Anita Hermannstädter in an interview with the artist Reiner Maria Matysik and the curator Ingeborg Reichle
In recent years artworks by the Berlin artist Reiner Maria Matysik have been exhibited at various venues and in very diverse contexts. His work became well known particularly through his models of post-evolutionary organisms, which are situated between Matysik’s vision of active evolution, that is, evolution controlled by humans, and the future forms of living biological sculptures created by the artist. The artist’s motivation in creating these prototypes of future organisms stems from his conviction that the rapid advances in modern molecular biology and genetic engineering will have dramatic consequences for the process of biological evolution, as well as for art, that can hardly be assessed at present. The exhibition jenseits des menschen was curated by the art historian Ingeborg Reichle for the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charité. Three aspects of Reiner Maria Matysik’s multi-layered œuvre are highlighted and brought together in a synthesis. From his extensive series of post-evolutionary organisms three exhibits were selected for a very distinctive space, the museum’s lecture hall ruin; they are suspended from the roof on steel cables and hang above the heads of visitors. In the second area of the exhibition the artist focuses on the future of human evolution and for the first time worked with modelling wax. In the third section Matysik also breaks new ground: with the support of the Deutsches Institut für Zell- und Gewebeersatz and using the techniques of tissue engineering, the artist created for the first time a living sculpture from his own cells, which is exhibited in the museum as a specimen. Matysik’s works and the processes used to create them can be understood as visual artistic experiments as well as a contribution to the contemporary negotiation process for the world of tomorrow.
Interview
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Reiner Maria, recently you have mainly exhibited in galleries and museums of contemporary art, and not in science locations. In what way is it a challenge for you to exhibit your work in a medical history museum, which presents scientific objects and specimens?
- Reiner Maria Matysik
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The ideal location for art is still the classical, sheltered exhibition space as found in a Kunstverein (art society), art gallery, or art museum. This environment facilitates the necessary access and enables engagement with the art without any energy loss. Some forms of art, however, feel constrained by such spaces and demand different, more open contexts. With regard to what I do, I am not actually sure whether it can be classed as art, and what qualities the ideal locations for it should have. What is certain is that I’m not doing science; but what it actually is remains uncertain. I think that the appropriate context for what I have produced does not yet exist; at the moment it is art that lacks a better location.
Ultimately, it’s about a child’s dream of discovering something new, and of pushing back the frontiers of thinking and experiencing. For this, science offers different resources to art. However, both science and art endeavour to push forward into territory that was unknown before or make what has not been thought of conceivable.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Reiner Maria, you see your works as being located outside of art, then?
- Reiner Maria Matysik
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In the case of my works it is only logical that they appear in spaces not meant for art. But it would be a real tragedy not to appear in an art context ever again, because other visitors to other types of institutions usually don’t know how to “read” what they are seeing. That art is encountered outside of spaces dedicated to it is, in the meantime, nothing special. In the meantime the number of art interventions has become inflationary, and I often get the impression that art is frequently being functionalised; the spaces in which it intervenes are to be rendered more attractive. For works that are created in peripheral areas of art, however, it does make sense to enter spaces not meant for art. Successful interventions for me are those that do not behave affirmatively to the context, but instead unhinge it.
My exhibition Biofakte in the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig in Bonn in 2008 was such an intervention. In natural history museums today animal specimens are mainly presented in replicas of their habitats and the traditional mode of presentation, arranged according to biological classification in showcases filled to bursting point, is gradually disappearing. In the wing of the museum that I set up, the biofacts remained non-located, because they don’t yet have a reference landscape. Permanent abode in narrow showcases is not possible for them; the door would be pushed open and the glass shattered, because these biofacts have still to conquer their own territories and to rebuild them in accordance with their needs.
My exhibition in the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charité calls a fundamental perspective of the museum into question, because the museum displays the diseased, pathological body. With this perspective I contrast works that show unusual forms of the human body, or forms that do not exist in this way, to provide a utopian view on the possibilities of the human. I regard differences as an opportunity; when anomalies are not understood as deformities or mutilations but as an optional design, an extension, or change.
When medical and bioscience procedures of the life sciences are used, like xenotransplantation or tissue engineering, the intervention and changes for the patient should remain as small as possible and be concealed by the results. However, I am especially interested in the collages and hybrids that could result from this. Organs created at a subhuman level do not necessarily have to be transplanted in the place that nature intended for the organ. They could also be a basis for independent, individual organisms, which might enable completely different forms of human existence. Perhaps we are getting surprisingly close to Friedrich Schlegel who wrote that the most highly perfected life would be nothing other than pure vegetating.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Ingeborg, you currently move between your job as art historian at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and as curator of this exhibition. What inspiration for curating this exhibition do you derive from your research on the relationship between art and science?
- Ingeborg Reichle
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My work as a scholar over the past years appears to me in a new light through curating this exhibition. When I began working on art out of the laboratory ten years ago, I was not aware of just how complex it is to create laboratory conditions in the context of a public exhibition, or how difficult, actually almost impossible, it is for artists to get access to science facilities. In recent years it has become easier through artist-in-residence programmes and more and more openness on the part of scientists to integrate artists in their laboratory research contexts and to give them the opportunity to realise artistically motivated projects in the laboratory. Up to now the results of my research have mainly been presented in lectures and publications. Organising an exhibition I find to be both productive and meaningful, not least because of the combination of theory and praxis. I first encountered Reiner Maria Matysik’s work around ten years ago at an exhibition in Berlin, and it features in my book Kunst aus dem Labor (2005) / Art in the Age of Technoscience (2009). Preparing a meeting and publication on Visual Models with colleagues in 2007 presented a good opportunity to work in greater depth on Reiner Maria Matysik’s post-evolutionary organisms. Thus, before this exhibition I had actually worked for several years on the theories, and particularly the production methods of the artist.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Ingeborg, with the Interventions series the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charité offers artists an experimental space in which they encounter the history of medicine from the eigh-teenth century to the present and engage with it from their position. In the exhibition jenseits des menschen the diseased and pathological is confronted by visionary diversity. How is the specificity of this location interrogated in your curatorial concept?
- Ingeborg Reichle
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In the latter half of the nineteenth century Rudolf Virchow, the founder of the museum, began to research, measure, and classify the evolutionary history of humans. With his collection of over 23,000 wet and dry anatomical specimens Virchow wanted to present in his museum the then known spectrum of human diseases as comprehensively as possible. This included all kinds of forms known to nature and also showed some of the monstrosities that it can bring forth. With the works he produced for this exhibition Reiner Maria Matysik shows us the diversity of life that humans could now bring forth, and likely will bring forth in the future. Possibly completely different notions of the body will dominate that are not oriented on contemporary norms. And yet the future life forms that Matysik juxtaposes with the specimens at times do look a lot like the specimens in the glass showcases. The empty space that gapes between the artistically motivated objects and the historic specimens is interesting: we do not see any technical aids, prostheses, or artificially created products, which present the future human being as a cyborg. Technological interventions in life itself are already so advanced that this can be done at the molecular level, and our eyes can no longer distinguish between natural organisms and artificial organisms. This is not about technical visions of the future potential of medicine, but rather about the transformation of our notion of living organisms. Our concept of the human is far older than the technology that is at our disposal today to manipulate life. There are still strict legal and ethical rules which are closely connected to the purpose of healing. But what if in the not too distant future living organisms become a pure and purposeless medium in which artists, for example, are allowed to express themselves? In the autonomous, organ-like tissues we see entities that the artist presents whose status has still to be determined. For me, the Medical History Museum is the ideal place to address these important questions, which concern us all, in a precise situation.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Reiner Maria, for the exhibition jenseits des menschen you worked for the first time with wax, a material that has been used from time immemorial in art and science to construct models. What significance does the choice of this material have for your exhibition in the Museum of the Charité?
- Reiner Maria Matysik
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Certainly, I became interested in working with wax through looking at the moulages in the museum. But the question of the material should not be viewed as so important. The decision to use wax is connected with the properties of the material: transparency, fleshiness, warmth, skin-like. Obviously, wax has a long tradition, which one is constantly aware of when confronted by objects made from this material. But ultimately all means and all materials are appropriate when one seeks to convey visual presence. By this I do not mean the genial manual skill that shapes from a formless mass the secret that lies buried within it. Instead, the work consists in making the given appear in a different light through a shift of context.
The two methods complement each other. Objects cannot be comprehended via materiality, form, surface, or colour. They are embedded in the context in which they appear. With models, for example, classifications and descriptions are a part of the work. Form of presentation and presented object are an inseparable unit. This method of working also results in inclusion of the qualities of the surroundings.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Reiner Maria, the exhibition is in three parts: the wax models in the specimens room, the organisms in the lecture hall ruin, and a »living sculpture«, which was created in a laboratory and can only be exhibited in the museum as a specimen. For the sculpture some of your skin was removed by surgery, which was then used to grow cell sheets in the laboratory of the Deutsches Institut für Zell- und Gewebeersatz. Does the use of this living material mean that you are consciously taking a step closer to BioArt, which seeks proximity to and implements the technical methods of the life sciences?
- Reiner Maria Matysik
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I see myself as one of the founders of BioArt. Since childhood I have been fascinated by biological material. Without consciously deciding to pursue art or science, the experience of nature and in nature has long played an important role for me. The question »What is nature?« has long been a preoccupation of mine. This interest has not disappeared; only the means whereby I pursue it have changed. People from different parts of the world have posed questions that result from their history and culture about the organic aspect of our existence, and have worked artistically with living substances using biological methods to produce their works. Already in 1995, the first year I began to study, I worked with vegetative, living material and joined organisms together through grafting. However, I found that working with living material was too limiting, too complex to organise, and too constrained by technical, logistic, and legal barriers, so I made use of the freedom that working on the level of models offers. In various projects in the area of art known as BioArt, I tend to wonder whether the experimental set-up is so promising that it justifies being realised. An example: In 1999 I published a book on future life forms, which brought genetic engineering and art together. Back then I asked Alfred Pühler, professor of genetics at the University of Bielefeld, if he would publish his work on fluorescence markers in tobacco plants in this context. The plants with their glowing green colour that I had been shown ought to be displayed in an art context. To me this was (for the time) a spectacular readymade and I saw no need to modify it unnecessarily or to apply this principle to other organisms.
A further example: In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, instead of a steak the protagonist is served »vatgrown flesh«. Research on in vitro meat was commissioned by NASA in 2002; in Norway the food research institute Nofima Mat is working on it; and at the University of Utrecht molecular biologists are doing research on meat grown from cell cultures in the laboratory. Now, with The Remains of Disembodied Cuisine by the Tissue Culture & Art Project, this vision that came from a literary work has arrived in art after scientific research on special cases of nutrition. Can an impetus be given for debate and reflection on what we refer to as the social and political effects of new biotechnologies when projects from other contexts are shown in the art context?
After my early work with living plants there were only two instances of an interesting framework for working on a molecular biological level with living matter. At the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Braunschweig, in the winter semester 2003 / 2004 I founded the ibiop. Under the project title From the biomass that you are to new life forms, in collaboration with the Technical University of Braunschweig I explored how course content might extend the artistic radius of operation into the fields of biology and the life sciences. The decisive question of the evaluation report »Will there be a course on biological sculpture?« was unfortunately answered in the negative. Now, the Charité is again offering me an interesting framework wherein I can work with living matter. The basic segregation into metaphorical and hands-on-science works only makes sense to a certain degree. Many artists use both for their works. One does not necessarily have to stand in a laboratory. Some artistic positions are assigned too quickly to the complex of BioArt. The issues and questions that arise from the skin penetrations of the Australian artist Stelarc can be debated more productively if these are seen in the tradition of Viennese action art than in the context of BioArt.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Reiner Maria, methods developed by molecular biology like genetic engineering or tissue engineering, and not least synthetic biology enable humans to intervene in evolution and probably to produce new life forms. In your view, what challenges will these developments present to modern societies and what is the position of art on this issue?
- Reiner Maria Matysik
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Art has a problem at the moment because it is strongly oriented on economic profit interests that come from outside. The question is, therefore, does art really want to be reduced solely to a commodity, or can it break free of this and pursue other interests? For sure, there has been art that wanted to revolutionise art and did not want to »serve the interests of capitalism«. In my view, art cannot simply relinquish the present transformation of the world to vested interests and science. Quite correctly, art wants to be involved and in the forefront to make its own individual contribution to developments.
When I began to develop my models, I didn’t know anything about synthetic biology (did the term even exist then?). And now texts on synthetic biology read like an introduction to my work. Is my project in the process of being overtaken by reality? I was perhaps the only person working on creating post-evolutionary organisms out of non-living matter, and now I find that there are other people – not in art, but in science – who are working on nothing less than the re-invention of nature.
- Ingeborg Reichle
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Current use of the term synthetic biology has mainly been shaped by Eric Kool’s 2002 report in Chemical Engineering News on integrating artificial chemical components in biological systems. The term was used already in 1912 in a publication of the French biologist Stéphane Leduc, La biologie synthétique. In the same year the German-American biologist Jacques Loeb said that in principle it should be possible to generate artificial living systems.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Ingeborg, art out of the laboratory is still a marginal phenomenon in the contemporary art scene. And this is in spite of the fact that in 2003 there were numerous exhibitions celebrating the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick and on the reception of genetics and the life sciences in art. What are the concerns and apprehensions of established art institutions founded on?
- Ingeborg Reichle
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It is not only the art institutions that have concerns but the entire art market. The contemporary art scene is not geared to the »living« media that some artists employ to realise their works or concepts in the laboratory. A transgenic rabbit or a research expedition in a biotope in the front garden can’t be hung on the wall over the sofa nor is it easy to locate them within an early or late phase of the artist’s œuvre, which is an important factor for an artwork increasing in value over time. In some respects I see here parallels with the history of media art, which for a long time was also a marginal phenomenon; indeed, even today it has not arrived in a big way in the established art institutions. To return to your question: the institutions that present these artworks to the general public tend to have a scientific perspective, like medical history museums, natural history museums, or science centres. BioArtists often refuse to exhibit their works or projects in such venues because they see the institutions’ didactic concerns as devalorising their art. This describes the dilemma of this art movement.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Ingeborg, art history is less like an archive and more a narrative that is repeatedly re-written. What contribution are artists who work in laboratories with scientific tools and methods making to the present revision process?
- Ingeborg Reichle
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I think it’s too early to give a substantial assessment of this process. However, this intervention process is already underway at art academies and universities of the arts as well as at a few art history institutes. In this connection I should like to mention The Arts & Genomics Centre, which was founded in 2005 by the art historian Robert Zwijnenberg and which is affiliated to both the Art History Institute and the Chemistry Institute of the University of Leiden. Further, there was also the Summer School Living Matter, Art & Research & Science Studies in Biological Laboratories which took place in July 2010 at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
- Anita Hermannstädter
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Reiner Maria, your call for »active evolution«, which with the exhibition jenseits des menschen encroaches on the perpetuation of human evolution, could be misinterpreted from an ethical point of view.
- Reiner Maria Matysik
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Active evolution is rather something that I think will come about; it is not something that I am demanding. And without a fundamental revision of contemporary ethics considerable differences certainly exist. Art as a project operates outside of rationally justified contexts of agreement. Aesthetic enlightenment beyond pure reason operates so to speak in a vacuum. Then it becomes difficult for art to find a springboard to new terrain or even terra firma. If it is not situated it counts as a case of diminished responsibility or as suffering from a loss of reality. Is artistic work sinking into a quagmire? Is it just a pathological figment of the imagination? If the answer is yes, then fortunately it is in no danger of having to become a producer of knowledge. As the word knowledge is very much associated with science, art could seek reference points beyond established logic.
If it chances to find such a basis, then there is a possibility of designing completely new ethics, and not evaluating the works on the basis of dominant contemporary ethics. We are currently witnessing how the organismic is being mangled, new creatures are being conceived and realised at a breathtaking pace. If we carry out scientific projects under the direction of artists, then we will have taken a first step.
This interview took place in June 2010 in the rooms of the interdisciplinary working group Bildkulturen at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.
exhibition: jenseits des menschen / beyond humans
book: jenseits des menschen / beyond humans