The Life Cycle of a Common Weed: Viral Imaginings in Plant-Human Encounters

It was like a scene from Repo Man (1984) in which all the products are brandless and packaged with the same blue-on-white text, indicating exactly what they are and nothing else: milk, beer, corn flakes. The hardware and garden supply in my farm community sold forty-pound bags labeled “dried blood” in generic red-on-white. The huge bags were piled by the door, as if to remind you to grab one on your way out among other sundries like chewing gum, flashlights and pocket screwdrivers. I marveled to think that more than my own body weight in dried blood slouched by the cash registers, and what was it for anyway? My mother, an amateur botanist, explained that blood is a fertilizer high in nitrogen and can be dried and sold as a by-product of industrial slaughterhouses. Though blood is not new to agricultural systems. Lush gardens sprouted with the blood of slain beasts appear in the Talmud and in twelfth-century Persian poetry (Stanley 1993; Bynum 2007; Khayyám 1901). The blood of mortal wounds from protagonists of ancient Greek tales gave rise to hyacinths, violets, and crocuses, as well as mythological plants, such as the prometheion and the moly (Conticelli 2001). I am enamored of blood as a substance and as a symbol of vitality. But as I am a lifelong carrier of the hepatitis C virus, my own blood carries with it the sinister potential of seeding another person with disease. I was intrigued that my own blood—hazardous to humans—could nonetheless be useful to plants.

This nugget of horticultural information lay dormant until the concept for an artwork germinated years later: Life Cycle of a Common Weed. The idea is to stage an encounter between plants and humans involving the exchange of nutrients. Blood from a human body nourishes dandelions with nitrogen. In turn, the root and leaves of the dandelion provide nutritious and medicinal sustenance to the human. The artwork exists as a performance, visual documents, an event, and a perpetual cultivation. In the narrative that follows, I describe the emergence of Life Cycle of a Common Weed from a web of embodied knowledges, multispecies encounters, cultural symbols and practices, dialogues, and lateral transfers. I infect the philosophical abstractions of the artist’s statement genre with a situated autoethnography that joins the artwork to nodes of questions and contexts, but by no means circumscribes its entire network of connectivity.

A growing fatigue with the militancy used to address human-viral encounters led me to develop a series of artworks, including Viral Confections, Tea Party to Befriend a Virus, and The Knit Virus (2006–2008). The sculptures are activated in public settings to invite nondidactic discussion about chronic illness, hepatitis C, art, and medicine. The arrangement facilitates free-form, public conversation about matters typically confined to private medical settings. The artworks engage what anthropologist Heather Paxson (2008) calls a “post-Pasteurian microbiopolitics.” Paxson extends Foucault’s (1976) concept of “biopolitics,” to describe the “potentialities of collaborative human and microbial culture practices” (Paxson 2008, 17) among artisanal cheese makers who cultivate the triumph of tasty and edible bacteria over pathogenic ones. Beyond cheese, Paxson’s microbiopolitics imply the structuring of interspecies transactions. They are at once intimately micropolitical in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) detailed, supple movements of power and subversion that complement the rigid centralization of macropolitics (208–231); and microbiological in scale, extending out into the molar realm of populations through globalized trade and travel, where the (micro)biopolitical becomes a geopolitical concern of sovereign powers (see generally Braun 2007). In resistance to this sovereign language, I am interested in delineating a micropolitical space to air the complicated antagonisms, codependencies, and evolutions in our relationships to pathogens. The friend-or-foe model hardly suffices for human interrelations; how could it suffice for human-microbial relations? Fear-inducing and xenophobic language used to describe disease frightens people away from learning how to safely and intentionally coexist with microbes. In these artworks, I seek not to normalize viral encounters but to...