Picturing DNA
An Interview with Suzanne Anker

[Suzanne Anker is a sculptor and printmaker. All of her work had been influenced by ideas about the earth, the primordial past and genetic imagery. One of the works we are discussing is "Symbolic Species," 1998.]

Q: How did you come to create art about the invisible, microscopic, parts of living creatures?

Anker: I am interested in the intersection, today, between art and biology, in the way nature can be transformed into an artifact by an artist.

Q: How did that influence you to work with chromosomes, and then with the genome?

Anker: My interest happened in a number of ways--particularly, I think, because I have always been intrigued with the invisible aspects of nature. I had been working with a number of forms in nature that combine an artifact. This was in 1987, 88 and 89. Some examples of this work are a bronze twig and a toy soccer ball, or a series of funnels superimposed on a Y shaped branch. These were proto-genetic without my knowing it. What made that evident to me was seeing reproductions of photographs I had taken through the kaleidoscope.

Q: How did that lead to your current work?

Anker: It began when I was trying to figure out how to make an object out of a sign from a biological diagram and actually turn it into a three-dimensional object.

Q: What do you mean by a sign?

Anker: When you look in a textbook and see a picture of a chromosome, it's flat. It is a representation of the thing under the microscope, but it is like a letter of the alphabet-you have no idea where it is in the context of the human organism. So I read them as a sign, as something that was a representation of something else in the biological situation. I tried to build these things, but I couldn't really tell how to make them into three-dimensional entities. And it took quite a while to figure that out.

Q: How did you do that?

Anker: I began my first set with pieces of steel wool, [which] I chose because I was looking at certain magnifications in which the sign there was a bunch of little hairs put together. And I figured, "What is a material like that?" And steel wool was the solution, what I mean is the steel wool is very much like hair. And little hair-like fetishes are constructed in tribal societies. They're put up as having some sort of magical power. And that's how I was beginning to envision this chromosome, and at the same time this relationship between modernism and its intention to incorporate more tribal aspects.

Q: Where did these reconstructed fetishes lead you?

Anker: I made a series of other works from there, trying to find materials, again, that related to the scientific photographs that I had found in certain textbooks, where I was looking for ways in which DNA could be represented. Every time I found a picture of [DNA], it was a different picture. I decided to focus on the chromosome because that is what you can see through a powerful microscope. And each photograph evoked a different kind of conceptual material. I went on to make a series out of natural sponges, because that was very much like the sponge-like character of the chromosome. Then I went on to make a series out of sugar crystals, because of the chemical composition of the helix, in which there's always a sugar present, relating that back to a [nursery rhyme] where we're made of sugar and spice and everything nice. And there it was.

Q: This is really remarkably appropriate to the genome. Do you have any background in science?

Anker: I started studying science, and I've always loved [it]; but after my first year in science in college, I realized that I did not have the technical patience for the subject. I was interested in the ideas in science, but I could never be in the laboratory. So that is when I moved into art. But I never really saw the connection between art and science until this body of work. Before this, my work was, I said, proto-genetic, in the sense that I've always worked with natural forms and natural history. But I saw that as nature; I didn't see it as science. And I was never able to make the connection between nature and science until I started working more in a kind of structure that could create a certain distance from the natural world. And that's how I see the format of chromosomes, as well.

Q: How did you move from proto-genetics into genetics proper?

Anker. When I opened the genetics book and saw all of these other representations, I knew that I had to now understand this on several levels.

Q: Am I understanding this correctly? Previously you had been dealing with an order of magnitude in which the thing that you were addressing could be seen with the naked eye?

Anker: That is correct. But I was putting together combinations that existed in different modes of reality. [Then] I began this series of work, which now looked at the ways in which chromosomes can evoke languages. The DNA molecule transmits genetic information from one generation to another, like language transmits information. And then I began exploring the different chromosome structures in various animals-alligator, bird, rat, the primate family, fish. And when I looked at their writing, which I call "body writing," they were like different languages. And just by looking at this collection of little dots and dashes, there were unique species.

Q: This is really more than a metaphor, isn't it? The chromosomes are, in fact, a real language.

Anker: Culturally, yes. This karyotype form is generally defunct now as a way of producing science, because we have more advanced ways of doing that. But from a cultural point of view, it is not defunct.

Q: So the chromosome is a stage along the way, that now that we can actually find the gene-

Anker: The chromosome is just an address.

Q: That's right. But it's an address with a visual shape.

Anker: A shape and a text. The karyotype structure is always from left to right, and that's the way we read text in western culture. So I thought, "What if I change the way I presented that." Like in this alligator [karyotype], I'm using the biological information accurately, but I'm now changing the karyotype to a form that's read up and down, that one would say is Chinese calligraphy--which is why I started studying last year at the China Institute. And so you can, again, evoke another language system here, this time perhaps Chinese. In the case of a fish, Sanskrit-or people have even said Hebrew-just because the forms are different. From there I got involved in a series of pieces in which I started to include language and chromosomes in the same piece. And this began by investigating a piece of work by Leonardo da Vinci in which he positioned backwards writing.

Q: What did da Vinci do?

Anker: He created a phonetic structure. So I thought that the ways [in which] languages [are] encoded in a body are also encoded speech. And since chromosome means "colored body" in Latin, I included the whole body here in this set. These are very different representations of the body.

Q: How do you correlate biologists and artists?

Anker: The laboratory technician fashions a chart with scissors and paste, matching identical pairs of chromosomes in their places, like a shorthand language. As with the cubists, the sign becomes an abbreviated blueprint of cultural code summarizing the materialization of ideas into visual form.

Q: Are you saying that there is a close connection between contemporary genetics and the way twentieth century art reduced form to symbol?

Anker: Science has always represented itself metaphorically-an experiment is only a representative of a natural process. Science has also continually diagrammed itself. Models, maps, charts, and schema are an integral part of scientific communication. But these representations, which seem objective, are not neutral. It's the role of art to question the unquestioned and explore the role of visual metaphor. The new science of genetics provides a particularly fertile field for this artistic investigation. Art now has a century's worth of experience dealing with abstraction-with systems, rather than outward appearances. Twentieth-century science deals with objects and systems smaller than those we encounter in our world, and art is well-positioned to understand, and interpret, this.

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Picturing DNA by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles & Marilyn Nissenson
Copyright © 2000 Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles & Marilyn Nissenson
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