The Use of Life (in Relation to the Industry of Men)
The Tissue Culture & Art Project: Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, with assistance from UCLA Art|Sci and the California NanoSystems Institute
2024
Cellular agriculture and biofabricated products, traditional animal products and parts, synthetic materials, custom-made bioreactor, HC11 Mammary Epithelium cell line and nutrient media, E. Lankester’s book The Uses Of Animals In Relation To Industry Of Man (1876), cabinets, freezer, fridge; dimensions variable.
Presented as part of Emergence: Art from Life
Established in 1996 by artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, the Tissue, Culture & Art (TC&A) Project is a pioneering collaboration that explores bioengineering as a medium for artistic expression. In addition to their art practice, Catts and Zurr co-founded the SymbioticA lab at the University of Western Australia. SymbioticA was the first combined art and science research laboratory and ran under Catts and Zurr’s leadership for almost three decades. The body of work known as the TC&A Project includes many actual body parts, such as lab-grown human ears and pterosaur wings, as well as dolls and meats developed in vitro, tissue-cultured clothing, and other evocations of the ambiguous distinction between the living and nonliving, the organic and the artificial. These pieces cast a critical, curious eye on novel developments in the field of biotechnology, as much as they embody its manifold possibilities.
The Use of Life (in Relation to the Industry of Men) explores what the artists term “metabolic rift”: the collection of scientific, economic, and cultural processes by which humans attempt to separate themselves from the violence and unpredictability that results from their exploitation of the natural world. Cells and tissues isolated from their original host organisms and coerced to develop in the lab depend upon regular human intervention and a steady supply of growth serum to survive—often fetal calf serum, the only natural material that can grow and preserve living cells, which must be harvested from the heart of a calf embryo. Lab-grown meat products anticipate a society in which human manipulation reaches the cellular level and the killing of animals is further hidden and repressed; as industrial livestock agriculture becomes more blatantly unsustainable, people look to other forms of life to exploit.
Catts and Zurr have laid open two original editions of zoologist Edwin Lankester’s 1876 work The Uses Of Animals In Relation To Industry Of Man, to which they pay ironic homage in their title. As Lankester enthuses, “It would seem, when we study these wonderful adaptations to the wants of man, as though either every creature was formed first for itself and then for man, or that man was so constituted that, in the course of his history, he should be able to render every creature by which he is surrounded subservient to the purposes of his existence.”
–Natasha K. Boyd
Image credit: Carson Davis Brown
The Use of Life (in Relation to the Industry of Men) was featured in Emergence: Art from Life, an exhibition at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, as part of PST ART. Presented by Getty, PST ART returned in September 2024 with Art & Science Collide, a regional event exploring the connections between art and science, past and present.
Thank you PST ART; JACCC; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles for your support of Emergence.