Over the past two or three years Patricia Piccinini’s exhibitions have been widely covered in newspaper art columns and by talking heads on television arts programs. Since graduating from VCA in 1991 Piccinini has built up a remarkable body or, more properly, bodies of work. The central concern of her art is to ‘problematise’ the taken-for-granted opposition between nature and science. The pairings that she seems most interested in deconstructing are technology and embodiment, and birth and construction.
There is no doubt that she has incredible skills in design and concept. Her works are extremely successful in doing what she intends them to do: reaching out and capturing our emotions. In her early works, which were more weighted towards inserting the possibility of humanity into machinery — for instance, the pastel pink-for-girls and blue-for-boys miniature prime movers of Truck Babies — we saw her skill at finding a direct path to the viewer’s ‘cute-reflex’. Using this same approach, though flipping the emphasis to look at the possibilities of technological intervention into human and animal life, the impact of Piccinini’s more recent works is even stronger. Using silicone and acrylic sculptures — implanted with hair and painted to enhance a sense of flesh-tones and veins just beneath the ‘skin’ — she has created an alternate world of hybrid humanity.
We are Family, currently showing at the Bendigo Art Gallery, which includes five sculptural installations and an animated video, was the star attraction at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003. It has been feted, both prior to her departure and on her return. Though most of the works have been exhibited previously (Retrospectology: The World According to Patricia Piccinini at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art early in 2003) there is good reason for its popular appeal. The humanoid sculptural installations, in particular, are extremely successful at mimicking life.
In the tradition of workshop art, Piccinini conceived of and designed the flesh-like sculptures but did not form them herself and perhaps as a result — playing out of her own creative practices — there is a disjunction between her work and its subject matter. They are asymptotic of life: like the lines of an asymptote, the closer the sculptures come to looking alive, the more obvious it becomes that they are not and never will be. In their successful impersonation of life, the sculptures become flaccid, dead simulations of the real and Piccinini is, ironically, as abstracted from their creation as are scientists from the social consequences of the biotechnologies they develop. By extension, there is an unbridgeable disparity between Piccinini’s desire to stir our emotions — to make us feel kindly towards all potential life-forms — and the negation of difference implicit in the biotechnologies her works are about. As such, her success in connecting with our emotional responses, in all but one of the exhibits, gives her sentimentality an unintentionally sinister edge.
The installation that greets one on entering the exhibition space, Team WAF (Precautions), is the least successful piece of the show. Consisting of six mutated motorcycle helmets of various shapes and sizes that, one imagines, could be worn by the genetically modified creatures, Piccinini intends them to evoke a sense of speed. It’s not difficult to imagine some creation from Jim Henson’s Creature Works wearing one of Piccinini’s creations in the pod race scene in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
While successful in suggesting speed and acceleration, Piccinini fails to capture the increasing pace of technological advance. These objects evoke the speed of machines — motorcycle drag-racing comes to mind — rather than a sense of technology outstripping our capacity to respond to it. And although the shapes of the helmets imply they might be worn by some of the other creatures featured in the exhibition, there is nothing in the hybrid creatures that populate We are Family to mirror the possibility of a connection. Quite the opposite. The creatures are decidedly fleshy and uniformly on the bestial side of the human/animal divide that Piccinini is presumably attempting to question. In execution, the helmets are works of high-kitsch, reminiscent of her earlier works Truck Babies and Car Nuggets, but at variance with the rest of the pieces that make up We are Family.
The other works that one is successively drawn through in the open space of We are Family more directly naturalise the possibilities of biotechnology. The Young Family, for example, has a mammalian-like animal suckling her young, using the emotional attachments of motherhood in a mawkish appeal to our sentiments. This work is interesting insofar as it suggests the existence of a second generation that came about through natural means — birth — carrying with it the blurring of the natural and the biotechnological. If a bio-technologically created animal has ‘natural’ off-spring, does that somehow erase the artificial circumstances of its own generation? Is the act of giving birth a way in to a more natural order? Piccinini herself seems more interested in using the common experience of birth and nurturing to bridge the gap between the biotechnological and the natural. However, appealing to the universally recognisable experience of caring for young is insufficient grounds on which to base a common humanity. And in pitching to the viewer’s gut reaction, the darker possibilities of the implied origins of this imagined animal — genetic engineering — are elided.
This subjective and personal approach to biotechnology is even more clearly evident in Leather Landscape and Still Life with Stem Cells. Leather Landscape is composed of a white leather upholstered pedestal, not unlike a bulbous car seat, populated by a number of humanly naked, meerkat-like creatures who are variously watchful, curious and perched on guard. One of these persuasively cute anthropomorphisms peers in mutual curiosity at a small child. Piccinini pulls no punches in her quest for sentimental appeal: only the steely-hearted can resist a meerkat. Still Life with Stem Cells, similarly, has a small girl sitting amongst a number of amorphous blobs of ‘flesh’. Holding one like a pet, she looks on at the others with innocent awe and wonderment.
Through these pieces, Piccinini is almost urging the viewer to do the same: suspend judgment, don’t think, don’t speak, just ask yourself could you put yourself in the little girl’s or the toddler’s position and accept these beings with childlike innocence? But lifelike as her sculptures are, they are simultaneously oddly cadaverous. The rendered flesh-tones of the silicone and acrylic forms have the cold and slightly moist quality of a corpse. Prosthetic limbs made of the same substances but that make lesser claims to being life-like are, ironically, less obviously lifeless.
To the side of these three pieces, which dominate the central space, is the strongest departure from this sentimental attitude, Game Boys Advanced. It is by far the most successful of the works that make up We are Family. Game Boys Advanced is composed of two lifelike boys standing together, one playing with a Game Boy hand-held computer game as the other looks on. Curator Linda Michael has done an excellent job placing the boys deep in the exhibition space. Seen only from the corner of the eye, one could mistake them for two boys dragged to the gallery by their parents who have pulled out the Game Boy to relieve their boredom. Moving closer you realise they’re part of the exhibition and then make the further discovery that they are genetically modified. These twinned — cloned — boys are prematurely aged: their hair is wispy and thin, their skin is wrinkled and rough, showing the marks of age. Crow’s feet frame their eyes, and patches of body hair more properly found on adults sprout from their forearms.
The subtlety of the work, which is in stark contrast to the fantastic creatures in Leather Landscape and The Young Family, is the key to its success. The ordinariness of the boy’s stance and the clothes they’re wearing is eerie; you almost expect them to start moving. And the unintentional suggestion of lifelessness in their material composition is less obvious because it is in fact more appropriate to the subject: they are dying. Referring to the premature aging of Dolly the sheep, Game Boys Advanced invites a far more complex, ambiguous response to biotechnology than any other work in the show. Here there is potential for biotechnology to be seen as a double-edged sword.
Piccinini, however, seems almost determined to resist any such interpretation. The ‘normality’ of the boys suggests they are not victims, but autonomous agents. She asks for a personalised response to them. The question is whether we love these post-humans. Of course one would — one could not fail to look after and care for such beings as one would for any other child. Similarly, primed by the common plea for conservation after centuries of environmental exploitation her daring us to love a herd of weird, sentimentalised beings is likely to fall on fertile ground. However, these are hardly the most pressing or pertinent points connected with biotechnology.
In the final piece, which is confined to a separate room, the animated video Plasmid Region plays in a continuous loop. In it we look down as if from a glass-bottomed boat into a cluster of ‘life-forms’ — that are somewhere between an anemone and a breast — erupting from a fleshy seascape. These are representational of the possibilities of embryonic stem-cells, eternally self-perpetuating in a protected environment. This hybrid matter is repeatedly giving birth to liver-coloured, irregularly shaped blobs.
Piccinini’s inspiration for this film was seeing heart cells cultured from embryonic stem cells beating in a Petrie-dish, shown to her by a scientist whose father had died of heart disease. She presses the personal story of loss on the part of the scientist who cultured them. As the curator puts it, ‘such a deeply personal response to the issues involved in the medical intervention into human life is at the core of her art’. Piccinini herself has described this work as ‘the heart of the show’.
If so, it is a strange heart. If you leave behind the personalised narrative of filial/paternal loss, her choice of imagery uncovers a perversity in her sentimentality. Breasts, which figure strongly as maternal images in the rest of the show, are now reformed as giving ‘life’ to placental shapes. Like the Sacred Heart, this breast bleeds life. Breasts ordinarily give sustenance to new life as do placenta, and yet these re-figured forms utterly negate their imagined — and embryonic stem cells literal — origins. That is, human embryos.
Piccinini seems to see her role as nothing more than opening a space for ‘questioning’, but the discussion that she wants to promote is curiously slanted. When it doesn’t descend into fantasy representation, it confines itself to wholly personal responses to biotechnology and its implications. Larger questions about biotechnology and what it means to be human are studiously avoided. Other, more probable and conceivable consequences of biological techno-science, such as Third World women being exploited as egg farms don’t come into it. Indeed, Piccinini’s mammalian beings actively divert attention from such contentious ethical dilemmas, taking the viewer instead into a world where we’re asked simply to love and accept ever more strange and weird mutations of the (post)-human.
As such, We are Family has roughly the equivalent critical edge of a Hallmark greeting card, infused with trite postmodern calls to accept difference. Her works are ultimately irrelevant to real-world science, and the cuteness of the majority of her subjects does not invite questioning, it merely affirms that biotechnology is really quite harmless — it’s all just a matter of aesthetic surfaces. Further, the personal nature of the responses that are invited seems determined to ensure that any deeper questions about the more troubling possibilities of techno-science is neatly elided in favour of a question of whether one has the emotional fortitude to accept beings radically different from any known species.
Nor is there any sense that the practical outcome of these technologies actually undermines difference and abnormality. The reproductive technologies being represented here, and the research surrounding them, actively efface difference. We are asked to accept and love the difference of clones or hybrid ‘monsters’, creatures that are notionally the byproduct of technologies that in the ‘real world’ are targeted at removing naturally occurring genetic differences such as Down Syndrome. In practice the thrust of these technologies is not ‘to find beauty in a world that can never be perfect’ as Piccinini would have it, but quite the opposite: it is to find beauty only in an imagined perfection.
Chris Scanlon is co-editor of Arena Magazine. Kate Cregan is
a post-doctoral fellow in the Globalism Institute, RMIT.
