Art and Biology

Art and Biology RobertJ. Lifton, who has devoted the greater part of his career as a psychiatrist to studying responses to catastrophic events and revolutionary change, once observed that the more important something is, the less likely people are to talk about it. Lifton’s observation is borne out in contemporary art by the scarcity of work about the biological revolution. Rarer still is art that in any way registers the most momentous scientific news of the late twentieth century: we are in the midst of an extinction event, a holocaust of species. Why do most artists avoid these subjects?Part of the reason is that these subjects are too new, too portentous, and too formless. Another problem is that they are too big. They will not fit into art’s traditional cubbyholes for nonhuman life: flower painting, dogs and horses, landscape, wallpaper. The biological revolution and mass extinction sprawl all over the place. They make poor subjects for art because they are too biological. In the West, art split away from nature (that is, everything nonhuman) long ago, and as a consequence the human figure and its technological extensions have occupied center stage for more than 2,500 years. Western art celebrates the myth of human exceptionalism. As Hegel put it, “Artisticbeauty stands higherthan nature. For the beauty of art is the beauty that is born . ..of the mind ...God is more honored by what mind does or makes than by the productions or formations of nature” (italics Hegel’s) [11. Few artists today would admit to such a view, butjust as greenhouse gases do not go away merely because we can see through them, so aesthetic methane lingers in the cultural air. Twentieth-century art remains almost as anthropocentric as Western art was in Hegel’s day. Non-Western art is another matter, of course. In Chinese landscape paintings, for example, humans and human works rarely occupy much space, while trees, mountains, water and air loom large. The message is clear: we are small in the scheme of things-sometimes smaller than brush strokes, since not even art is entirely human. “Artarose from nature and was not created by man,”in the words of twelfth-century commentator Han Cho [21. The spirit of some contemporary art has parallels with Chinese landscape painting . When the materials of art generate form-whether in a drip painting, an earth work, an installation with live birds, or on a computer screen-distinctions between human creativity and the energy that animates all things disappear. Once that happens , there is a possibility that nonhuman life will move toward the spiritual center of art. Art without human figures may be inhuman and dehumanizing, but the opposite isjust as likely to be true. Lascaux has more to tell us about who we are than Michelangelo does. The proper study of humankind has long since ceased to be humanity and has become life in all its ramifications-from redwood trees, dinosaurs and Galapagosfinches to base pairs of viral DNA. New meetings between art and biology are taking place-occasionally in the limelight , as were the work of the Harrisons and of Andy Goldsworthy, but more often not. A few artists are even using the tools of genetic engineering to manipulate 01997by George Gessert LEONARDO, Vol. 30,No.3, pp. 169-170 169 DNA. We will have to wait awhile for a full-fledgedart of genetic engineering-as well as arts of extinction and evolution-to appear.But at least the door is partly open. GEORGE GESSERT I