Responding to a call for “wild artists” by the curators of the Multispecies Salon, Adam Zaretsky gave the questions orbiting around the exhibit a whimsical and provocative twist. Zartesky who describes himself as a “demented naturalist”, was already widely renowned for framing microbes, insects and plants as creative agents.
Years before the Salon, at the Salina Art Center in Kansas, he installed The Workhorse Zoo – juxtaposing “great hopes invested in the products of genetic engineering” with “biophobic visions of environmental apocalypse.” Zarestky lived inside a biosecure container for a week – putting himself on display as a representative of Homo Sapiens, a creature that he regards as a “spectacular life form”.
He lived cheek to jowl with mutant fruit flies inside a biosecure tank and documented interactions among multiple species – fruit flies, yeast, Escherichia coli bacteria, Xenopus frogs, mustard plants, zebra fish and mice. As church groups, lawyer’s luncheons, art appreciation groups, goth-punk contingents and local farmers filtered through the Salina Art Center, he offered these spectators fresh beer and tastes of fried albino frogs (pictured below), zebra fish, mustard greens, and mice – all organisms “whose genomes have been sequenced, partially annotated and altered”. By displaying and eating this motley array of critters, Zaretsky hoped to provoke a rethinking of fixed moral positions about biotech research and catalyze open-ended discussions.
Zaretsky was also celebrating aspects of wild nature – potentially dangerous, risky and out of control life – blurring the distinction between the “new wild”, a realm populated by creatures that have emerged amidst regimes of biological control, and the “old wild” where feral animals like wild geese and wild boars have long roamed free. Bringing attention to where new wild things are, or where they might come to be, Zaretsky staged another spectacle at the Multispecies Salon in New Orleans. Alongside a tank of GloFish® (pictured below left), purchased from a local PetCo Superstore, Zaretsky posted a critique of laissez faire approaches to biocapitalism and a libertarian manifesto for modified organisms which highlighted tensions between environmental risks and “mutant animal rights”.
In the nearby brackish waters of the Gulf Coast, Adam Zaretsky released a group of reproductively viable GloFish. In tandem he crafted an “International Release Document” that he displayed at the Multispecies Salon, which said, “Speed mixing of traits does breed inherently irresponsible, interspecies hazards… [But,] transgenic life should have a chance to run wild for its own sake, not just for the sake of profit”. Perhaps deflecting the alarm of some environmental purists, Zaretsky framed pictures of him “liberating” these workhorses of biotechnology with a big banner alleging: “BP killed my GloFish®!” Thanking corporate deregulation for the oil spill, Zaretsky suggested that wild agents of capitalism have generated anarchistic destruction and “a prodigious flight of forms”.
By celebrating forms of deviance, and the uncalculated promises contained in wild products of biocapitalism, Zaretsky pointed to the potential of wayward life to blossom in wild profusion. Rejoicing in the liberation of critters from the cages of biotech laboratories, Zaretsky disrupted multispecies relations that were producing spectacular forms of life.
Further Reading
Kirksey, Eben et al. (2014) “Life In The Age Of Biotechnology” in The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 196-201.
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