LAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERY AT THE DR HAROLD SCHENBERG ART CENTRE

3 OCTOBER - 5 DECEMBER 2015

CURATED BY ORON CATTS WITH JENNIFER JOHUNG

AND ELIZABETH STEPHENS

Tané Andrews 2.0, 2015

Art Orienté Objet WTF?!?, 2014-15 Afterman, 2015

France Cadet Dog[LAB]: Flying Pig, 2004,

Oron Catts Shanghai Earmouse, 2014-15

Oron Catts, Megan Moe Beitiks and Chris Cobilis an Ear for an Eye, 2015

Oron Catts and Robert Foster Triptych of Dismembered Immortality, 2015

Beatriz de Costa Dying for the Other, 2011

Donna Franklin EarMouse Such Sweet Music, 2015

LuYang Cancer babies, 2014-15

Pelling Lab Ear, 2015

Patricia Piccinini, Protein lattice, Subset - Red Portrait, 1997, Type c colour photograph.

LIST OF WORKS

Patricia Piccinini Protein Lattice, 1997 Tender, 2014

Nina Sellars OBLIQUE, 2008

Nina Sellars and anonymous Documentation images of the filming of Stelarc’s Extra Ear surgery, Los Angeles, 2006.

Stelarc PROPEL- Ear on Arm Performance, 2015 PROPEL- Ear on Arm Installation, 2015

The Tissue Culture & Art Project and Stelarc Extra Ear ¼ Scale, 2003

Joseph Vacanti’s lab, Harvard Medical School Objects from the lab, 2000-14

Oron Catts and Robert Fosters, Triptych of Dismembered Immortality), 2015, bioreactors and living tissue, variable

DeMonstrableDuring a 1995 episode of the popular BBC science television show “Tomorrow’s World,” the presenter paused during an account of new breakthroughs in tissue engineering to warn the viewer: “You might find this next piece of film a bit disturbing, but we think it is such a significant medical advance that you really ought to see it.” With this caveat, the BBC unveiled the first footage of what has since become known as the Earmouse: a hairless mouse with a human ear growing from its back, alive and displayed within a glass petri dish.

The presenter acknowledged that the Earmouse looked like a Frankensteinian creation. Certainly its appearance was a startling, uncanny moment, and yet it was one that would be immediately reproduced around the world. The image of the Earmouse became one of the definitive scientific images of the end of the twentieth century; evidence of the seemingly limitless capacity of science to remake or engineer life.

Like Frankenstein’s creation, the Earmouse has been contextualised as part of a long tradition of scientific monsters, which have been popular objects of public display since at least the Middle Ages. The word “monster” derives from the Latin verb monstrum (to show or warn) and traditionally monsters were understood as omens, portents or signs.

While science has always been interested in the study of monsters, what distinguishes the present period is the ability to manufacture them. Fictional scientists like Doctors Frankenstein, Moreau and Jekyll, and their impact on the popular imagination, serve as a reminder of cultural fears about this ability. The figure of the monster is a warning that something vital will always escape the control of the creator.

When it was first revealed 20 years ago, the Earmouse represented both these established fears and a warning about something yet to come: a brave new world in which organs and body parts are grown to measure, and surrealist dreams come alive.

* * *

In the two decades since the first appearance of the Earmouse, living matter has continued to be stretched; pulled; deformed and reformed; synthesised and renewed, while suspended, reversed and rerouted in time. While the Earmouse has come to represent all that we can now do with and to life, this exhibition situates and contextualises its influence, and the plasticity of living matter more widely, within contemporary art as well as scientific and popular

Art Oriente Object, WTF?!?, 2014-15, antler carving, 30 x 10 x 10 cm

culture. As the forms and temporalities of life expand, the manipulation of living matter has instigated visual, spatial, and performative modes of inquiry alongside biological and technological developments.

From the back of a mouse and into a human, the growth and implantation of an ear is taken up by the performance artist Stelarc. Stelarc has been exploring alternate body anatomies since the mid-1970s; in 2006, he had an ear formed with a biocompatible scaffold surgically placed under the skin of his forearm. Nina Sellars’ Oblique series, a set of tightly framed images of Stelarc’s surgery, contextualise this procedure of body modification in terms of Renaissance anatomy lessons and the operation theatre. Prior to his surgery, Stelarc collaborated with the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) to grow an ear, Extra Ear ¼ Scale (2003). Using very similar processes as those used for the Earmouse, TC&A cultured cells from various human and non-human sources, and seeded them onto a polymer scaffold in the shape of Stelarc’s scaled-down ear, demonstrating and questioning the promise to grow living organs outside of the body as well as the materials and infrastructures required to grow, maintain, and care for such a partially-living form over time. Off-site from the gallery, Stelarc himself engages in a durational performance, in which he is harnessed for hours to a large industrial robotic arm

that controls the movements of his body. At the mercy of these otherwise directed movements, Stelarc becomes an extension of this mechanical arm rather than the arm enhancing or extending his body, inverting technological control by transferring it from human to machine.

Patricia Piccinini’s series of photographs and video, Protein Lattice (1997), presents a glamorous fashion model alongside a digitally generated rat with an ear on its back, both of which advertise our desired ability to enhance living bodies that, in turn, exist somewhere between the natural and the artificial. With her newer video piece Tender (2014), Piccinini turns our attention to the expanded familial relations and forms of care within which unclassifiable creatures come into the world. We are urged to consider where biotechnological developments will lead us, and how we will respond to the increasingly ambiguous objects and bodies that result from such advances.

For France Cadet, the impossible has now become possible, as a robotic dog-turned-pig carries two small ears on its back like wings. As a playful caricature of a reprogrammed transgenic creature, Cadet’s Dog [LAB] 01: Flying Pig (2004) asks us to balance biotechnological capacity; biological demand and desire; and ethical responsibility.

France Cadet, Flying Pig, 2004, silkscreened poster.

Straddling biotechnological reality and imaginative fiction in Art Orienté Objet’s two new works, the Earmouse becomes a rat skeleton with its ear still intact even after death in WTF?!? (2014), while two other stuffed hairy ear-rats gaze back in Afterman (2014-2015). The status and function of the Earmouse is further examined in two new works presented for the first time. Tané Andrews’ 2.0 (2015), a white powder-coated bronze sculpture with two exaggerated ears as wings on its back, sits on a pedestal, transposing the Earmouse into a symbol of questionable veneration. Donna Franklin’s EarMouse Such Sweet Music (2015) pairs a soundscape of male mouse vocalisations with ear-mice covered in a new kind of bacterially-fermenting second skin, positioning the mouse as a long-standing mechanism for biological experimentation and innovation.

The juxtaposition between controlled experiment, the emblem of which is the nude mouse, and the uncontrollable and unexpected pathways of life and living matter is explored in two video works that uneasily face each other in the gallery. Beatriz da Costa’s video triptych Dying for the Other (2011), one of her last works before succumbing to cancer, couples her rehabilitation after the removal of a brain tumor with documentation of nude immuno-deficient mice that are implanted with the same human cancer she had. As the two scenarios fade into and

out of each other, we contemplate the vulnerable lives of both forms of being, animal and human, as one consistently and historically stands in as a surrogate, modeling potential pathologies and treatments for the other.

LuYang’s Cancer Babies (2014-2015) includes figurines and a video depicting cancer cells as brightly colored, bouncing and singing animated characters. With its superficial and playful tone, and tunes, LuYang’s work challenges us, however uncomfortably, to reckon with living forms that exist outside of our control and that are autonomous in our body. As much as we seek to instrumentalise, harness and renew living matter, we are always struck, and sometimes struck down, by the unmanageable, insuppressible and insurgent forces and forms of life.

While probing into the history of the Earmouse, we discovered that in an earlier experiment the researchers implanted three primary geometrical shapes – a cross, triangle and a square – into mice. The trinity also exists in the Earmouse itself, since it is made out of three discrete organisms: symbolic human (ear shape), real mouse (life support), and fragmented cow (the actual cartilage cells). In light of these observations, Oron Catts and Robert Foster developed Triptych of Dismembered Immortality, a vertical triptych totem bioreactor corresponding to the

The Tissue Culture & Art (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr) in collaboration with Stelarc, Extra Ear – 1Ž4 Scale, 2003, biodegradable polymer and human chondrocytes cells, 3cm x 1.5cm x 1.5cm (ear only). Photo by Bo Wong

Tane Andrews, 2.0, 2015, powder coated bronze

history of the development of Earmouse. This artificial life support system carries cells from mouse and cow grown into the three shape in abstracted human head shaped vessels, in a cascading arrangement of forms, life, and decay.

In addition to these artworks, the exhibition includes scientific relics of the process of trying to grow ears from Prof. Joseph Vacanti’s lab, including a curious titanium wireframe that was hailed in 2013 as a way to achieve life-like strength and elasticity in the tissue-engineered ear. Specifically for DeMonstrable, Dr. Andrew Pelling has crafted a decellularised apple into the shape of an ear and seeded it with human cells. Finally, a video made by Moe Beitiks, together with Oron Catts and Chris Cobilis, collects some of the popular culture responses to the Earmouse superimposed with scientific imagery and interviews with the original team that created the ear.

Whether in direct or indirect conversation with the form and widespread circulation of the Earmouse and positioned out of specialised laboratory contexts and into more public frameworks for debate, the artworks and objects on display catalyse ongoing and unfinished conversations concerning our capacities to manipulate life – conversations that are untethered to the functional end goals inherent in tissue engineering and regenerative

medicine. Across the exhibition, the entanglements that unfold between what we can, should, and ultimately end up doing with and to living forms are staged as unresolved. Instead the exhibition calls attention to many open-ended repercussions while visibly demonstrating, as well questioning, the processes through which we currently and constantly reshape the plastic materiality of life.

Oron Catts, Jennifer Johung, and Elizabeth Stephens

Published by the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at The University of Western Australia, 2015. All rights reserved.ISBN 978 1 876793 69 2

DEMONSTRABLE CAMPUS PARTNER

We would like to acknowledge and thank our campus partner.

The School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human BiologyThe School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology has research and teaching programs that focus on the integrated study of humans. Its programs provide an holistic understanding of ourselves, our structure, function, development, genetics, and evolution - at every level from species to populations, individuals, systems, organs, tissues, cells, and molecules.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The curators would like to acknowledge the great help of Chris Cobilis and Laetitia Wilson, and pay respect to the contribution of nude mice to human knowledge.

DeMonstrable is presented with the assistance of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts.

@LWAGallery

Cover image: Oron Catts, Shanghai Earmouse, 2015, digital prints on paper, 21 x 29 cm.

CRICOS Provider Code: 00126G

Government of Western AustraliaDepartment of Culture and the Arts

DR HAROLD SCHENBERG ART CENTRELAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERYOPEN TUES - SAT 11AM - 5PM

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, Australia 6009P +61 (0)8 6488 3707 W www.lwag.uwa.edu.au

LWAG+

LWAG+ is a free app that you can use to learn more about the art on display at DeMonstrable - interpretive material, images, artist biographies and more.

Download it from the App Store or Google Play and enable Bluetooth on your phone. When you stand in front of an artwork, the app will prompt you with information about the work’s origin, meaning and context.

For more information, visit www.lwag.uwa.edu.au/app

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