Eradicating Humanity's Guilt for Taking Animal Lives
While bio-techno-wizardry supplies the reason Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr typically receive acclaim in the contemporary art arena, they might also be celebrated for assuaging humanity's psychological dilemmas. Sources of guilt and insecurity are the ostensible reasons for culturing leather and meat. They also explain a 2006 work entitled "DIY DVK": "Do It Yourself De-victimizer Kit." In each of these instances the artists seek to provide their fellow humans with an easy escape from feelings of shame.
DIY DVK m1 was undertaken to allay the guilt many people feel when they consume parts of dead animals, either by eating them, or using them for clothing, or applying them to some functional purpose. This guilt may also arise when someone causes the accidental death of an animal. This may be the result of a car accident or a lawnmower running over an animal.
Tissue Culture & Art's kit reduces the resulting guilt by maintaining the life of parts of the deceased animals' bodies. These body parts can remain 'alive' until the grieving period is complete and the guilt recedes.
Anyone can participate. Tissue Culture & Art's DIY DVK utilizes off-the-shelf items to construct a basic tissue culture facility. The only other component that is needed is nutrients to keep the cells alive. The artists admit that the inclusion of other animal-derived materials in the nutrients is difficult to avoid, which may, ironically, exacerbate the guilt for sacrificing the life of an animal for human benefit.
The artists explain, “We made use of the DIY DVK for a performative installation in which we experimented with bringing back to life (literally) parts of meats. We attempted to reverse the ‘destructive’ effects of human technology by ‘re-life-ing’ its victims and invited the audience to take an active role in the experiment by assisting us in caring for the fragments of life and making different ethical decisions with regard to these fragments’ eventual fate.”
This compelling narrative was further enriched when the artists focused on the particular source of guilt in Barcelona, the city where this project had its debut. Its specific human/animal relationship that generates guild is associated with the Spanish bullfighting ritual.
The artists noted that McDonald’s restaurants were proliferating in seeming proportion to mounting criticism against bull fighting. In response to this irony, they created an analogy between killing a bull for entertainment and killing a bull for a McBurger. In both instances, the fate of the bull is predestined, a fact that became apparent when the artists ‘re-lifed’ the tissues from the bull killed in a bullfight and referred to the bull killed to make meat. The former were cultivated over a miniature replica of a tourist-shop figurine shaped like a bull. They then asked the audience to choose which bull they preferred ‘killing’.
The artists’ explanation of their initiative follows: “Parts of the living are fragmented and taken away from the context of the host body (and this act of fragmentation is a violent act) and are introduced to a technological mediation that further “abstracts” their liveliness. By creating a new class of semi-being, which is dependent on us for survival, we are also creating a new class for exploitation.” This year we performed, for the first time, the DIY De-Victimizers, exploring the hypocrisies involved in our
relationship with other living and partially living systems by taking the paradoxes and ironies involved in the production of a victimless utopia to somewhat extreme levels of absurdity. We explored the creation of The DIY De-victimizer Kit as part of the Tissue Engineering & Art Workshop organized by “SymbioticA: the art and science collaborative research laboratory” at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology of the University of Western
Australia and run in collaboration with Dr. Stuart Hodgetts.”