CULTURING SHAME
Karen Thornton:
shame bacteria, 1997, bacteria, agar;
courtesy the artist
Karen Thornton's investigations into biology co-opt the processes of science using metaphor as the hypothesis.
Artworks using bacteria or other lifeforms become more common as we extend the boundaries of art. Likewise, our definitions of life are progressively challenged with the use of living media. Presently, I am fascinated by the divisions and categories we use in classifications of life, the overlaps and disparities. These same disparities exist in moral and cultural values. I seek a means of reconciling the logic of classification with conditions of singularity and individuality. When a unique form is assigned a categorical place, its uniqueness is diminished by similarity within and reinforced by difference without.
My primary attraction to scientific methods and processes centers around the opportunity to provide decisions when there are an infinite number of possible outcomes at any given juncture. This choice (of science's practices) is both parody and homage. It is a homage to the spirit of exploration and the sense of pure research allowed by science, for the sake of furthering knowledge and encouraging invention which science allows, and with all its subsequent effects on human philosophy and individual self-understanding. However, I am suspicious of methodology by rote, though I understand the need for a recipe of action. My suspicions find their origins in the scandals of our times: science as statistics, justifying sexism, racism and specism, eugenics supporting mass sterilizations, Thalidomide babies, Valium and Prozac (as a means of 'normalizing'), and more recently, Monsanto's monarch butterflies killed by transgenic crops in lab experiments. Blinded practices and the misuse of knowledge, removed from social and environmental considerations by economic or anti-social motives, create tragically thoughtless situations.
I desire more knowledge of scientific practice, but not to the point where its implementation becomes prejudicial or predictable. Parody is present in my disdain for the prerequisites: to practise or appear to practise science without the appropriate credentials mocks the legitimacy of scientific practice, which deserves to be called into question given its frequently egregious implementations.
I am drawn to methods of recombinance and alchemy in order to recreate the moment where a value achieves its inception as individual (dividual) form, as all complex matter (presumably) is iterative from an initial state of simplicity. Alchemy, as an adventure in both exploration and invention, is attractive, as even at the height (or end?) of its practice its methods were not yet codified.
In the fall of 1997 I discovered a roadkill garter snake in the lane behind my apartment. I collected it (carefully slipping a plastic bag over my hand) and returned to my kitchen where I donned rubber gloves and skinned it with a sharp knife.
In swallow, I combined (recombined) the snake's skin with a supermarket apple in order to revisit the beginnings of temptation ('the Fall'). Though I had hoped it would dehydrate, the snakeapple inevitably began to fester, oozing noxious liquid. I realized the process was not complete, that the decay was signalling further meaning. This piece also generated its own sequel: the culturing shame series. According to the biblical model, temptation instigated the invention and development of shame. In this work, the identification of shame must translate to a legitimate, accessible form. I chose text and simple skeletal forms of fig leaves as symbols to illustrate a meaning which would be understood without ambiguity. The liquid produced by combining the snake and the apple was then used to write the letters of the word shame on individual Petri dishes. These letters eventually disappeared, as the bacterial colonies grew in the dish. Culturing shame involved the propagation of an initial event to a moral conclusion, reflecting the process by which shame as a social construct grew, colonizing cultures.
Chicago-based artist Karen Thornton works in electronic and sculptural media. Her work often addresses the inherent meanings of materials, using their characteristics and physical qualities as content. Karen's current explorations consist of kinetic/interactive installation, biological explorations and internet projects: www.artic.edu/~kthornto, thornton@proteometrics.com
