ART REVIEW:
ART ORIENTE objet (AOo)
"Live in Boston"
Galerie Des Archives
open from 1-11-97 to 2-28-97

Bio-technology in the Gallerie:

"Sur les reseaux des computers, I'effet negatif des virus passe encore plus
vite que l'effet positif de l'information. Or le virus est lui-meme une
information. S'il passe mieux que les autres, c'est que, biologiquement
parlant, il est a la fois le medium et le message. Il realise cette forme
ultra-moderne de la communication selon MacLuhan, ou l'information n'est
pas differente de son support mediatique."
Baudrillard in "Cool Memories"

For well over a decade social theory has been speculating in regard to
bio-technological mutations. In the abundant anthropomorphic elucidations
that are emerging out of post-industrial techno-culture, the
biologicalization of technology, via computer viruses for example, and the
technologicalization of biology, as ART ORIENTE objet (AOo) aptly
demonstrate in this exhibition, are some of the most stimulating artistic
metaphors, seems to me. In Norbert Wiener's "Animal and Machine" written
in 1948 and then again in his remarkable paper "The Human Use of Human
Beings" from the year 1950, the flight of fancy implied in
bio-technological development has been one of an increasing possibility of
completing an interface in which the mechanical device becomes extended
biological skin. In the years following his theorization of
bio-technology, this prospect of creating an alliance between biology and
technology has become both feasible and, perhaps sardonically,
advantageous, if one ignores the buried ethical concerns. As technological
instrumentilization continues to mutate into the biosphere, the reflective
significance of technology in relationship to the human skin is stirring
artists to mentally copulate with more than mere hypothetical
circumstances, but to some extent presuppose the materiality of
reprogrammed and amended existence, perhaps to an extent interchangeable
with a degree of fanciful extravagance. The invasion of technology inside
and onto the flesh is more than a violence of technological advancement, it
also tracks a mutation of the science of biology into the polished
prescriptions of art in which physics is joined with theory and biology
with personality in concession to a technological imperative not
necessarily precombined in what used to be called fate. Bio-technology, as
befitting the heart of an experimental orbit, is by 'nature' unimaginable,
out of sight, and preposterous from the point of view of previous
conceptions of corporeality. The biologicalization of technology and the
molecularization of means through neuroelectric gene therapy and molecular
electronics has, it seems, recently been manufacturing an actual
post-industrial mode of the mutating and growing human skin as ART ORIENTE
objet (AOo) demonstrates here in their exhibition and, not surprisingly,
mutating our epistemology along the merry way.

In as much as the populace has intensely and rather influentially rebutted
the practice of the cosmetic industry using animals in the testing of their
new cosmetics, recent bio-technological research has been orienting itself
towards the cultivation of human skin. At present specimens of
reconstructed human skin are put to use to test the latest in cosmetic
merchandise as well as to repair the damaged skin of severe burn victims.
But we are not rid of the manipulation of living things in this respect, in
as much as animals are still a prerequisite in the inaugural stages of skin
reconstruction in the laboratory. Animals serve frequently as substrate for
the multiplication of human tissue cells which are breeded for this
purpose.

Here in the installation called "Live in Boston" presented at the Galerie
Des Archives in Paris, skin samples have been realized from bio-cultures
breeded from the cells of the two artists who make up ART ORIENTE objet
(AOo), a man and a woman, in an abnormal desire to exchange skin with each
other. These two artists who work collaboratively under the name of ART
ORIENTE objet (AOo), slipped into this skin exchange fantasy by taking
pictures of themselves in a process of transmission of skins "tattooed"
with transferable patterns used as sketches by tattoo makers. (see attached
image) The animal's image is reduced to a sort of advertising logo, easy to
wear, easy to take off, which symbolizes the cynical attitude of man
towards the animal, granting its survival only through his demiurgic will.
Patches of their skin were breeded at a University lab in Boston and then
these patches were tattooed with images of animals by a professional tattoo
artist and exhibited in jars of preservative liquid. A video taped
interview by a clinical doctor involved in the skin breeding procedure also
complimented the installation along with a curious doll house which seemed
to house strange and freaky toy mutational combinations.

In 1991, Ms. Laval-Jeantet and Mr. Mangin created the duo ART ORIENTE objet (AOo) in Paris and in accordance to AOo's indication, the meaning of ART
ORIENTE objet (AOo) is "art objects oriented" but which can also be read as
"art oriented by objects". Their work, they claim, can be explained in
terms of Wittgenstein's insistence on the importance of sustaining the
relationship between ethics and aesthetics. In order to realize this
premise, ART ORIENTE objet (AOo) investigates and explores the
inter-related fields of science and art. They arrange mise-en-scenes or
objects such as "The Kit Ecosysteme Animalite" (1991) as quasi-promotional
packaging, for example. Also ART ORIENTE objet (AOo) plays with scientific
procedures and tools of research and experiment, as they merge
heterogeneous objects aiming at a new, hybrid entity with a hidden poetic
potential. In doing so, ART ORIENTE objet (AOo) deals with some of the
ecological fears which plague post-industrial humanity, but in a way that
does not necessary follow the rules of political correctness. With ART
ORIENTE objet (AOo) the utopian abstract world clashes with the reality of
the natural environment, subject to artistic manipulation. ART ORIENTE
objet (AOo) frame methods used by research laboratories in order to prove
that the very principles of scientific research should be questioned and
not taken for granted. Seen in this light, making art can lead towards a
more constructive solution than just questioning reality in an ironic
manner. Therefore ART ORIENTE objet (AOo)'s activity in the field of
obscure bio-technology could be understood as an attempt to draw the
outlines of 'une science artefactuelle' (a science of artifices), an
artistic activity leading to an eventual recuperation of living experience
and the re-creation of the propinquity of myth in human life. ART ORIENTE
objet (AOo)'s diagnosis of contemporary Western civilization points at the
repossession of spiritual values through an initial dispossession of the
viewer from pre-conceived notions of the pseudo-scientific spectacle, which
is usually offered in the guise of absolute truth. "La poule heureuse"
(1993), for example, consisted of a long horizontal cage divided into small
square sections, the last of which contains a "joyful hen", the domestic
animal imprisoned seemingly for the sake of pseudo-scientific experiment,
but in fact for no other purpose than the pure absurdity of the situation.
ART ORIENTE objet (AOo) proposes, it seems then, a new post-biological
iconography, rooted in notions of common sense.

ART ORIENTE objet (AOo) 106205.523@compuserve.com>

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Joseph Nechvatal, Paris, France, Europa
http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech