Creative Capital

February 9, 2007: Indiana University School of Fine Arts. Before a gathered crowd, artist Paul Vanouse begins injecting various DNA samples into a gelatinous substance. A large projection behind him shows the audience exactly what he’s doing, up close. He takes the rig holding the tubes and places it in a curious-looking machine that begins to hum in the background. At this point, he embarks on a discursive lecture explaining the science and layered meanings behind this performative installation he calls Latent Figure Protocol. In about an hour, what little you knew about genomic research will be turned on its head. Welcome to the quasi-theater of science, where Vanouse conflates art with the laboratory to show us that the physical world is much more complicated than we’ve been led to believe.

Even if you don’t know a plasmid from a micropipette, Vanouse’s quest to debunk faulty scientific metaphors will enlighten, entertain, and even astonish. His 2002 project, The Relative Velocity Inscription Device, pitted DNA samples from various members of his own multiracial family against each other in a race through a computer-monitored gel, incongruously challenging the very existence of racism: can it exist if, in fact, race doesn’t exist genetically? Intellectual paradoxes such as these, along with an eccentric strain of humor, permeate Vanouse’s work, which has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Louvre, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, and the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand.

Vanouse has spent a good portion of his life hacking stuff: theory, media, technology, you name it. With Latent Figure Protocol, his Creative Capital project, Vanouse demonstrates that contrary to popular belief, DNA is not a fingerprint. Though DNA evidence might be useful in freeing that innocent guy whose lawyer fell asleep during the trial a few decades back, the artist considers comparisons like “fingerprint” as obstacles to grasping the full implications of DNA and its uses in the criminal justice system and beyond. “It’s completely unnatural,” he says of the fragmentation process used to produce such evidence. “It tells us more about the enzymes used to fragment the DNA than the DNA itself.”

Trained as a painter, Vanouse’s brushwork now takes place at the molecular level, as he mixes DNA, bacteria, and microscopic organisms to produce visual forms. For this self-described anti-image artist, it’s a sort of prodigal son’s return to the realm of pictures, as he creates simple visual figures—using the bands found on DNA charts—right before your eyes. One of the samples that Vanouse analyzes, for instance, is from a genetically modified food crop. As the chemicals develop onscreen behind the pontificating artist, a copyright symbol slowly reveals itself—a comment on the ethical questions surrounding ownership of living organisms. As he continues to perform Latent Figure Protocol, Vanouse plans to reveal new images that further comment on the increasingly hazy moral codes surrounding genetic research.

After performing the work at Indiana, during the Biennial of Electronic Art in Perth, Australia in September 2007, and again as part of Life +, an upcoming exhibition at New York City’s Exit Art and Bios 4 at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Siville, Spain, Vanouse hopes to find additional venues. To conduct these heady experiments, he regularly hits the Internet, perusing clearinghouses that specialize in surplus laboratory equipment. Not only are these outdated machines more ungainly in appearance compared to current technology—adding a tinge of mad scientist vibe to his performances—they’re astronomically cheaper and evoke the old hacker adage: anyone can do this.

Although we may not completely comprehend all the biomorphic processes involved in Vanouse’s work, its message is still extraordinarily clear. The human condition, more complex than the compounds that the artist exploits, seems to be eternally riddled by inexactitude. But one thing’s certain: the mysteries behind DNA and the sequencing of the human genome have not, as yet, been pinned down to an exact science.