Becoming Chimera

How BioArt uses the Abject to pose a transdisciplinary future

As human knowledge progresses and more is discovered, thinkers are pushed to the cracks and corners of their fields in search of the next great discovery. But while these thinkers tend to their field of weeds, they are ignorant to the shadow of the branching tree which looms over them. Where true progress occurs nowadays is rather at the interface between seemingly disparate fields, this branching tree of knowledge. Artists seem to recognize this fact: The future is interdisciplinary. Recent art practices like BioArt colonize the unexplored landscape between disciplines like biology and art. Many have read news articles on glow-in-the-dark rabbits, designer babies, and Dolly the sheeps–the author often warns of the unethical slippery slope that these spectacles tread, by now all but a cliched refrain. Or perhaps they will invoke the disapproving probing of Jurassic Park’s (1993) timely Dr. Ian Malcolm: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

What makes BioArt so transgressive is already well formulated; Julia Kristeva wrote about “the abject” in her treatise “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,” which extended the psychoanalytic theory of Freud’s “the uncanny.” Whereas the uncanny deals with discomfiting experiences like doppelgangers or an epileptic fit, Kristeva’s “the abject” finds its archetypal example in bodily fluids. Dino Felluga of Purdue University defines the abject as “A threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” Humans are disgusted by bodily fluids expressly because they are bodily, and this “loss of distinction” between body and bodily fluid threatens our perception of what constitutes our selves. The theory of the abject has been applied to dense subjects like racism, homophobia, and misogyny, but it is also directly explored through works of BioArt which challenge the audience’s sense of self by using biology as brushstrokes.

Few artists manipulate biology towards the abject as effectively as Eduardo Kac. In 2009, Kac produced the “Edunia,” a chimera, or genetic hybrid, between himself and a petunia. The Edunia was designed to express Kac’s DNA only in its blood red veins, evoking the image of a flower coursing with human blood. The Edunia, of course, contains no actual human blood, but the disquieting effect of the abject still remains: Imagine gifting a bouquet of petunias to your partner, only to discover that the flowers contain the DNA of a 59-year-old Brazilian man. Kac’s DNA has no meaningful impact on the phenotypic expression of the flower, so the Edunia should be indistinguishable from any regular petunia. Still, this scenario feels like a violation because of the loss of distinction between human and flower.

More can be said about the chimera’s association with the abject, particularly in regards to the word’s mythological origins. The Greek “Χίμαιρα” has come to refer to any mythological creature with the anatomical features of various different animals. In fact, the creatures and deities of many cultures follow the formula of the chimera: the Scottish kelpie; the Egyptian Sphinx; the Indian Ganesha; and the Greek mermaid, centaur, satyr, minotaur, Pegasus, griffin, gorgon, etc. Professor Stephen Asma hypothesizes that the universal prevalence of this chimeric formula results from categorical mismatching within folk taxonomy, a method of early vernacular classification innate to all cultures. For example, the folk taxonomy of the Greeks may have classified hooved animals as distinct from humans, and the conflation of these categories would logically give rise to the myth of the centaur, satyr, and minotaur. Part of Asma’s theory suggests that the “category violations” of chimeras “arouse the human mind” in such a way that makes them “cognitively ‘sticky’” (Asma, Nautilus). These taxonomic glitches mirror the “loss of distinction…between self and other” required by Felluga’s definition of the abject. Chimeras are so “sticky” because they were once as abject to humans as Kac’s Edunia; however, these images are now so culturally ingrained that they have lost their potency for arousal. Aristotle seemed to acknowledge the abject nature of the chimera when he stated, “Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these cases Nature has in a way strayed from the generic type.” Thus the origin of the biological chimera is inherently monstrous.

But BioArt’s aim is not necessarily to mythologize or even to shock; the goal of BioArt becomes more clear when one realizes that BioArt itself is a chimera, a hybrid between biology and art. BioArt’s goal is to proliferate itself as though an actual biological organism by rousing a chimeric revolution of interdisciplinary scholarship. The abject, then, would correspondingly function for BioArt as a kind of Fisherian runaway-ed agitprop, given its potential to arouse. BioArt calls us to become chimeras–in an scholarly sense, yes, but also in an ambiguous evolutionary sense. BioArt posits that the way forward is somehow sideways: By commingling the technologies we already have, we will unlock the future.

Works Cited

1. Spielberg, Steven. Jurassic Park. Universal Pictures, 1993.

2. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982.

3. Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny. New York:

Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

4. Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject." Introductory Guide to Critical

Theory. Jan. 31, 2011. Purdue U. Feb. 22, 2022.

<http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html>.

5. Kac, Eduardo. Natural History of the Enigma, https://www.ekac.org/nat.hist.enig.html. Accessed 22 Feb. 2022.

6. Asma, Stephen T. “Why Monster Stories Captivate Us.” Nautilus | Science Connected, 25 Sept. 2017, https://nautil.us/why-monster-stories-captivate-us-8441/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2022.

7. Aristotle, , and A L. Peck. Generation of Animals. London: William Heinemann, 1943. Print.