Visual Arts

With the emergence of Bio Art, biotechnology became part of the art world. By bringing cutting edge technologies closer to the public, Bio Art has provoked wider reflection about the ethics of turning biology into technology and in particular has raised questions about the aesthetic and ethical status of manipulating living organisms. By showing transgenic organisms in galleries and museum contexts, Bio Art drew attention to the fact that biotechnology had already crossed the divide between the artificial and the natural back in the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the selective manipulation of living organisms for artistic purposes provoked passionate debates about the shifting concept of life, a concept that has changed dramatically since the arrival of biotechnology within the frame of technoscience. Art emerging from the laboratory opened up non-normative debates about life and its limits in the crossover between Bio Art, ethics, sciences, and the humanities, and also framed controversies about the growing influence of science and technology and a bioscience-based economy on our societies as well as on the fine arts. Whereas in the early days Bio Art primarily sought to reveal the state of the art of biotechnology or tissue engineering, current Bio Art practices interrogate the limits, boundaries, frontiers, and frameworks within which life can exist and how fragile these limits are in an age that some have termed the Anthropocene. Altering nature deliberately using biotechnology – in a scientific laboratory or in the kitchen at home – is still a vital topic in Bio Art. However, because we have transformed our entire planet in recent centuries into a kind of laboratory where traditional distinctions between natural and artificial, subject and object, human and non-human agents no longer hold when confronted by the enormous ecological problems and challenges that exist today, speculative biology is now becoming a major issue in Bio Art. One of the most promising approaches of bringing Bio Art and speculative biology into a fruitful liaison is demonstrated in the work of the Turkish artist and researcher Pinar Yoldas, who has lived in the USA for more than a decade.

The reception of the works of Bruno Schulz in Italy has been growing wider and more diversified in the last few years. Among the examples of such a reception there are two essays by Paolo Caneppele: La Repubblica dei Sogni Bruno Schulz, Cinema e Arti Figurative tra Galizia e Vienna (The Republic of Dreams: Bruno Schulz, Cinema and Figurative Arts between Galicia and Vienna, 2004) and I Capelli della Cometa. Di Esseri in Fiamme, Catastrofi Varie e Donne in Bicicletta (The Hair of the Comet. Of Beings on Fire, Various Catastrophes and Women on the Bicycle, 2008). Caneppele, whose main research interest is in cinema, analyzes Schulz’s work through the lens of the visual, thus providing a theory according to which everything produced by him (prose and paintings) is influenced by the aspect of vision, color, and movement. The aim of this essay is not only to acknowledge this particular reception of Schulz in Italy (and in Austria as well, as Caneppele is the head of the film related mate...

The use of arts-based research has recently gained attention among scholars in diverse fields of social sciences for its capacity to communicate research beyond the authority of the written text as well as to engage with non-academic audiences. This article focuses on the dynamics of art as knowledge work from the perspective of contemporary art and its institutions: if academic research 'goes' to the arts then how does this 'going' interact with the already established politics, economies and ethics of the art field? I will be arguing that research emerges as a generalized category, if not a systemic imperative, of doing contemporary visual art, and that within this territory arts-based research encounters similar issues with those surrounding academic production and consumption. I summarize challenges pertaining to issues around deprofessionalization, new forms of distinction and art's increasing resemblance to the information apparatus.