Brookhaven College School of the Arts

Forum Gallery

1.9-2.1.2006

Christine Chin

A Taste of Questions

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

James Baldwin ¹

Wise men forever have known that a nation lives on what its body assimilates, as well as on what its mind acquires as knowledge.

M.F.K. Fisher ²

Christine Chin's elegantly fabricated photographs, positioned within the conceit of The New Genetically Modified Foods Cookbook, deploy parody to problematize the biogenetic engineering of the food supply as an aspect of the technological (re)construction of nature. ³ The New Genetically Modified Foods Cookbook elicits questions regarding biogenetic engineering. Those questions presuppose broader questions of the relation of human agency to nature, and the nature of nature: an always already pregiven alterity to the human, a domain subsuming the human, or a construct of human agency. Chin's practice entails the employment of mass-media genres-the illustrated cookbook, the advertising food shot-and thus places into question the relation of visual culture in its broader manifestations and visual art regarded as a critical enterprise. Chin's work equiprimordially exploits and questions the presumed evidentiary character of photographs. In doing so, broader questions are elicited. How do we know things? What is the relation between artworks and knowledge? What is the relation between art and life? Between aesthetics and politics?

While actual genetically modified foods typically appear no different from their non-genetically modified antecedents and are thus effectively invisible, Chin's images of genetically modified foods are distinctly visible as vegetable-human hybrids. As representations of hypothetical vegetable-human hybrids, Chin's images have polyvalent sources of their disturbing affect and humor. The parody of the cookbook format is in itself humorous, at once entailing a thoroughness and care in its execution, and hyperbole and irony. So also the visual conception of the foods themselves, presupposing a compelling illusion, and an exaggeration of transgenic biotechnology to produce an alterity that is both disturbing if not disturbational, ⁴ and humorous. One function of humor is to reduce tension by dispelling anxiety, and part of one's response to Chin's hybrids is nervous laughter, for though one recognizes the toetatoe, Grinny Smith apples, heartachokes, or finger carrots to be biological impossibilities, the image and its contextualization compels credibility. Given the credibility commonly ascribed to ostensibly straight, unmanipulated photographs as "a kind of deposit of the real itself" ⁵ predicated on the indexicality ⁶ of the photographic image, one responds to the image not as a thing seen 'as if' but simply as a thing 'as is'. One may well urge, with Geoffrey Batchen, "that the production of any and every photograph involves practices of intervention and manipulation of some kind." ⁷ Yet the credibility attributed to photographs remains, even if incredulity might be a more prudent presupposition. The hyperbole inferred in response to Chin's work is such that one knows, or thinks one knows, or wishfully thinks one knows, that what one sees is a fiction, though it appears not to be so. One is thus positioned in tension between the modalities of the impossible and the possible, between what the mind knows and what is presented in visual perception, between cognitive and perceptual domains of evidence. This situation of tension between mind and body, cognition and perception, intellect and the biological ground of lived experience, under lays the tense broader arena of modernity and of postmodernity, a distant echo of the dualism devolving from Descartes' res cogitans and res extensa.

Beyond the specific address of issues entailed in biotechnology and the food supply, and the relation of culture and nature, Chin's work intervenes in the arena of cultural production within modernism and postmodernism, entailing the presupposition that the means of dissemination of visual information within the social formation can be reflexively deployed to critique that information and the mechanisms of its circulation.

This intervention is deployed in an arena of art as a generic practice versus an instantiation of a specific medium, for though particular media are entailed in the facture of the work, the instantiation of particular media are subordinate to the generic practice of art as such, which obtains at a metalevel with regard to the level of the specific media employed. ⁸ Chin's New Genetically Modified Foods Cookbook engages an intertextuality that bridges mass-cultural images and artworks to enable the criticality of the latter with respect to the former. The artness of the artwork The New Genetically Modified Foods Cookbook turns not on a specific medium constituting the work as art, but rather on the uses of a specific medium, in which the properties of the medium and the implications of these properties are exploited, to enable the artness of the work qua critique to obtain at a metalevel beyond the employment of the specific medium.

If that turn, that strategy, has flowed now for some while, since the appearance-or non-appearance-of a certain Fountain, the questions remain with us, as it were laid bare.

1. James Baldwin, Creative Process (New York: Ridge Press, 1962), 17.
2. M. F. K. Fisher, "How to be a Sage Without Hemlock," anthologized in The Art of Eating (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 189. [Initially published in 1942 in How to Cook a Wolf.]
3. Other engagements of genetic engineering by artists including Steve Kurtz, Gary Schneider, Catherine Chalmers, Gail Wight, Eduardo Kac, Beatriz de Costa, and Virgil Wong are considered in Christine Chin, "Genomic Art: Seeing Controversy," presented at the Society for Photographic Education Southwest Conference, Denver, Colorado, October, 2004; http://www.unm.edu/~cmchin/genomicart.htm. April Katz' presentation "Photography and the New Genetic Pluralism" at the Society for Photographic Education National Conference, Chicago March 25, 2006 suggests the metaphoric use of genetics for engaging issues of genres of artist's practice, as does the theme of the 2006 Southern Graphics Council printmaking conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison: Genetic ImPrint, www.art.wisc.edu/sgc2006/.
4. Arthur Danto distinguishes artworks that are disturbing from artworks that are disturbational thusly" "it is disturbation when the insulating boundaries between art and life are breached in some what the mere representation of disturbing things cannot achieve just because hey are representations and responded to as such." "Art and Disturbation," The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 117-133.
5. Rosalind E. Krauss, "The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 112.
6. Charles S. Peirce, "Logic As Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," ed. Justus Buchler, Philosophical Writings of Pierce. (New York: Dover, 1955), 96-119; and Pierce, Collected Papers, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss. 8 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958. An 'index' in Pierce's semiotics is a sign having its reference to the object it denotes through being affected by the object.
7. Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 139.
8. Thierry deDuve, Kant After Duchamp. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Rosalind E. Krauss, "A Voyage on the North Sea" Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition [Thirty-First Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, National Gallery of Art, London, 1999] (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000).