A Review of Kevin Clarke's
From The Blood Of Poets
by Richard Ledes
http://artnetweb.com/artnetweb/projects/clarke/kchome1.html
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Immediately after the Second World War, genetic research in the United States reached its lowest ebb in the twentieth century. The field had become tainted by the Nazi's use of genetics as an allegedly scientific foundation for policies of extermination. This ideological streak had also been present before the war in the United States, when arguments using genetic research were frequently marshalled to support anti-immigration legislation that was being enacted in the wake of the Depression. Genetic research has gradually made a comeback and is currently heralded as one of the most promising directions in medical research. According to some, this new enthusiasm is based on scientific progress; according to others, it is based largely on a cultural desire for a panacea that avoids looking at problems in ways that are more political and social than technological and scientific. Advances in computer sciences have played a major role in fueling expectations of major benefits deriving from genetic research. The creation of the Genome Database --a key ingredient of the U.S. government's Human Genome Program--would obviously be unimaginable without the marshalling of data that computers have made possible. In a timely and provocative way, Kevin Clarke's work From the Blood of Poets engages the conflicting associations of genetic research at this historical juncture. Clarke has constructed a series of portraits in which a graphic DNA analysis is combined with a photographic image taken by the artist. The subject of the photograph is not the person for whom the portrait is named, but is chosen by the artist as in some enigmatic way evocative of that person. A number of Clarke's portraits are on display at artnetweb. While they are not interactive in the way the term is familiarly used, they do interact with technology as part of the symbolic basis of each portrait. The Web greets all visitors with a new hybrid mixture of word and images. This hybrid mixture might be described as somewhere between, on the one hand, television, and, on the other, books. Words have more importance than on television; the term "authoring" has gained new meaning from the ease of creating websites, yet the proliferation of words in what is often perceived to be a visual medium is felt by many as a kind of temporary impediment, soon to be overcome as the Web finally achieves its potential, providing users with a seamless alternate reality. The relation of Clarke's work to the Web is significant because the work demonstrates a hybrid form combining images with letters and other forms representing the analysis of DNA (e.g. graphs); this hybridization resembles that of the Web. The letters and other graphic representations running through each image--the artist assures us in an accompanying statement--comprise particularly important information that has been chosen by technicians from a blood sample of each subject. Clarke writes, "In the words of the technicians, it is the area that tells you how to be you. This is a profoundly basic area informing the physical development of the individual. Only the physical." Clarke's assurance to his audience that the technicians are only speaking about the physical would seem to beg the question: What exactly do these technicians mean by "only the physical"? Nevertheless, Clarke's works permit an aesthetic consideration of the various forms of graphic analysis of DNA: since the viewer can no longer attempt to consider this information solely for its content, for what it might be "communicating," the portraits appear to reverberate with a dynamic tension that flows through the Web's own hybrid use of images and words. Clarke's portraits avoid any referencing of the more unpleasant not to say horrific chapters in the history of genetic research. Whether this is ideological airbrushing or not, Clarke's portraits appear imbued with a powerful force that they have pulled like a magnet out of our present collective dream-material. |