Final Exam
The readings that really hit home for me were the ones that I presented to the class. When I was signing up for them I knew they would be the most pertinent to my artwork and lifestyle. Donna Harraway’s reading (A Cyborg Manifesto, 1991) tied in with subRosa was the most meaningful to me and I continue to look up readings and websites that are in that same vein. Harraway and subRosa (separately) speak for women globally, which goes against the history of women’s rights in the west (which practices white humanism through searching for a single ground of domination to secure their revolutionary voice). For them both to understand that it all begins and ends with eugenics when referring to gender and biotechnology, the labor market, social structures, etc is not something that I’ve read very much until recently in the past year. For example subRosa in Yes Species, which is a series of writings, precludes the history of biotechnology with a history lesson in eugenics in the US, WWII to date, because they believe in order to truly understand the “why’s” and “what’s” behind biotechnology (especially biotechnology that’s implemented in reproductive technologies) you have to examine the history of eugenics. Harraway’s writing to restructure social-feminism to include women globally and fighting for women at the bottom of the labor market (3rd world countries), recognizing that the history of the women’s movement is filled with latent eugenic content, meant a lot to me.
subRosa’s work like U-Gen-A-Chix questions the biotechnology community’s standard of ethics. Artists/activists should question their own ethics in bioart and the implications of their experiments on animals and the environment. It’s a double standard I think when it comes to bioethics in the art community…We’re allowed to make a bunny luminescent and grow ‘semi-living’ matter, but we throw a fit and do a performance about how our food is being cultured. But performers like subRosa bring subjects to light in bioethics without stirring any questions about their own ethical/unethical practices in biotechnology, because they do a lot of parodies and online pieces that only ‘seem real.’ I appreciate their efforts to raise important questions without being unethical in their tactics.
The content of my work as a studio artist has everything to do with perceptions of people that are different, and the history of those perceptions in the US when talking about people of color…or The Other, as they are historically referred to. My work deals with how the implications of eugenics effects our perceptions of people daily without us being conscious of it…stereotyping, appropriating, classifying, ignoring, etc. The Harraway reading and research I did on subRosa has helped me to further my language when talking about my work and also gives me a new frame of reference when I’m building a concept for a project/art piece. For example, the ethics or lack thereof in the biotechnology community and their effects on women globally is a subject area that I am interested in making work around.
