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73 The field of bio art is relatively new and emerged in concert with expansions in biotechnology ; these include tissue culturing, which only came in to development at the turn of the twentieth century. Artists took up such practices at the beginning of the 1990s, following the pioneering bio-artist collective Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A). Bio art, which takes living matter as a starting point for material production, remains unfamiliar to many. Those who encounter live matter for the first time in a gallery or museum setting often recall an initial shock, which is followed by an uneasy, queasy, and uncanny feeling. In one of bio art’s earliest definitions, Robert Mitchell notes that medium specificity — the use of living materials, such as live tissue, bacteria, or living organisms — unified early understandings of art engaged with emerging biotechnologies.1 In his theoretical account of bio art, he proposes that a shared use of living materials and bio-technologies underpins the art form, which seeks to transform relationships between science, medicine, corporate interest, and the public at large. While Mitchell’s framing of the field allies the bio-art form with medium specificity, in contrast, I define bio art both by its themes and materials, and by how it often moves along a spectrum between these two imposed poles. At the same time, I prioritize a categorical distinction : a work of bio art must use “wet” or biological matter as its medium. In line with the work of bio art curator Jens Hauser, I suggest that the bio-art form is not solely allied by formal use to a specific set of bio media, but rather that it can — as in the debates around the framing of “new media art” and its shared material, conceptual, and formal language — be a more malleable categorization, one that links artworks and practices that employ all types of “wet” or bio matter, that share a thematic interest in bio technologies, ecology, and the environment, and that can be categorized using a variety of terms, including vivoarts, transgenic art, wet art, and biotech art. Liveliness and presence has also been identified as a key feature of bio art. The latter generates a “presence” through this liveliness, as well as through the visceral responses it produces. In bio art, liveliness is mobilized through the presence of human and nonhuman bodies, what Hauser refers to as “the literal mingling of ‘art and the living’ and with it a general trend towards physicality and bodily perception.”2 This relationship between the human body and a present work of bio art generates visceral and embodied modes of viewing that are necessary to consider in the context of critically curating artscience practices. Cet article se concentre sur la pratique en plein essor du bioart, afin d’envisager les possibilités de faire du commissariat au sein de deux sphères de productions culturelles en apparence disparates, celles du laboratoire scientifique et du musée. Dans une analyse des œuvres du Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A), de Kathy High et de Jennifer Willet, il décortique les méthodes commissariales qui s’attachent à relocaliser le laboratoire dans le musée et vice-versa. En explorant ce phénomène de transversalité à travers les figures du « mangle » et du « biotheatre », le texte fait valoir que les pratiques du bio-art font intrinsèquement appel à des stratégies créatrices et commissariales qui ébranlent la perception de stérile objectivité des laboratoires et qui permettent de critiquer les paradigmes de la culture scientifique.

Keepers of the Bio Art Laboratory: Mangling Methods and Curating Critically