media that enable the cells to attach themselves to the
porous polymer and grow around it. During its New York MOMA exhibition,
however, this process went awry: the tissue began to grow so fast that the
incubator could no longer function properly. The cells outgrew their polymer
structure; one of the arms was falling off. The coat was not decomposing; on
the contrary, it was proliferating too rapidly for its environment. The New York
Times’s headline announced its untimely demise with patent relish: ‘Museum
Kills Live Exhibit’. Initially, the newspaper reports, Victimless Leather had been
‘unsettling alive. Until recently, that is. Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the
museum, had to kill the coat’ (Schwartz). After the incubator had been turned
off, Oron Catts, one of the two artists responsible for the piece, declared
himself pleased with this turn of events, cheered the ‘slightly Frankensteinian
sensibility of “life growing out of control”’ (Schwartz).
Details
- Title
- Making Monsters: Bio-Engineering and Visual Arts Practice
- Creators
- Elizabeth Stephens - Southern Cross University, Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Publication Details
- Corporeality and Culture, pp.71-84
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Identifiers
- 991012927089202368
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Book chapter