A
Matter of
Authority
By Shawn Stone
For
20 years, the Critical Art Ensemble have made challenging
interventionist art—now one of their members may spend 20
years in federal prison for it
Steve
Kurtz, a smiling, middle-age man with straight long hair,
seems as normal as can be as he describes a slide presentation
in a recent appearance at Troy’s Sanctuary for Independent
Media. He certainly doesn’t seem like an enemy of the people.
The image he’s describing is pretty innocuous, too; weird,
but certainly innocent. After all, what could be less threatening
than someone playing with toys? One of the other members of
the arts collective Kurtz helped found, the Critical Art Ensemble,
is sitting on the ground at an unidentified interstate rest
stop wearing a paper Burger King hat. Surrounded by a small
crowd and a couple of cops, the guy has a Hot Wheels track
and cars set up, and is playing with them—accompanied, Kurtz
adds, by a jarring soundtrack (from a boombox) consisting
of taped sounds of car crashes.
Referring to the cops in the picture, Kurtz explains that
“they’re deciding right now if they’re going to arrest him”
for being a public nuisance. Why? Because adults don’t play
with toys. Because, as Kurtz adds, “arrest is discretionary.”
“Anyone
can be arrested at any time.”
When the Critical Art Ensemble repeated this installation
at Daytona Beach, Fla., he remembers, the cops were on the
scene immediately. The level of security often depends on
the level of what Kurtz describes as “commodity exchange.”
Translation: Don’t try this at the mall. Or in front of an
office building.
Did the police involvement faze onlookers? No: “People understood
that he was about to be arrested for playing with toys.”
This particular form of intervention, he says, was in some
part about “escaping the militarization of space.”
Translation: This is about what is—and is not—permitted in
public spaces that are more and more monitored and policed
by cops, rent-a-cops and, if it’s government property, the
state police or FBI.
The reality about artists, Kurtz says, is this: “We have no
real power; there’s nothing we can really do.” And yet, it
took no time at all for this relatively innocuous intervention
to provoke the real possibility of arrest.
Again, looking at the unassuming Kurtz, he could be a state
worker, musician, postman or even what he actually is—an artist,
and professor of art at the State University of New York at
Buffalo. He certainly doesn’t look like a bioterrorist. But
that is the way the FBI viewed him on May 12, 2004, the day
after his wife died.
On May 11, 2004, Kurtz’s wife, Hope, died in her sleep at
their Buffalo home. He called the paramedics to come to his
house; when they arrived, they not only took note of his late
wife—who, the autopsy proved, died of natural causes—but of
Kurtz’s lab, and his home-raised bacteria.
The paramedics called the police. As Kurtz told the U.K.-based
Guardian newspaper, “They thought I’d germed her to
death.”
The following day, the FBI became involved. As the chronology
on his legal defense fund Web site lays out, the FBI and agents
“from the Joint Terrorism Task Force” took him into custody
and told him he was being investigated for “bioterrorism.”
Next, “agents from numerous federal law enforcement agencies—including
five regional branches of the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task
Force, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the
Buffalo Police, Fire Department, and state Marshall’s [sic]
office—descended on Kurtz’ home in Hazmat suits.”
You may recall the Lackawanna Six, the immigrants from Yemen
who visited the al Queda training camp in Afghanistan and
then moved to the rust-belt Buffalo suburb Lackawanna? This
was shortly after their arrest. The same assistant
U.S. Attorney (“Chief Terrorism Division”) who went after
the Lackawanna Six, William Hochul, went after Steve Kurtz.
The Department of Justice was—and still is—extremely focused
on fighting terrorists. As it says on the DOJ Web site: “For
decades, terrorists have waged war against U.S. interests.
Now America is waging war against terrorists. . . . We have
promoted freedom over the past two years while protecting
civil liberties and protecting people here and around the
world from further terrorist attacks.”
Kurtz, with his Petri dishes of scary looking bacteria, looked
like a terrorist.
What, you’re probably wondering at this point, was in
those Petri dishes?
Nontoxic bacteria being grown for one of the Critical Art
Ensemble’s biotech actions, Free Range Grains, which
was to have been part of The Interventionists exhibit
at MASS MoCA last year. (The FBI’s own little intervention
prevented this.) Kurtz talked about this and a more recent
biotech effort, Marching Plague, in his recent Troy
visit.
Free
Range Grains was to take on Monsanto and genetically engineered
foods. Marching Plague is about “showing the connection
between ‘war tech’ and the decline of public health.”
Huh?
“The
militarization of our medical research.”
Come again?
It’s simpler than it sounds. In Troy, Kurtz talked in detail
about the amount of money being spent by the U.S. government
on bioweapons research (millions), as opposed to what he characterized
as “real” health crises like tuberculosis or malaria (very
little). This, he argued, is in spite of the fact that the
chance of people being hurt by biological weapons is minuscule—because
they’re so hard to make and to “deliver” in a weaponized form—compared
with, say, the current worldwide TB epidemic.
To illustrate the futility of germ warfare—and, by implication,
the stupidity of spending millions on research to prevent
a bioweapons attack—the CAE re-created, in Marching Plague,
an early-1950s British military experiment to see if plague
“could be used as a tactical ship-to-ship weapon.”
If it sounds like a dopey idea, be assured that, on this point,
the CAE confirmed the original results. They went way, way
up north to the Isle of Lewis (off the Scottish coast) where
the test was first performed. They built a floating platform
on which was placed a large cage full of 30 guinea pigs, watched
over by an animal-protection representative seeing to the
safety of the rodents.
>>From
a ship one mile away, they launched a harmless “bacterial
broth” from the rear of the boat using a “pressurized atomizer.”
Alas, as the Brits found out more than 50 years ago, it didn’t
work. As it says on the CAE Web site: “Our results were as
disappointing as the original experiment.” Traces of the bacteria
were found on only one guinea pig, “proving once again that
germ weaponry is not only a stupid idea, it is also impractical.”
(Note: “No guinea pigs [were] hurt or unnerved during the
experiment.”)
OK, some of you are probably asking yourselves, “This is art?”
The short answer? Yes.
As a matter of fact, just last week (March 5), Holland Cotter
wrote in The New York Times that the “most interesting
option” for a contemporary art world dragged down by “bland
paintings, self-regarding videos, artful tchotchkes and shoppable
M.F.A. artists-to-watch” is the work of “miniature subcultures
known as collectives.”
One of the groups Cotter references is the Critical Art Ensemble.
Referring to Kurtz’s legal problems, he wrote: “It would be
easy to think that the government officials prosecuting Mr.
Kurtz are simply too obtuse to see the ‘art’ in Critical Art
Ensemble’s work. Yet it is just as likely that they see an
art of potentially subversive information and don’t like it.”
“I
really do completely admire what they’ve been able to do as
a collective,” says Kathy High, professor and chair of the
Department of Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “I
didn’t realize that they’ve been together for 20 years. To
think about how they work as a collective. . . . it’s really
to be admired.”
Asked for more particulars, she says that “for me, there are
a couple of things they do. They form a bridge not just between
academics” but for the general public, in that they “work
with technologies that are otherwise inaccessible.”
“The
demystification process they go through in their performances,”
High adds, “really speaks to allowing students and academics
from different fields to begin to ask questions about what’s
going on in the areas they’re investigating.”
There is also, she explains, the matter of the CAE’s now-widespread
influence: “I keep hearing their philosophy and kind of approach
to things repeated over and over.”
“When
people talk these days,” she notes, “I hear a lot of their
[Critical Art Ensemble] writing reiterated by other young
artists.”
After a week of going over Steve Kurtz’s home, the alphabet
soup of government investigatory bodies packed up and left,
leaving behind a gruesome smorgasbord of biological filter
wrappers, empty soda bottles and more than a dozen pizza boxes.
(Indicating that, when it comes to good health practices,
these law enforcement officers were found wanting.) The state
DOH determined the house “held no public safety threat.” The
DOJ still tried to get a grand jury to indict Kurtz “under
Section 175 of the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism
Act of 1989,” which had been amended (re: enlarged) by certain
provisions of the USA Patriot Act.
While that didn’t happen, the grand jury did indict
Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, the former head of the genetics
department at the University of Pittsburgh, on counts of mail
and wire fraud. The reason? Ferrell procured the bacteria
from a commercial supplier ostensibly for himself, but was
really buying it on behalf of Kurtz. As things stand right
now, Kurtz’s lawyer’s most recent motion to dismiss the charges
failed. It is likely that the case will go to trial next year;
if convicted, Steve Kurtz faces up to 20 years in a federal
penitentiary. (Ferrell, who is reportedly very ill, is not
expected to stand trial.)
This is one reason why Kurtz was in Troy—part of the funds
raised that night (Monday, Feb. 11) will go toward his legal
defense fund. Certainly the art world has rallied around him.
Last year, D.J. Spooky did a multimedia benefit concert in
Buffalo; a benefit art auction held at New York’s Paula Cooper
Gallery (50 artists donated works) raised more than $167,000.
Kurtz is currently traveling around giving lectures and raising
money.
In what he calls this post 9/11 “prefascist” moment, Kurtz
certainly has no illusions about his prospects. “If I have
to go to jail,” he told the audience in Troy, “so be it.”
“Never,”
he added, “be intimidated.”
As part of his lecture, Kurtz connected the dots between the
increasingly political nature of CAE’s projects and the level
of government interest in what they’ve been doing. And it’s
making their work more difficult. When deciding what projects
will be possible, “it’s really difficult to do risk assessment.”
It’s easy to know when to pick up the Hot Wheels track and
go home; it’s not so easy to know if the nontoxic, unthreatening
biological agent you’re working with will bring down the wrath
of Homeland Security. In this climate, Kurtz deadpanned, the
government has proved to have a “greater tendency to overreaction.”
It’s a convincing argument.
“I
personally find Steve’s own questioning, and the way he looks
at things, has a kind of fluency,” Kathy High says. “He’s
so articulate.”
“That
whole continuum of thinking about disciplinary actions against
their work, for the past 20 years, it really made a very clear
case,” High says, adding, “You can’t argue with it.”
She concludes: “He’s a good one, that Steve.”
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