ANICKA YI
In early adulthood, Anicka Yi set out to lead the curiosity-driven existence of an international vagabond, a quest that at the age of 35 she began to refine into an interdisciplinary scientific and artistic exploration of different forms of life. Her non-hierarchical approach dethrones sight as the highest human sense and instead addresses the less noble smell with sometimes challenging “scentscapes”. Through her long-term collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yi has discovered a respect for bacteria and viruses, other kinds of intelligence that, like AI, may well survive far beyond our own presence on Earth. In 2021, Yi turned the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern into an “aquarium of machines”, a habitat for her floating creatures that she says were meant to give visitors the friendly feeling of swimming with humpback whales and, as the title of the show explained, encourage them to fall “in love with the world”.
Interview by Claudia SteinbergPhotograph courtesy of Anicka Yi
CLAUDIA STEINBERG The various scientific fields you engage with are in and of themselves fascinating and exciting. What does art add to them? How do your science collaborators respond to your art? Are they surprised? Have they learned from you? Do they contribute to the aesthetics at all?
ANICKA YI Art adds material potential to the world as we know it. Much like molecular biology and chemistry, art by nature is a process of experimentation and discovery – though perhaps in slightly more immediately sensorial and uncanny ways. For this reason, I have often thought about artworks as inoculating ideas into existence, however distressing that may sound at first. It is not unlike the anxiety-provoking miasma that surrounds the very thought of being contaminated by elements external to the self, whether viral, bacterial or, increasingly, artificial. Rather than be wilted by the odious and the odorous, sometimes even the odiously odorous, my artwork apprehends these transmissions as a viable conduit of ideas. In other words, my art contaminates as it is contaminated by the ideas of scientists whose work replicates, undulates and thrives in the microscopic worlds of a Petri dish. Looking back, this thinking crystallised for me during my residency at MIT, where I collaborated with Tal Danino, a synthetic biologist who was a postdoctoral researcher at the time. He remarks that our work together made him more aware of the smells he encountered in scientific research, from the repulsive to the attractive, from the contaminated to the uncontaminated. Through our respective microbial research and practices, we have been able to illuminate the aesthetic forms of these contagious disciplinary fields and their cultures.
CS You have said that you once thought that art was more “polite” than science. I was struck by the word because 20th-century art tried so hard to be provocative, subversive, even rude, and you have chosen to work with the one sense that is maybe the least polite and the furthest removed from our verbal brain regions. You also like tactility, another potentially messy terrain.
AY The politeness I was referring to is the one often associated with the lack of smells in the white-cube gallery, which is steeped in sterility and neutrality as a backdrop to the artworks. It is what scientific laboratories and galleries have in common – at face value, or in this case nose value, the sense of smell is suppressed. Therefore, in asking what feminism smells like or how smell is tethered to racial bias, olfaction intervenes in this supposed absence to give material substance to the political and biological by engaging the full breadth of the sensorium. I have found that the feigned sterility of the lab, much like the gallery, can become engulfed in all sorts of smells: agar-agar; the yeasty, meaty smells of various cell-culture media; the saline and amphibian smells of marine biology labs; the earthy smells of greenhouses for botanical observation; and the sulphurous, mineral and Bunsen burner smells of the chemistry lab. The fact that the LA health department almost shut down Dieter Roth’s first US gallery exhibition, Staple Cheese (A Race), in the summer of 1970 is a funky example of smell’s bio-political potency, even if the smell in question posed no actual threat apart from a nose scrunch. A more appalling incident is what happened to Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble, whose home was raided by the FBI [in 2004] under suspicion of bioterrorism following his wife’s untimely, yet unrelated death. Kurtz’s lab equipment and Petri dishes where he was growing Serratia marcescens, a common bacteria found in soil and water that produces red pigment, led to him being indicted and to a prolonged legal battle [that ended in 2008]. Tactility, being another of the senses often unjustly reduced to the non-transcendent, carries implications for the physical and material nature of our reality as well. As I explore in my work Grabbing at Never Vegetables [2015], the fragrant or the tactile reinsert the biological qualities of these senses in order to subvert their censure.
CS The sciences have their own aesthetics. There is the beauty of astronomy, for example, and to some people Einstein’s formula of relativity is the most elegant thing ever produced by a human being.
AY Most definitely. It is precisely the aesthetics of observable phenomena rendered palpable in both sensorial form and language that make the sciences a lucid and formidable counterpart to the arts. By focusing attention on the hidden potential of the microscopic world – all the trillions upon trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi furthering us in the delicacy and porousness of our bodies – these living materials compose an aesthetic of immense proportions. In countering human exceptionalism, I have found that going into collaboration with their immensity is also a way to learn more about them. Of course, it is also about ourselves as vessels or glorified condominiums for the microscopic ecosystems that symbiotically make us who we are and who we’ve always been. This has been the primordial origin of much of my work dealing with the biological world.
CS You’re not only working with brilliant people but with brilliant organisms, from bacterial to fungal colonies. Only recently has the microbial biome in our gut got some respect; we now know that it influences our moods and even our courage. Have you observed a shift in people’s relationships to forms of life that used to be beneath their attention?
AY Bringing to light the social and affective ties that someone might have with the brilliance of these organisms is one of the most stirring things that I contend with in my studio. While I cannot say for certain that my works such as Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita) [2019] have inspired a newfound appreciation for the soil bacteria, Cyanobacteria and algae that exist below the surface in the local landscape, they are intrinsically embedded in the familiarity of it all. While seemingly unknown, these organisms have never not been there. This is perhaps one of the foremost steps in fostering a favourable shift: demonstrating their omnipresence and their conviviality in the places and spaces that hold special value in people’s lives. Whether it’s a self-contained micro-ecosystem, such as a Winogradsky column, or the cultural practices made possible over millennia by these geological portraits, their multilayered relationships are made visible in their shared continuance across a recognisable location. Yet, I am also quite comfortable with the thought that, unlike science and technology, art doesn’t always imply certainty beyond that of absolute reality. This is all to say that if the artist is to play a role in steering civilisation, it is important to remain open to the non-conceptual spaces that elude the scientific method. This is perhaps one difference that makes the fields of art and science distinct, though they might be similar in other ways. It is also this difference that strengthens their relationship in my own work; by eschewing a certain certainty, I can remain open to the uncertain and be in dialogue with what is and can be known in more concrete terms.
CS You have mentioned the beautiful word “entanglements”, which has recently been applied to social complexities by thinkers like Indy Johar, and refers to the interconnectedness of concepts such as economics and feelings, health and labour laws and weather, when it comes to looking at something like a house. The term actually originates in quantum science, which is something you’re interested in. How does it inform your thinking about art?
AY To be entangled is to find oneself embedded in a shifting constellation of other living things. Physics is certainly not my area of expertise, but to my understanding, one of the key aspects of quantum entanglement is that, even once separated by a large distance, entangled particles still have this relationship where the state of one particle cannot be described independently of the other. So proximity or lack of proximity can be misleading when it comes to the effects things can have on each other. Smell molecules can work this way as well – we might perceive a distance from something, all the while metabolising the molecules emanating from it. I’ve always described smell as a type of absent presence. I’m eager to learn more about these mysterious and unknown quantum effects and entanglements, especially as they apply to quantum biology, which theorises on how quantum mechanics might affect biological processes. There is now some evidence to support a quantum theory of smell, called the “vibrational theory of olfaction”, that describes smell as a delicate interplay of molecular vibration and quantum tunnelling. We lack adequate language for the quantum subtlety of our sensations, and we are taught to narrow our sensory experience into crude hierarchies and reductive binaries of “good” and “bad”. There seem to be many resonances between Buddhist philosophy and the multiplicities, relationalities and uncertainties described by quantum science, which I am curious to explore in relation to my own practice.
CS You state that we think of nature as a space we can enter and leave as we please. During the pandemic, the virus was a teacher, you say: we are not above nature, we are part of it, even if we destroy it and want to rule and exploit it. Your work explores the notion of a reality where there is no autonomous self, that we are made of multitudes, that our relationship to the world is porous. It sounds so rich to be part of animal, plant and microbial intelligence, and now, machine intelligence. What do we have to lose or whose interest does our insistent detachment from our countless connections serve?
AY Even though we might imagine differently, there’s no “outside of nature” or “outside of evolution”. This is because nature itself is a fabricated concept that we redefine according to our various worldviews and our politics. What we think of as “natural” is constantly in flux, but in reality everything around us is a “natural” part of the living world. Our fears of losing our autonomy stem from this imagined separation between ourselves and the rest of planetary life. We think we are in danger of unknown forces overtaking us, but we are always porous, always implicated and always compromised. In my 2019 exhibition, We Have Never Been Individual, I was exploring how certain ideals of Western liberalism such as individualism and human exceptionalism are being radically challenged by the fields of microbiome research, artificial intelligence, and animal and plant cognition. In the press release for that show I stated that “nature is a concept that is constantly in drag as itself”. Imagined detachment from this essential interconnectedness has perpetuated noxious aspects of our global capitalist society: colonialist exploitation, environmental extraction, mass consumption and so on. Imagining yourself as separate from your environment allows you to act in reckless and damaging ways. ◉