Plastic Flesh and the Biological Oeuvre

Abstract This essay examines the work of three contemporary artists whose disparate practices converge around the theme of biotechnology and its implications for the coherence of our understanding of the human itself. These artists—Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anicka Yi, and Juliana Huxtable—excavate the paradoxes of life's materiality, demonstrating in different ways how the very structure of mastery that biological technology seems to uphold is in fact profoundly troubled by this technology. Each emphasizes what philosopher Catherine Malabou would describe as the plasticity of living biology: a capacity for change and transformation that promises to undo the distinction between human and non-human, which biotechnology would otherwise seem to reinforce. Lynn Hershman Leeson, an artist long concerned with the tangled nexus of identity and technology, appropriates gene editing as an unorthodox artistic tool for her Infinity Engine installation project (2014–ongoing), performatively demonstrating its vast potential and strange, auto-deconstructive limitations. In her 2016 video The Flavor Genome, Anicka Yi weaves a fantastical narrative about what might be termed the biological informe: the hybridic swirl of de-differentiated life that, for the technological imaginary, is both something desired and an ominous emblem of a world unmoored from clear distinction between human, animal, and flora. In her 2019 show at Reena Spaulings gallery (entitled Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back), Juliana Huxtable demonstrates that the plasticity of the biological is no neutral refuge: the biological is embedded in a violent history of race, sexuality, and gender that Hortense Spillers describes as “flesh,” which troubles any appeal to biology's intrinsic properties of resistance.