My first encounter with biodesign took place six years ago in a museum.
The Museum of Modern Art, to be precise. I can date it (October 28, 2014) and place it exactly (the Celeste Bartos Theater). I was less than a year into working with the inimitable and longstanding design curator Paola Antonelli. We had organized a panel discussion to celebrate the debut of a book chronicling the Synthetic Aesthetics project in conjunction with one of its authors, designer Daisy Ginsberg. At MoMA, four speakers—scientist William Shih, architect David Benjamin, journalist Daniel Grushkin, and Ginsberg—covered, among other topics, the biological cell as a tool of design, mycelium bricks, citizen-led wet labs, and the ways in which speculative storytelling can shape concrete science [1].
Billing itself as “far from an ivory tower text,” Synthetic Aesthetics recorded explorations by interdisciplinary teams of scientists, artists, technologists, and designers who used biological materials as a creative tool to program life. It reminded me of a latter-day version of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) program founded in the late 1960s. In it Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and the choreographer Trisha Brown, engaged with pioneering video and sound technologies. For the participants in Synthetic Aesthetics the technology was alive.
In the six years since that program at MoMA, I have watched a symbiotic relationship emerge between biodesign and museums. For biodesign practitioners, like so many other experimental groups, exhibition spaces have played a crucial role in fostering their discourse and translating their ideas to the public. Galleries have functioned as sites to show works in progress, stage conversations, and introduce audiences to new forms of communication, aesthetics, and social possibilities—and to gauge their reactions.
In turn, these spaces have connected biodesign to histories and the promise of sustained critical engagement. The exhibition space is a palimpsest of past exhibitions, curatorial, and artistic approaches. All of these contexts echo around each new presentation. For contemporary art in general and, given its potential to radically alter the very building blocks of life, biodesign in particular, perhaps the most important function of the public exhibition space is the way in which it lends accountability and transparency to a conversation that would otherwise be opaque and inaccessible.
In all the research that I’ve done, no one has interrogated the context in which biodesigners display their work. As biodesigners find increasing footing in exhibition spaces, they must remain critically aware of the culture industry in which they engage.
Exhibition spaces are not special, liminal entities divorced from life outside their walls. As many have said—from “Beyond the White Cube” author, artist and critic Brian O’Doherty to the collective behind #MuseumsAreNotNeutral—exhibition spaces are as designed as the objects within them.
Objects, artists, and visitors are never divorced from their spatial contexts. The choices we make, the social locations we occupy, and the objects or projects we pursue, whether as a curator or as a biodesigner, have an inherent politics. It is especially urgent for biodesigners to understand their work in relation to this ethical paradigm, given that exhibition spaces and the people that steward them are currently in a state of massive flux [2].
In early April, only a few weeks into the Covid pandemic, many exhibition spaces laid off great swaths of their staff—in particular the front of house folks who hold expertise in welcome, community ties, and on-the-ground interpretation of complex and challenging ideas. Meanwhile, the police murders of Black people—among them, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain—and the ensuing protests have exposed the ubiquitous presence of structural racism to many. Exhibition spaces and the financial and cultural capital that scaffold them are but one microcosm that mirrors broader racial inequities. While several Black-led cultural institutions have been meeting these issues courageously, many responses from white-led cultural institutions have been woefully inadequate at acknowledging their role in the perpetuation of white supremacy [3].
While biodesigners continue to challenge the boundaries when it comes to how we might design using living matter, they must also be aware of the living labor that underpins the spaces in which they show their work. When invited to show work, biodesigners should be aware of how these spaces function. Have they committed to a diverse staff across all job functions, especially those historically white-dominated roles like curatorial? What is the price of entry, is the site accessible, has the institution recognized the staff’s right to unionize, what is their policy on unpaid internships, etc.?
While no individual designer can change these elements alone, especially those just emerging into the field, artists can often have considerable impact on institutional structures. Raised together, their voices are powerful [4]. If biodesign—and, by extension, any visual and material culture—is to truly occupy generative and generous ground in exhibition spaces, they must consider how their work relates to these sites and their contexts.
I was reminded of this a few weeks back while listening to Kemi Ilesanmi, Executive Director of the Laundromat Project in New York, speak as part of a Zoom panel on art and place. Kemi described her core values in the workplace as being “being ‘propelled by love’ … the most necessary and the most radical act we can commit every day as human beings” [5].
In this vein of care as a locus for the work we do, sociologist Richard Sennett sets out an expansive definition of craft in his 2008 book The Craftsman that may be helpful to future exhibiting biodesigners. It’s one that I hew to as a museum curator of material culture. Sennett posits craft as an ethos, rather than a specific movement, history, set of aesthetics, techniques, or materials. Craft is, in essence, a way of meeting the living human, plant, animal, or mineral worlds around us from a place of radical care.
Such an ethos makes us aware of the spaces we come from and those we occupy in our practices, whatever they may be. Working in never-neutral exhibition spaces with this approach now requires more than simply holding space for others. For many people it may require giving space up, sometimes entirely, while for others it might mean claiming space they’ve long been denied. It is an ethos that I hope those in biodesign can embrace to catalyze change in the museums and galleries, the habitat in which they’ve evolved.
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[1] William Shih, a professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, broke down the complicated research his lab undertakes into bite-sized morsels, explaining how molecules work and—crucially—how and why they might be synthetically designed to do things like deliver drug treatments more effectively (watch the video). Synbio designer (and Synthetic Aesthetics lead author) Daisy Ginsberg shared, among other works, the benchmark E.Chromi project (debuted at iGEM 2009 and included in MoMA’s Talk To Me exhibition in 2011), a design fiction that envisions future self-diagnoses of internal ailments through drinkable, synthetically engineered probiotics that would combine with intestinal bacteria to produce color-coded poop that reveals the state of a person’s health (watch the video). Finally, Dan Grushkin, cofounder of Genspace, talked about citizen scientists and doing synthetic biology experiments in his Brooklyn living room (watch the video). David Benjamin spoke about his work using iterative design and computer modeling to create structures based on plant xylems (watch the video). Their talks paved the way for an intense and rewarding discussion with the audience that spilled out into the lobby after the end of the panel. Watch the video.
[2] I have written about the long hours, underpayment, union struggles, lack of family leave, and lack of credit, among other things, that culture workers have faced for too long. In the last three months, this has only become worse. Other arts and culture workers have also put down their thoughts in many eloquent open letters laying out the stakes of the spaces they steward and their irrevocable interconnectedness with the urgent issues we all face, in varying ways and to different degrees, now and in the future.
[3] As I finish writing this, Yesomi Umolu has turned a fierce and thoughtful Instagram post into a thought piece detailing all you need to know about the ways in which the space of the museum needs to better reflect and respond to the worlds outside it. Find it here.
[4] One recent example is the 2019 Whitney Biennial where artists withdrew their work in protest at Warren Kanders, the vice chair of the board, whose personal wealth (his qualification for said board position) was based in part on the sale of tear gas and other chemical weapons. Kanders later resigned.
[5] I am grateful to my colleague and friend, Nikki Columbus, for making me aware of Kemi’s work and the Laundromat Project. Kemi spoke as part of Art / Work / Place, a panel discussion Nikki and I organized in collaboration with the Vera List Center and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York in June 2020.
Cite This Essay
Fisher, Michelle Millar. “There Is No Neutral Exhibition Space.” Biodesigned: Issue 2, 16 July, 2020. Accessed [month, day, year].
