Terror Hysteria Gone Absurdist (Kurtz Case)
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[NYTr] Terror Hysteria Gone Absurdist (Kurtz Case)
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The Nation - posted July 22, 2005 (web only)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050801&s=solomon
Terror Hysteria Gone Absurdist
by Alisa Solomon
No doubt members of the Critical Art Ensemble had no desire to prove their
point by personal example when they wrote in a 2002 manifesto on
transgenics, "In the era of pancapitalism, only the corporations have the
right to manage and control the food supply. If anyone else intervenes,
it's terrorism."
But since May 2004, CAE founding member Steven Kurtz has been at the center
of an aggressive investigation launched under bioterrorism laws because of
just such an intervention. Kurtz ran afoul of authorities after he called
911 when his wife died of a heart attack. Paramedics noticed test tubes,
petri dishes and other lab equipment in his home and called the FBI.
Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was
working on projects criticizing genetically modified food, the
militarization of healthcare and the history of American biowarfare. Despite
Kurtz's well-documented and renowned career as a bioartist, the FBI
confiscated his computers and art materials, along with his car and his cat.
He was indicted last June on four counts of fraud, along with Robert
Ferrell, former head of the Department of Genetics at the University of
Pittsburgh's School of Public Health. Ferrell helped Kurtz acquire the $256
worth of bacteria used in his project--a routine practice among scientists.
CONTINUED BELOW Facing prison sentences of as much as twenty years, the two
are alleged to have breached a "material transfer agreement" (MTA) for
misleading the company supplying the bacteria. According to prosecutors,
the company believed the bacteria would be used in a classroom, not in an
art project. Moreover, Kurtz wasn't a "registered customer" of the bacteria
supplier. By all accounts, this is the first time the federal government has
stepped in and characterized an alleged MTA violation as a criminal offense.
A ruling on Kurtz's recently filed motion to dismiss the case is expected
shortly.
Kurtz's case is not only one of those quirky clampdowns on artistic
expression that keep making news around the country; it's a revealing
example of wasteful federal overreach in the "war on terror." Like many of
the 200 indictments falsely touted as terrorism convictions by President
Bush as he shilled for renewal and expansion of the Patriot Act last
month--a Washington Post investigation showed that all but thirty-nine of
those snared were charged with visa violations and other minor infractions,
pursued after terrorism hunts went nowhere--Kurtz landed in the jaws of the
Joint Task Force on Terrorism by chance. And now, like a dog with a bone
clenched in its teeth, the Feds won't let him go.
But unlike the stories of immigrants rounded up on specious suspicions of
terrorism, or scientists overzealously hounded on technicalities in their
handling of hazardous biological agents (as the ACLU decries in a new report
called "Science Under Siege: The Bush Administration's Assault on Academic
Freedom and Scientific Inquiry"), Kurtz's Kafkaesque tale is also a story of
the genuinely radical power of CAE's anti-aesthetic, boundary-smashing,
interventionist art--and of federal efforts to silence it.
The 9/11 commission famously concluded that intelligence agents missed the
hijackers' plot because of a "failure of the imagination." Despite seeing
the specter of terrorism everywhere in Kurtz's home--one FBI agent made much
of the Arabic writing that was part of one of half a dozen images on a card
advertising a museum exhibit--the authorities in this case are also
suffering from an imagination deficit: They do not know how to read CAE's
projects as art, nor art as critical discourse. As the agent noted in an
affidavit supporting the prosecutor's request for a search warrant last May,
Kurtz explained that he had laboratory equipment at home "to detect the
presence of bacteria in food" but later made "a contradictory statement"
when he said that the equipment was used to "grow bacteria for art." The
agent could not fathom that Kurtz's artwork might involve food-testing and
bacteria cultivation, and thus it was easy for him to think that Kurtz had
expressed a "contradiction" that suggested deception.
In many respects, CAE intends to blur categories. The iconoclastic
collective, formed in 1986, describes itself as "dedicated to exploring the
intersections of art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory."
For close to a decade, the group has been addressing such issues as human
reproduction technologies, eugenics and genetically modified organisms in
exhibits, performances and a sophisticated body of manifestoes and theory
(see www.critical-art.net). In one performance/installation, for example,
called "Flesh Machine," CAE screened audience members' DNA and invited them
to calculate the potential value of their bodies in the genetic market
economy. In "Cult of the New Eve," they represented the redemptive promise
and utopian rhetoric of biotechnology as the stirring faith of an
apocalyptic cult. "Contestational Biology" publicly staged experiments
attempting to reverse-engineer genetically modified plants.
As Kurtz explained in a lecture about CAE's work at the City University of
New York in March, such projects ask why science claims "materials,
processes and knowledge bases that we as citizens, as amateurs, can't use,
though they are actually legal to use. Why do they function only for
corporate and military culture?" CAE shows how the public can seize the
means of production even in this most rarefied of realms to demystify,
retard and possibly overturn biotech practices that endanger people and the
environment.
A chapter of Molecular Invasion called "Fuzzy Biological Sabotage" suggests
how. Distinctly counseling against arson, violence, the use of toxins and
other unlawful tactics, the authors call for "genetic hacking and reverse
engineering." The fuzzy saboteur, they state, "has to stand on that
ambiguous line between the legal and the illegal" in "areas that have not
yet been fully regulated."
Ambiguity is a quality seldom appreciated by federal prosecutors. Working
with benign bacteria in his own home, Kurtz was positioned well on the legal
side of the line. But CAE is challenging the corporate, military and
government monopoly on biotech information. In the name of counterterrorism,
the feds are trying to keep such information out of the hands of dissidents
and citizens in general--precisely where CAE aims to place it. Seizing the
tragic occasion of his wife's death, they are persecuting Steve Kurtz to
warn off anyone who dares to contest the joint enterprise of science,
profit, Pentagon and state.
Copyright © 2005 The Nation
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