The living image in bio-art and in philosophy

Abstract

The complex relationship between visual art and philosophy has long revolved around what each discipline considers the proper place of imagery in rhetorical persuasion. With the advent of bio-art in the 1990s, however, a tantalizing new vista opened up for artists: the possibility of creating living artworks in laboratories, of incarnating images that were previously only represented. In the decades that followed, biotechnology became increasingly sensationalised through scandalous, freakish imagery propagated in mass media, and so the question arose whether bio-art would participate in the scandal or offer critical inquiry into it. Here, I test the critical intentions of bio-artists by setting up a comparison between, on the one hand, bio-art, and on the other, bioethics: a philosophical discipline, which developed contemporaneously with, but separately from, bio-art, and with the same aim of interrogating biotechnological change. How artists and philosophers treat the image in biotechnology, I claim, is the key to understanding the competing claims of each discipline. Iconological notions of the living presence, the viral image and the pensive image are central to my inquiry. I develop my argument by comparing the works of artists Eduardo Kac, Stelarc and Maja Smrekar, and the philosopher Julian Savulescu.