Monstalgia 2016 IHR Art Exhibit by Institute for Humanities Research

Curated in conjunction with the 2015-2016 Fellows Program at the ASU Institute for Humanities Research, a research unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

On the cover: © Jennifer Strunge, Growth (detail), 2015. Pg. 01/30: © Casey Jex Smith, Multiple (detail), 2012.

MONSTALGIA © 2016 Kev Nemelka for Arizona State University Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) Curated and designed by Kev Nemelka Select photography by Dallas Etzel Other photographs provided by the artists Essays by Kev Nemelka and Kenneth Pike, with excerpts from the 2015-2016 IHR Fellows’ Abstracts All rights reserved. No element of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including recording, photocopy, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from IHR and the artists featured in this publication. ihr.asu.edu Printed and bound in Tempe, AZ by ASU IHR

About the curator Kev Nemelka is the contemporary art curator at ASU IHR and the 2015-2016 Windgate Curatorial Assistant at ASU Art Museum. kevnemelka.com Curator’s Acknowledgments Thanks to Susan Anderson, Breezy Taggart, Jennifer Quincey, Sally Kitch, Kenneth Pike, Dallas Etzel, and the rest of IHR; Herberger Institute, Wood Gallery, Peter Bugg, Nicholas Wiesinger, Dean Steven Tepper, Meredith Hoy, and all the Art History Faculty; Heather Lineberry, Julio Morales, and everyone at ASU Art Museum; and my wife and family. Finally, my special thanks go to the superb artists whose talent, insight, and dedication to art made this exhibition possible.

Contents

Introductory Essay: ‘(Sub)Liminal Ooze’ Kev Nemelka

Exhibition Checklist Andrew Ballstaedt Fidalis Buehler Greg Caldwell Brian Kershisnik Takashi Murakami Casey Jex Smith Jennifer Strunge Rachel Van Wagoner Mike Whiting

Essay: ‘Scribbling Without the Lines: IHR Research Fellows 2015-2016’ Kenneth Pike

Introduction

(Sub)Liminal Ooze Kev Nemelka

It seems to have no motive, no vendetta, no program of action, other than simply that of “being ooze.” - Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet

Lodged in the chasm of time and space lay nostalgia, a troublesome romance immortalized in fantasy and sentiment. It is neither truly here nor there, then nor now, fated to the realm of in-betweens. Nostalgia has previously been problematized in art criticism as an attempt to fabricate alternate histories, or worse, erase portions of history altogether. However, this exhibition explores a positive side of this phenomenon through the lens of kid culture’s fascination with mythical creatures and biological anomalies, a paradoxical intersection of the cute and the terrifying, i.e. another in-between, another ooze. Monstalgia developed in conjunction with the 2015-2016 IHR Fellows theme, Monsters and Monstrosity, as well as in preparation for the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Instead of paying homage to how this literary classic helped construct our notion of horror, this show is inspired by the very celebration of such a work of fiction. A penchant for nostalgia is at the foundation of anniversaries; we yearn to commemorate births, deaths, unions, speeches, revolutions, publications, all because they imply culture, success, or the strife we have overcome. Because a key element of Frankenstein’s plot

is the monster’s child-like innocence—an Adam-figure thrust into a world of pain and cruelty—discussing the topic of our sentimental celebration of this masterpiece through an imaginative, kid-art (nostalgic) aesthetic seemed the perfect launching pad for a contemporary art exhibition. On the surface, this show is a carefree, colorful insertion of children’s subjects into the stereotypically adult-centric context of the university art gallery. However, this introductory essay aims to provide a more in-depth examination of this combination of monsters and nostalgia and how each work fits into one of three key points of the exhibition’s thesis. This curious junction of two liminal spaces—that of monsters and nostalgia—first led to an incorporation of ideas of faux-naïve art practice. Contemporary faux-naïveté refers to works created by artists who have received post-secondary training but direct their art practices as if they have not, circumventing many laws of traditional academic art and utilizing techniques that resemble those of selftaught or kid artists. Aesthetically, this recent development is in some ways a continuation of ideas that were introduced decades ago by Modernism—e.g. a distinct influence of

(Sub)Liminal Ooze

“primitive” art and the “naïve” abstraction of the figure—but faux-naïveté decontextualizes to recontextualize in our present setting, combining archetypal (cute) kid-art materials with new resolve to reach the crux of something still somewhat foreign to this aforementioned adult-centric art world: the profound, buoyant minds of children. A second constituent of the show is how this merging of monsters and nostalgia integrates youth mode, a new philosophical development that makes notable distinctions between young and youthful. According to the movement’s unofficial manifesto, “Being in youth mode isn’t about perpetually reliving yourself at a younger age, it’s about being youthfully present at any given age. Youth isn’t a process, aging is. In youth mode, you are infinite.”1 Monstalgia applies this rationale to further accentuate a more genuine side of nostalgia that bypasses age and longing to access something everpresent. Thus, youth joins nostalgia, monstrosity, and as yet another liminal space addressed in the exhibition. An exploration and synthesis of art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics comprises the third concentration of the show. “The whole of human relations and their social context”2 is at the heart of relational art practice, and Monstalgia utilizes a shared state of adulthood—and, implicitly, the fact that we were all once children—to access a collective mindset more inclusive than that of the artinformed. This final consideration spotlights a progressive side of nostalgia in its ability to evoke interpersonal relations in a museum or gallery setting. Cute Terror / Faux-naïveté From comic books and graphic novels to innumerable children’s films and television shows, it is clear that the horrific and strange have been long entwined with ideas of cute and youthful imagination. While Monstalgia’s pairing of youth and monstrosity hints at pubescent transformation and an early relationship between Self and Other, it also

suggests that the innate contradiction of cute monstrosity serves to soften the violent or disturbing aspects of life into “more positive or ambivalent connotations.”3 Art writer Frances Richard expounds:

Cute might be thought of as a watered-down version of pretty; which is a watered-down version of beautiful; which is a watered-down version of sublime; which is a watered-down version of terrifying. In this regard, the cute is akin to the ridiculous, which is a watered-down version of the absurd, which is again a watered-down version of that which terrifies. By extension, this suggests that all representation, whatever its stylistic bent, is tinged with the experience of terror: the terror of the convincingly ersatz, the killing disjuncture of the otherized, the pseudoreal.4 In other words, although the sugarcoating component of nostalgic art is its greatest suspect, blending the cute and the monstrous in fantasy can serve as a sort of anticipatory mechanism for dealing with the horrors of the real world. Many artists in this exhibition channel this constructive romanticization by adopting a faux-naïve aesthetic to address serious matters in a seemingly lighthearted manner. Greg Caldwell’s nostalgic images of robot monsters are prime examples of contemporary faux-naïveté. At first glance, these works are but notebook doodles enlarged, imaginative creations of an artist who made do with a limited palette and common materials. However, these painted drawings extend into a somewhat unfathomable realm, alluding to the terrifying, not-so-unthinkable reality of superintelligence—self-improving artificial intelligence that could, if realized, take over the planet. Caldwell utilizes the kid-art aesthetic to address a harsh concern of contemporary life, alleviating some of the stress that accompanies contemplation of a planet on which humanity is no longer its chief steward. Another work that confronts mortality is Brian Kershisnik’s Dead Mermaid, which depicts a sheepish girl in a moment of discovery as

Introduction

she probes a beached, bloated mermaid. This work exemplifies a faux-naïve aesthetic in its execution, making more poignant the juxtaposition of life and death, reality and myth, cuteness and terror; on one hand it addresses the end of life, on the other the end of puerile make-believe. Kershisnik’s work implies a state of mind to which we lose access as we grow up, an innocence that cannot easily be duplicated, hence his conscious implementation of kidinspired faux-naïveté. Of its influence on his practice, he explains:

The work of children is not cute because it’s not real, it’s almost like it’s too real for us to even understand. It’s like hyper-real. It reduces things to some kind of essence that we don’t understand yet. So I think faux-naïveté is almost like looking into what is generally seen as a more naïve version of the world but for some reason seems to be closer to the core of the issue than further away.5 Although Caldwell and Kershisnik tackle more universal subjects of death and disaster, some artists incorporate concerns of humanity that affect certain peoples more directly than others, for example, changes in global climate. Solastalgia, a longing for life before climate change and all its ramifications, enters the conversation as an appendage and incarnation of nostalgia and faux-naïveté, respectively. Just as Godzilla and other anthropogenically created monsters were metaphors for the nuclear bomb and the way it wreaked havoc on human civilization, so monsters in solastalgic art can represent climate change or its affected populations in distress. Consider the dire situation of South Pacific island inhabitants and the rapidly rising sea levels as consequence of global warming. Fidalis Buehler addresses this bleak reality in The Tide is Full, another work that uses a kid-art aesthetic to illustrate grave matters. The work depicts Nareau the Creator, a legendary god of the Kiribati island nation, in a frantic stance of worry and fear. Directly translated as “the spider,” Nareau faces impending doom as its islands gradually disappear under the ocean’s surface.

Buehler’s faux-naïve (cute) interpretation of grim circumstances recognizes the resonating power of intermingling myth and reality to illuminate an unfortunate fact of life. It is not the harmful romanticization of obliterating history, but, on the contrary, that which strives to preserve it. Faux-naïveté calls for an acknowledgment of other realities where robots and mermaids and spider lords roam free, especially if those alternate universes attempt to make sense of this reality in ways perhaps inconceivable to an otherwise educated, adult eye. Additionally, it incorporates nostalgic inclinations to harness an untaught mastery unexploited in academic curricula, an unlearned, child-like variation of realism fixed on allowing, not forcing, the child within to shine through. Youth Mode / Medium The late Svetlana Boym questions nostalgia as merely “a romance with one’s own fantasy,” “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,” and a “sentiment of loss and displacement.”6 Although these observations are valid in particular contexts, the situation of contemporary nostalgia is intrinsically different from that of her investigation. Monstalgia’s incorporation of youth mode is what separates this new sentiment from that which Boym criticized. Whereas her nostalgia is more place-oriented—concerned with the distance that trails an accumulation of lives lived—youth mode is more time/space-oriented—occupied with ideas of youthful presence and the things that integrate the past into the present. Youth mode does not long for something that no longer exists; it taps into something that exists interminably. Much of this time/space orientation is due to art medium, as certain materials inevitably hark back to particular eras of childhood. For example, Mike Whiting’s ghost/castle sculptures reify the 8-bit world of games like Super Mario Brothers via playground building supplies, and Takashi Murakami’s skate decks further the theme of nostalgia for childhood pastimes.

(Sub)Liminal Ooze

Notably, both videogames and skate culture have effectively crossed over into the realm of adult recreation, a circumstance that fits the trans-temporal youth mode condition. Alongside pencil-on-paper drawings akin to the daydreamt creations of a bored minor, Casey Jex Smith creates monstrous collage installations from old cutouts used in children’s Sunday School lessons. These collages are reminiscent of teen culture bedroom décor, and his oeuvre incorporates youth mode thinking in its renegotiation of youthful presence via reintegration of youthful ephemerae. Similarly, Jennifer Strunge uses fabrics with an embedded history in works like Growth. Of her choice in materials, she states, “I work with recycled, discarded clothing, blankets, and bed sheets to create soft sculptures. There is already an inherent nostalgia in that this cloth had a previous life.”7 Strunge takes this previously reminiscent medium and creates stuffed animal monsters, thus, her works are, like Smith’s, doubly nostalgic. Whether through muscle memory or mere nostalgic association, certain mediums allow artists to channel the inner child, resulting in a genuine youth mode existence within our contemporary adult milieu. The use of such material—both medium and content—further reconciles ideas of social collectivity and materiality that relational art wholly embraces. Relational / Intrapersonal Aesthetics Relational aesthetics emerged in the late 90s as an attempt to provide a new framework for art that clearly reached outside the bounds of earlier theoretical approaches to art (feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism). Within Bourriaud’s outline, the artist is no longer master or tastemaker or subconscious revealer, but rather a facilitator of social relations. Monstalgia’s emphasis on faux-naïve, nostalgic art to which visitors of all ages can relate demonstrates an innately relational quality. Additionally, the value it places on the object and its power to trigger collective memory fulfills a crucial criterion. Unlike modes of

contemporary art where ideas take precedence and material is rendered obsolete, the object is an integral part of relational art. In its defense, Bourriaud suggests that

objects are an intrinsic part of the language, with both regarded as vehicles of relations to the other. In a way, an object is every bit as immaterial as a phone call. And a work that consists in a dinner around a soup is every bit as material as a statue…. Objects and institutions, and the use of time and works, are at once the outcome of human relations—for… they organise [sic] types of sociability and regulate inter-human encounters.8 Within relational art, the object is still a necessary and valuable component because of its power to initiate social situations (imagine a phone call without a phone, a dinner with no food). Because ours is a material world, objects allow for interpersonal relations in art settings, creating a space where viewers can relate through subject matter, material, style, or a number of other components of an art experience. While this exhibition fulfills Bourriaud’s relational principles, it also extends the bounds of this aesthetic condition. Whereas relational art depends greatly on an art-informed society, nostalgia and faux-naïveté are dependent on a community that consists of children and those that were once children, i.e. all adults. This latter demographic can be reasonably generalized as having once had imaginations that slowly evaporated with childhood, thus a collective acknowledgment of maturation and the coming-of-age experience allows another level of connection. For Monstalgia, adulthood becomes the community, challenging art adult-centricism and recognizing that we are each one in eight billion, children in a life prior, creators and champions of our own monsters. This idea of connection via past selves leads to an additional way in which this exhibition builds upon relational aesthetics. When the viewer experiences a work that resembles something of his/her childhood,

Introduction

not only is a connection established between a viewer and those in his/her environ that also undergo similar recognitions, but also a connection between the viewer and the viewer’s past self. I call this relational characteristic intrapersonal aesthetics. “Intrapersonal” is appropriated from terminologies of psychotherapy and is loosely related to ideas of attunement and intrapsychic relatedness, in the sense that “intrapersonal patterns of relating are forged” and “relatedness between aspects of the mind”9 is established. Because the “aspects” taken into account by intrapersonal aesthetics are those of the past and present, it maintains an innate time/space component, creating a relational pairing of the viewer as adult and the viewer as child. Monstalgia attempts to reset a time continuum “as attuning parts of self join to create a coordinated superstate.”10 All the works in this show contribute to these (inter/intra)personal considerations in their own ways, but Andrew Ballstaedt’s art practice exemplifies how they overlap for this grownup community. The style in which his faux-naïve monster paintings are executed more effectively allows two individuals’ past selves, as well as an individual’s past and present selves, the opportunity to relate under art circumstances. Because the artist utilizes a rather index motif of friendly, wide-mouthed creatures tip-toeing on a low horizon line, the nostalgic reach of the works is more generalized and thus extended for a broader relational appeal. These relational aspects of the exhibition are perhaps those that most convincingly retrieve nostalgia from its negatively connoted presence in art criticism. Heretofore considered detrimental art sentiment founded in fiction, nostalgia finally finds repose in its thoughtful implementation as a linking tool for gallery viewers. Above all, connection is the goal, and nostalgia proves an effective outlet for such an undertaking.

Monstalgia endeavors to allow relations through the nostalgic material and youth

mode emphasis of each artwork, suggesting nostalgia has value beyond its self-perpetuated, liminal state. Beneath this liminality, the amalgamation of the cute and the terrible in kid-art monster motifs can play a substantial role in reconciling the cruelty of mortality; as cuteness “marks its presence by oozing positive feelings,”11 it subliminally manufactures coping devices for the inevitable catastrophes of life, channeling child-like optimism and encouraging hope amidst an overwhelmingly fatalist worldview. Thus, in some ways nostalgia’s in-between condition finds stability in its reconciliatory, relational qualities, at last attaining a program of action other than simply that of “being ooze.”

Notes K-Hole and Box 1824. “Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom,” www.khole.net [accessed 15 Nov 2013]. 2 Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Les presses du reel, 2002), 45. 3 Maja Brzozowska-Brywczynska. “Monstrous/Cute: Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness,” in (At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries, Volume 38) Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2007), 216. 4 Frances Richard. “Fifteen Theses on the Cute,” in Cabinet Magazine, Issue 4 (Animals), Fall 2001, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/cute.php [accessed 14 Dec 2015]. 5 Brian Kershisnik. “Utah Faux-Naïve: A Conversation with Andrew Ballstaedt, Fidalis Buehler, and Brian Kershisnik.” Interview for 15 Bytes: Artists of Utah Magazine (Jan 2013), 4. 6 Svetlana Boym. The Future of Nostalgia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001), xiii. 7 Jennifer Strunge. Interview by author. Phoenix, AZ, 06 Dec 2015. 8 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 47-48. 9 Jerry Lamagna. “Of the Self, By the Self, and For the Self: An Intra-relational Perspective on Intra-psychic Attunement and Psychological Change,” in Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, Vol. 21, Issue 3 (Sep 2011), 281. 10 Ibid., 294. 11 Brzozowska-Brywczynska, “Monstrous/Cute,” 218. 1

Fidalis Buehler (American) Lives in Mapleton, Utah; works in Provo, Utah The Tide is Full / Nareauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Forewarning (Spider Lord), 2015 Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. Loan from the artist ÂŠ2015 Fidalis Buehler. All Rights Reserved.

Greg Caldwell (American) Lives and works in Provo, Utah Monster Robot with Gun Flames, 2015 Acrylic and pencil on wood panel, 28 x 17 in. Loan from the artist ÂŠ2015 Greg Caldwell. All Rights Reserved.

Takashi Murakami (Japanese) Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan and New York Shimon-Kun, 2007 Screenprint on white-covered seven-ply wooden decks, 31.8 x 7.8 x 1.5 in. Loan from the Lambson Family Art Collection ÂŠ2007 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Rachel Van Wagoner (American) Lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas Underglow, 2015 Porcelain, prismacolors, LED wire, 12 x 10 x 10 in. Loan from the artist ÂŠ2015 Rachel Van Wagoner. All Rights Reserved.

IHR Research Fellows 2015-2016

Scribbling Without the Lines IHR Research Fellows 2015-2016 Kenneth Pike

It is a primary pursuit of Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research to transect disciplines. To that end academic Fellows exploring the 2015-2016 academic year’s IHR theme, Monsters and Monstrosity, meet in a weekly seminar to discuss their work in the context of one another’s projects and academic perspectives. These Fellows, like those before them, submitted competitive research proposals in order to qualify for their positions in the Institute. Once selected, Fellows design their own seminar curriculum, which includes furnishing relevant readings for one another. As they discuss those readings and one another’s projects, they often examine the boundaries typically drawn around their own disciplines and begin thinking across them. The concept of monsters and monstrosity has a long history. The monstrum of antiquity were abnormally-developed animals that appeared, it was believed, to portend evil and calamity—not things to fear, but warnings of fearsome things to come. Over centuries monsters of imagination took on the

fearsomeness of things they once only foreshadowed, but never entirely shed the role of omen-bearers and boundary-markers. The diverse historical and cultural roles of monsters and monstrosity furnished a broad range of questions for IHR Fellows to examine and discuss: What is a monster, socially, ethically, aesthetically? How are monsters villains, and how are they heroes? How does mythology and literature use monstrosity to establish cultural boundaries? In what ways might prevailing narratives of science and progress account (or fail to account) for the monstrous? How is the monstrous reflected in ideas about nature and humanity? Early in the seminar series, broad consensus emerged that, whatever monsters our children fear beneath their beds, whatever monstrosities we encounter in popular culture, every monster story is also a human story. Visiting Fellow Andrea Wood observes this in her project concerning ways that popular monster narratives predicate human survival on the crossing of lines:

Scribbling Without the Lines

QUEERING THE APOCALYPSE: SURVIVAL POLITICS, ZOMBIES, AND POPULAR CULTURE Andrea Wood, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Winona State University

THE MONSTROUS AS A COUNTERMONUMENT: BODY AND MEMORY IN SOUTH KOREAN CINEMA AND LITERATURE Jiwon Shin, Assistant Professor of Korean, Arizona State University

This project examines how apocalyptic settings and themes in zombie films, graphic novels, television shows, and video games conceive of the future and survival in queer terms. I analyze how visions of zombie apocalypse manifest in these pop culture narratives, while exploring their attendant survival politics, which often require rejecting normative behaviors, codes, and ideologies in order to survive. I also focus specifically on how apocalyptic zombie narratives explore fears about sexual and reproductive agency, racialized and gendered Others, disease pandemic, and scientific and technological advancements against the backdrop of decomposing social, national, and global landscapes. On a broader theoretical level, this project interrogates how “queerness” and temporality play a critical role in imagining the apocalypse as well as conceptualizing survival in zombie narratives when neither a utopian future nor a nostalgic return to the past is viable.

Named the plastic surgery capital of the world, South Korea is a place where bodies and faces can be made anew at will. It is also a place that suffers unhealed wounds of torture, sexual violence, and labor exploitation from the nation’s violent twentieth-century history. Lingering memories of exploited and tortured bodies are uncannily projected onto the increasingly visible bodies of the influx of migrant economic refugees from North Korea and other parts of Asia. My project considers monstrosity through examining body genres developed in so-called “extreme” cinema (horror, crime-thriller, and spy-action) and the poetic grotesque in feminist literature in South Korea. These films and literary works register paradoxical considerations of the body in relation to memory in contemporary South Korean social life, as something infinitely redeemable and yet utterly irrevocable.

The funhouse-mirror nature of the “undead”—zombies, vampires, and other creatures with recognizably or predominantly human features—surely contributes to their recurrent popularity. By blurring lines between “us” and “not-us,” these monsters embody the tension between the comfort of stability and the thrill of the undiscovered. The price of discovery often proves high, as Prometheus well knows! But high or low, the price will be paid, and not always by those who incurred it. The monsters we make of ourselves and others are of lasting consequence. IHR Fellow Jiwon Shin explores some ways that today’s monstrosities trace the outlines of their progenitors, and how that impacts those whose monsters peer back at them from the streets—or through the mirror:

The realization that monsters can be found both in the world around us and in ourselves marks the achievement of a kind of maturity— for so long as monsters could be trusted to mind their boundaries, keeping beneath their bridges and within their caves, we could imagine ourselves truly safe in the protective warmth of firelight and loving arms. It is the knowledge of true terrors that lines the faces of our elders, knowledge that we are not protecting our children from the darkness at all, but in great measure from things that humans do in darkness. Monsters in closets and under beds are house pets by comparison, in essence allies of those children fortunate enough to have closets and beds, easy excuses for comforting reassurances: one last story, one more hug. Too often the best we can do to protect our children from real monsters is simply to not become monsters ourselves. Thus it is with reluctantly dawning horror we contemplate the inverse: that sometimes, the

IHR Research Fellows 2015-2016

children we strive to protect are themselves to be feared. Try as we might to disclaim them, as a rule their lineage is only too certain. What can we say when our “little monsters” become monsters in truth? IHR Fellow Stephen Toth reflects on the surprisingly recurrent phenomenon of children who kill, and societies that grasp for ways to explain it:

MONSTROUS YOUTH: MURDER AND MODERNITY IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE FRANCE Stephen Toth, Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University

the conception, care, and keeping of the non-human “children” of scientific exploration:

BIOETHICS, HUMAN MONSTERS, AND ‘FRANKENFOODS’: GLOBAL MONSTER NARRATIVES AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Joan McGregor, Professor of Philosophy, Arizona State University Rebecca Tsosie, Regents’ Professor of Law & Vice Provost, Arizona State University

While recent murders in the United States have brought to prominent public attention the child or adolescent who kills, this is certainly not a new phenomenon nor is it limited to the American experience. Through a microhistorical reconstruction of three notorious cases of murder committed by boys in fin-de-siècle France, this project roots our current dialogue surrounding such acts in a longstanding Gothic sensibility with regard to monsters and monstrosity that was experiencing a popular resurgence in the late nineteenth century.

What can traditional Western European, Asian, and Indigenous monster narratives tell us about the ethical and legal responses to emerging technologies on humans and foods? This project seeks to identify the range of legal and ethical views on emerging technologies that implicate themes of what is “human” and “natural” versus what is a “desecration” or “monstrosity.” Is there something special or “sacred” about natural kinds, whether human, animal, or plant, such that it is immoral to engineer them in particular ways? What are the consequential moral arguments about the use of emerging technologies on humans, animals, and plants?

Of course, one of the most famously monstrous children in literature was not a child at all, except as the brainchild of Victor Frankenstein. As the bicentennial of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s famous monster tale, Frankenstein, approaches, so too do technological breakthroughs in the synthesis of life. Science fiction once more proves more science than fiction, but then, the line between imagination and discovery has never been bold. After two centuries, scientists are closer than ever to realizing the creative genius of Shelley’s protagonist, but with regard to the consequences of their discoveries, are they any better prepared than was hapless Dr. Frankenstein? Science and technology often mark the boundaries of what can be done, but it is the humanities that concern questions of what should be done. With global monster narratives as their guide, IHR Fellows Joan McGregor and Rebecca Tsosie inquire after

It happens that not everyone thinks such consequential moral arguments exist or are relevant to scientific advancement. Despite efforts to combat the trend, for some the line between the humanities and the sciences has never been brighter. “Who are these poets, to hinder our progress?” asks a scientist. “Who are these technicians, to decide the fate of humankind and, indeed, all things?” asks a philosopher. But the border between them is set by convention; like children with coloring-books, most of us either keep our scribbling within the lines or boldly (or sloppily) stray outside them. Rare are children who make their own lines; rarer still those who dare to remove them, or even to ask, “whence these lines,” but boundary disputes can arise even when no one specifically intends it. IHR Fellows Ben Hurlbut and Gaymon Bennett examine one such struggle at the borders of monstrosity, where the biological sciences have begun to

Scribbling Without the Lines

make normative assertions of the kind once reserved for ethicists:

BIOTECHNICAL MONSTROSITY AND MORAL IMAGINARIES OF INNOVATION Ben Hurlbut, Assistant Professor of History of Science, Arizona State University Gaymon Bennett, Assistant Professor of Religion, Science, and Technology, Arizona State University The monstrous has long been a central figure in the scientific imagination: an object of enlightenment domestication, a retrograde past to the progress of knowledge, an everlurking shadow chased away by the light of reason. Put otherwise, modern science owes its origins to abnormality and deviation: science establishes itself as science precisely by exposing life’s parade of horribles as mere disordered expressions of reassuring biological order. A central imperative of the enlightenment project was to illuminate the rational order of things. This imperative gave rise to a forked repertoire: capacities to explain life were at once capacities to manipulate and transform it. Science was empowered, under the banner of illuminating life, to reconfigure living beings and to refigure life’s fundamental moral boundaries. Under the sign of illuminating abnormality, the sciences assumed ontological and ethical authority: defining which interventions in life serve the ends of rational inquiry and which transgress forbidden limits.

how does this institution occlude biology’s latent (if disavowed) potential for generating monstrosity? In living rooms, laboratories, and legislatures, tautologically all human activity is human activity—and so the humanities, and the projects of the IHR Fellows, range from monster movies to political policy and beyond. For whether our monsters are products of our culture or our imagination or our technology, they are our monsters, disclaim them as we may with lines of semantics or salt. We make and unmake them, literally and literarily. At times we are them, and they are us, because every monster story is also a human story, if only to the extent that telling stories remains a uniquely human endeavor. Stories lay the lines between which we color our world, and monsters are sentinels, policing the borders of humanity. But there are more things in heaven and earth than can be found inside these borders. We can explore those things, if we can overcome our monsters (and ourselves). We can explore those things, if we are brave.

Contemporary biology has thus set itself free: it positions its own technological gains as “advancement” and therein assumes responsibility for policing moral imaginations of the rational and the monstrous. Our project interrogates the terms and costs of this freedom. Theorizing the monstrous as deviations against which the normal and the normative are given form, we ask: what are the moves by way of which biology gets instituted as a space for making the rational and the virtuous? And

This group exhibition is created and funded by ASU IHR. To inquire about purchasing any of the works featured in this exhibition, please contact the curator via email at k.wendell.nemelka@gmail.com.

A research unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences