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23
de arte no 79 2009
© University of South Africa Pr ess
ISSN 0004-3389 pp 23–33
Themes of genetic engineering and the
homunculus in Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural
installation, We are Family1
Andrew James Smith and Elfriede Dreyer*
Research
* Andrew James Smith completed his MA
Visual Studies in 2008 at the Depar tment of
Visual Ar ts, Universit y of Pretoria. Elfriede
Dreyer is associate professor of Fine Arts at
the Department of Visual Ar ts, Universit y of
Pretoria.
Abstract
In this article Patricia Piccinini’s We are
Family of 2003 is considered in terms of the
concept of the genetic homunculus, which
can be understood as the product of artifice.
The genetically engineered human being is
investigated within the context of alchemic and
post-human discourse, with specific reference
to the ideas of Donna Haraway and Jean
Baudrillard. It is maintained that, although it
is as yet impossible to accurately predict what
the outcomes of such forays into the realms of
the natural or the divine may be, post-human
futures are already imagined and simulated in
the milieu of artistic licence.
Introduction
Just as the creation of life has always been a
preoccupation of humankind, so the creation
myth is one of humanity’s most pervasive
archetypes. In mythology, the question of
creation is almost always resolved in the divine.
Any human attempt at the creation of life is, in
most myth systems, portrayed as vainglorious
and even perfidious, and human hubris in
wishing to acquaint themselves with the divine
is mostly met with punishment. This is evident,
for example, in the biblical myth of Babel and
the ancient Greek myth of Icarus, which both
show the symbolic relationship of elevation,
divinity and pride.
Similarly, many myths of human annexation
of divinity – particularly those of humans
creating humans – are tempered by some
divine intervention.2 It is for this reason that
the creation of life and the idea of immortality
go hand in hand with the equation of human
beings with God. This is most evident in
alchemic homunculus mythology which,
despite its ancient roots, relates to post-
human theory.3 In The post-human condition
(1995) Robert Pepperell posits that present-
day technology effects fundamental changes
in all aspects of human life and society, from
arts and culture, to politics and economics.
These areas are becoming increasingly
saturated with ‘essential’ technologies, and
all human experience is becoming integrated
with increasingly rapidly advancing technology
which threatens, on an escalating scale, to
overwhelm and destroy humanity. However,
this destruction is as inevitable as entropy
itself, and is itself an extension of evolution.
According to Pepperell (1995:135), the post-
human era begins in full when the output of
computers becomes ‘unpredictable’ and ‘all
technological progress of human society is
geared towards the redundancy of the human
species as we know it’.
The loss of distinction between natural and
artificial is demonstrable in several post-human
technologies. It is in this context that the notion
of the homunculus and the work of Patricia
Piccinini become relevant.
The homunculus
The notion of the homunculus, literally
meaning ‘little man’, refers to the generation of
human life in the laboratory by the alchemist/
scientist.4 Since this feat was, for obvious
reasons, never proven to have been performed,
the various accounts of and methods for
creating the homunculus differ greatly, but
most involve specific, mystical prescriptions
for the incubation of semen outside the womb
of the mother. The genetic homunculus can
be understood as the product of any artifice
that deals specifically with the creation,
perfection, augmentation and prosthesis of
human life, where there is mediation of that
organism prior to birth. It can be taken to refer
to any scientifically created creature produced
(partially or wholly) from human DNA that
deviates from its original form.
Ontologically, the homunculus is a human
construct, an artificial man created solely by
human ingenuity and technological prowess.5
Originally, the homunculus was created in
the retort6 using spagyric components and
techniques that supposedly nurtured base
components into human life. As such, the
homunculus was intended as an extension of
the alchemist’s living soul, a kind of purified
cutting that was intended, according to the
medieval Arabian alchemist, Jabir Ibn Hayan
(Holmyard 1928), to make the alchemist more
god-like. The takwin (the ritual creation of life
in the laboratory) was a sacred and clandestine
rite of purification for Hayan and his adherents,
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Andrew James Smith and Elfriede Dreyer
that would enable them to attain a greater
understanding of God through the appropriation
of His processes.
In a similar way, modern scientists
arguably prepare genetic hybrids and chimeras
in laboratories in equally occult secrecy.
The creation of the contemporary genetic
homunculus is already a reality: recombinant
DNA technology has ensured that animal/
human hybrids – creatures with no root in
or connection to nature – are at the forefront
of medical research. Like the alchemists of
old, today’s scientific researchers seek the
perfection and immortality of humankind, at
least medically. The search for cures to the
diseases of the age – HIV/AIDS, cancer and
other such terminal nightmares – is conducted
alongside cosmetic and experimental research
into the human genome.
It is important to distinguish between the
genetic homunculus and the genetic clone.
Single-cell parthenogenesis (cloning) is not a
perfective process. The clone merely represents
the cellular twinning of an embryo to create
an amoebic doubling of a particular organism,
whereas the genetic homunculus is a being
that is augmented or changed by science into
something that can be perceived as better than
the original subject (most often from multiple
genetic parents). The genetic homunculus is
not a clone, although, like any other life-form,
it can be cloned. In fact, it can be argued that
the genetic homunculus is not ‘human’ in any
traditional sense. The genetic homunculus
can be understood as a being fashioned from
altered human DNA, in that it is a combination
of specific human traits which have been
augmented by science, changed and possibly
even hybridised with other species. The result
of changing the fundamental nature of what
it means to be human, even slightly, is surely
a wholly different species. The use of human
DNA itself is currently ethically regulated for
this very reason.
Fusions of multiple distinct DNA subjects of
the same or different species have been dubbed
‘chimeras’ in the scientific community, after
the three-headed monster of Ancient Greek
mythology slain by the hero Bellerophon (the
Greek monster was a fire-breathing lion with
a goat’s head on its back and a snake where
its tail should be). This kind of hybridisation
pre-emptively devalues the sanctity of humanity
in a very essential way, since the ‘parts’ that
make up a genetic chimera are interchangeable
and thus the process mostly becomes arbitrary
(‘chimera’ is, quite simply, a blanket term
for a vastly varied arm of genetic science,
comprising any result of recombinant DNA
testing). The mere fact that no terminological
distinction is drawn between chimeras created
using human DNA and other chimeras also
lends further opacity to the already clandestine
practices of genetic researchers. For this reason
it is necessary, even from legal and scientific
standpoints, to refer to genetically engineered
humans as ‘homunculi’.
Superficially, the genetic homunculus may
seem similar to American biologist Donna
Haraway’s cyborg, described in A manifesto
for cyborgs: Science, technology and socialist
feminism in the 1980s (1991) as a ‘cybernetic
organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a
creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction’ (1991b:28). Haraway views the cyborg
as the offspring of militarism and patriarchal
capitalism (1991b:29), and argues:
[By] the late twentieth century, our time,
a mythic time, we are all chimeras,
theorized and fabricated hybrids of
machine and organism; in short, we are
cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it
gives us our politics. The cyborg is a
condensed image of both imagination and
material reality, the two joined centers
structuring any possibility of historical
transformation (1991b:28–29).
Both the genetic homunculus and Haraway’s
cyborg represent a form of neo-human that
is created and prosthesed (augmented by
prosthesis) by technology. Both are marriages
of technology and nature; and both belong to
a separate ethos of non-uniform nature, that
is, a nature without laws. The exception is that
the genetic homunculus is merely created from
human parts, and so it can be argued that it is
not specifically human. It is also changed prior
to birth and its birth would not occur without
the intervention of technology. This is different
from the in-vitro fertilisation methods and
fertility enhancers of the cyborg. As Baudrillard
(1995:70) notes, genetic intervention is
a ‘definitively integrated prosthesis’ and
what this means is that there is no longer a
distinction between the prosthesis and the
prosthesed. The term ‘genetic homunculus’
describes a being that has benefited from
genetic alterations that enhance aspects of its
physicality and/or intelligence, where human
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de arte no 79 2009
Themes of genetic engineering and the homunculus in Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural installation, We are Family
genes have been used only as a point of
departure – the genetic homunculus is itself a
prosthesis. For example, a genetic homunculus
could potentially be a hermaphrodite that can
even determine how it reproduces, just as the
human cyborg can, but whereas the cyborg is
an augmented human and uses its technology
to achieve these ends, the technology whereby
the genetic homunculus does this is invisible –
it precedes and mediates its birth.
The crucial element of homunculus
mythology is that it concerns life created
by humans and represents the efforts of
humankind to attain godliness, immortality and
perfection. Schwarz (1980:57) states that
in the same way as Prometheus is the
mythological archetype of the rebel and
Lucifer … is the theological archetype of
the rebel, the alchemist is their human
reflection: Prometheus, Lucifer, the
alchemist all strive to equal the feats of the
gods to reconquer the two complementary
qualities: immortality and creativity.
The human creation of life is archetypically
significant because it equalises the mortal
(humans) and the immortal (gods). As such,
the homunculus can be interpreted as the
summation of the alchemist/scientist’s desire
for immortality through his/her own works of
authoring an eternal being – a desire to create
a race that will see the fusion of nature and
culture, a union of humankind and godkind.
The concept of the homunculus represents
both the transcendence of what it means to
be human, and the ultimate abrogation of
nature in humankind’s dearest desire – to
survive eternally. Visual representations of
monstrous creatures created by humans,
such as the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel,
Frankenstein (1818), have been common
throughout history. Yet, the homunculus is both
sacred and profane and in this sense differs
from other monsters inasmuch as it is created
by human beings. Still, it offers the hope of
transcendence through science and technology,
while simultaneously destroying the notion
of a creator god and transcendence through
spirituality by proving that mortals are capable
of the divine. As such it appears monstrous.
In this article it is maintained that,
although it is as yet impossible to accurately
predict what the outcomes of such forays into
the realms of the natural or the divine may
be, such futures are already imagined and
simulated in the safe milieu of artistic licence.
Yet, within the domain of the visual arts, the
fanciful and imaginative play with genetic
possibilities and abnormalities cannot be
viewed as mere artistic divination, but as an
important social gauge of cultural norms and
attitudes towards the unknown future of human
beings.
Patricia Piccinini’s homunculi
Just as there have been countless mythological
figures whose magical or technological genesis
under human auspices has set them apart
from the natural realm, so have these myriad
creatures manifested in contemporaneous
visual culture. A recent exhibition by Patricia
Piccinini recalls the cultural exposition of
the monstrous (or, rather, the unknown)
with piercing clarity. In her 2003 sculptural
installation for the Venice Biennale, We
are Family, she offers a strange collection
of creatures and corrupted forms, instantly
recognisable as artificial, but completely
naturalistically represented. One is instantly
reminded of the genetic homunculus through
the artist’s interplay of the natural and artificial,
and her life-like presentation of the strange
genetic freaks renders her a kind of alchemist-
artist-scientist. The installation of sculptures
of human children interacts nonchalantly with
the creatures, ignoring their grotesqueness and
treating them with the innocent indifference
afforded all well-used playthings. The work
comprises several sculptures perched on
couches and sofas which are purpose-designed
to accommodate them, or sitting on the floor
amongst the viewers. The installation consists
of several individual pieces which interact
directly with the environment and the viewers
walking among them, and indirectly with each
other.
Reproducing a microcosm of a world
completely divorced from normalcy, the artist
presents the potentially abominable and
horrific aspect of the limitlessness of genetic
engineering as banal and commonplace.
Still Life with Stem Cells (1) shows a figure
of a child playing with or petting curious
abortions of form, as if innocently unaware of
their grotesqueness. The forms look like pre-
embryonic creatures existing in a bizarre semi-
living state (they look alive, yet have no visible
means of locomotion, no means to ingest food
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Andrew James Smith and Elfriede Dreyer
1 Patricia Piccinini, Still Life with Stem Cells (2002). Silicone, polyurethane, human hair, clothing, carpet. Lifesize dimensions variable.
Photo: Graham Baring.
or expel waste, or to respire. They appear
warm and mammalian, possessing the texture
of human skin, yet they have none of the
characteristics of a mammal, bearing more of a
resemblance to amoebic creatures or embryos).
In reference to Donna Haraway’s
(1991a:296) idea of nature as topos,
accommodating the aberrant, a believable
version of nature has been created through
the interplay of and negotiation between the
unnatural and the natural. The explicit character
of the work is ironically where its subtlety lies
– the work becomes an exposition of scientific
possibility, an exhibit at some kind of futuristic
World’s Fair. Still Life with Stem Cells reproves
the current laxness in scientific ethics, and
at the same time questions the relationships
of humans to each other, to animals and to
possible homunculi that might be born of the
manipulation of the human genome.
The alien, pillowy amorphs are reminiscent
of the type of natural curiosities one might
find in medical museums or universities – only
in this work they appear to be presented for
amusement, rather than study. What is truly
bizarre is that the viewer is acquainted with
them as toys or pets, completely pathetic
and dominated. One is tempted to see them
as wholly non-threatening, helpless lumps,
simulacra, of live tissue. Ironically, the
‘creatures’ do not seem to represent a threat.
The threat that they expose is the threat of
a violence that humanity will do unto itself
and its progenitor, nature. They represent the
violence of the system imploding, in reference
to the threat of Baudrillard’s implosion
(1995:66, 68), that is, of the inability to
control or make sense of a system that has
spiralled out of control, and the threat of the
simulacrum made real.
The grotesqueness of the sculptures lies in
the spectators’ familiarity with the abominated
‘creatures’. The children appear to interact
smilingly with them, imparting their aura of
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Themes of genetic engineering and the homunculus in Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural installation, We are Family
2 Patricia Piccinini, The Young Family (2002). Silicone, fibreglass, leather, human hair, plywood. 85cm x 150cm x 120cm approx.
Photo: Graham Baring.
benign curiosity onto the viewers themselves,
and present creatures exploited as endearing
pets and curiosities for infantile and overly
curious human masters.
Human family and nature
In the title of the installation, We are Family,
Piccinini toys with the linguistic concept of
familiarity, family and familial relationships.
The notion of family in the sense of taxonomic
rank is evoked, in that the creatures presented
are genetically related to humans. The Young
Family (2) represents is a small nuclear family,
which immediately draws attention to their
simulated humanness and the relationships
between pets and their owners, in that pet-
owners often see their pets as ‘a part of the
family’. The nature of the family and the family
environment is dealt with in these works. In
Piccinini’s family there is no private space,
no retreat of normalcy for these creatures to
return to. They are exposed and displayed as
art-pieces. In this way the artist also questions
the idea of a ‘normal’ family environment, and
the planes of interaction between the nuclear
family and the outside world.
The denial of the norm in these works
extends beyond the mere flesh-and-blood
principles of family, however. The children
in her works are depicted as innocent,
but afforded a position of great power and
dominance over the genetically enfeebled, the
reduced other. Thus they become human in
that they dominate the other creatures in the
works with impunity, proven by their stark
juxtaposition with the ‘monsters’. However, the
creatures are human enough to evoke a deep
sense of sympathy and pity for them.
The interplay of normalcy and
grotesqueness invokes the dialectic of natural
and artificial. Yet, the lifeless stasis of these
synthetic (but realistic-looking) children
destabilises a straightforward reading of the
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Andrew James Smith and Elfriede Dreyer
3 (Above and below) Patricia Piccinini, Leather Landscape (2003). Silicone, acrylic, leather, human hair, timber. 290cm x 175cm x
165cm. Photo: Graham Baring.
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Themes of genetic engineering and the homunculus in Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural installation, We are Family
work. Ostensibly, it would seem that Piccinini
has presented us with the traditional trope of
(normal = natural) and (grotesque = artificial).
However, this cannot withstand the fact that
the sculpture clearly shows that it is not so
much the monsters that are abhorrent, but the
children, who are looking on with such wide-
eyed innocence, oblivious to the fact that the
situation should seem abhorrent. Thus this idea
is subverted in favour of a far more seditious
dialogue.
At this stage, it is useful to examine
Haraway’s position of nature more thoroughly.
Haraway (1991a:296) describes the dilemma
of the human relationship with nature as
follows:
Nature is for me … one of those
impossible things characterized by Gayatri
Spivak as that which we cannot not
desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature’s
discursive constitution as ‘other’ in the
histories of colonialism, racism, sexism
and class domination of many kinds,
we nonetheless find in this problematic,
ethno-specific, long-lived and mobile
concept something we cannot do without,
but can never ‘have’. We must find another
relationship to nature besides reification
and possession.
According to Haraway (1991a:296), nature
is ‘made’ by ourselves, our technology and
our experience, through the mutually creative
interplay of various ‘artefacts’ (the players on
what she sees as the stage of nature) which
are loaded with meaning to varying degrees.
This rather pliable, almost Shakespearean
view, allows for the possibility that even what
we regard as the most aberrant perversion
of nature – the genetic chimera – is a part
of nature. The genetic homunculus must
be considered under such a theory not
only because it allows us to consider the
homunculus beyond the confining and narrow
strictures of scientific method, but also because
it is a way to argue the homunculus as a
position of post-humanity7, without becoming
embroiled in ethical complexities.
Haraway’s (1991a:332) contention is
that knowledges are made, through dialectical
processes such as self/other, nature/culture
or human/not human: ‘If organisms are
natural objects, it is crucial to remember
that organisms are not born; they are made
in world-changing technoscientific practices
by particular collective actors in particular
times and places’ (1991a:297). This equates
nature, technology, culture and humanity on
a homogenous plane of creative power, and
gives each the ability to create or influence
the creation of the Other, at least in terms of
discourse. ‘The “collective”, of which “nature”
in any form is one example … is always an
artefact, always social, not because of some
transcendental Social that explains science or
vice versa, but because of its heterogeneous
actants/actors.’ This equity of creative power
allows for the view that we make nature, just as
nature makes us. Haraway seeks to naturalise
the course of nature creating organism creating
technology creating organism creating nature.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean a
physical creation of all organisms, but it is apt
to take the discourse onto the topos of genetic
cloning and cybernetics.
Worlds and homes
In her alchemic model, Haraway diverges from
the traditional modes of viewing nature ‘as that
which is hidden and must be unveiled; as the
“other” who/which offers origin, replenishment
and service; as mother, nurse, or matrix,
resource, or tool for the reproduction of man’
(1991a:296). However, this view of nature
as discourse is congruent with the idea of
biology as a discourse between environment
and organism, mind and organism, and mind
and environment. Such dualism can be taken
further in the discourse of desire surrounding
nature, by extending it to concepts of
belonging, land and home.
In Leather Landscape (3) the creatures’
environment, a miniature white landscape
reminiscent of a zoo habitat, is itself a
landscape, but it becomes awash with colonial
metaphor. However, the creatures do not have
and never had an original habitat or home, so
either we must imperialistically consider that
this is their ‘natural’ environment simply by
virtue of the fact that they had none to begin
with, or we must consider that the creatures’
genetic parents have been disenfranchised
in the most heinous way – two species have
been displaced from their natural habitats
or homelands, and their offspring have
been denied the right of heritage. Similarly,
Haraway’s cyborg ‘does not expect its father
to save it through a restoration of the garden
... [since it] would not recognize the Garden of
Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream
of returning to dust’ (1991b: 29).
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Andrew James Smith and Elfriede Dreyer
The fact that the visual real has become
amended by virtual creatures such as the ones
in Figure 3, in the Baudrillardian (1996:13)
sense, means that although the concepts of
world and ‘the real’ are constructs already, the
human imagination has been active in altering
and adding to the real; therefore it becomes a
fully human world assuming its full meaning
in being imaginative and fictive. According
to Baudrillard (1996:13), the world is only
appearance and will always remain the ultimate
mystery, the enigma. In fact, the world has
disappeared and is radical illusion (Baudrillard
1996:16): the real actually consists in the
discourse on the real. In The perfect crime,
Baudrillard (1996:109) presents a nostalgic
loss of a human sense of world and teleology in
the artificial encounter:
With the Virtual, we enter not only
upon the era of the liquidation of the
Real and the Referential, but that of the
extermination of the Other.
It is the equivalent of an ethnic cleansing
which would not just affect particular
populations but unrelentingly pursue all
forms of otherness.
The otherness of death – staved off by
unrelenting medical intervention.
Of the face and the body – run to earth by
plastic surgery.
Of the world – dispelled by Virtual Reality.
Of every one – which will one day be
abolished by the cloning of individual cells.
And, quite simply, of the other, currently
undergoing dilution in perpetual
communication.
If information is the site of the perfect
crime against reality, communication is the
site of the perfect crime against otherness.
No more other: communication.
No more enemy: negotiation.
No more predators: conviviality.
No more negativity: absolute positivity.
No more death: the immortality of the
clone.
No more otherness: identity and
difference.
No more seduction: sexual in-difference.
No more illusion: hyperreality, Virtual
Reality.
No more secret: transparency.
No more destiny.
The perfect crime.
Andreas Huyssen postulates that the search for
the real has become utopian (1995:101), and
refers to Baudrillard’s ‘astrophysical imagery
[that] betrays his hidden desire: it expresses
nothing so much as the desire for the real after
the end of television’ (1995:90). The process
of the ‘amendment’ of the real entails not
denial of the human real, but an extension of
the boundaries of being human for the viewer.
Similarly, in Leather Landscape, the viewer
is enticed to relinquish his/her ideas about the
ontologies of being human in the complicity of
the simulacrum of the real. The viewer is as
much a monster as the creature in the false
habitat. Herein lies the irony of the work – the
viewer’s monstrous nature is reflected in the
eyes of the pitiful creatures and he/she is forced
not only to sympathise with the creatures, but
to contemplate the power exchange.
The post-human and ownership
The question of ownership – no longer what,
but who is owned – is critical to Piccinini’s We
are Family. Both ghastly and endearing, the
pets in Leather Landscape are a reminder of
the failure of technocracy in the collapse of
the value of individual rights, which Francis
Fukuyama (2002), a pre-eminent scholar
in the field of bio-ethics, sees as inherent to
the genetic project. Haraway (1992:324), in
discussing the distribution of knowledge with
regards to AIDS and other terminal illnesses,
strikes on the dilemma of distribution of
knowledge by the technocracy and causes us
to examine the homunculus in terms of its
arbitration and the access it would have to the
technologies that provide prosthesis, as well as
who would have access to them:
Unable to police the same boundaries
separating insiders and outsiders,
the world of biomedical research will
never be the same again. The changes
range across the epistemological, the
commercial, the juridical and the spiritual
domains. What are the consequences of
the simultaneous challenges to expert
monopoly of knowledge and insistence
on both the rapid improvement of the
biomedical knowledge base and the
equitable mass distribution of its fruits?
How will the patently amodern hybrids of
healing practices cohabit in the emerging
social body? And, who will live and die
as a result of these very non-innocent
practices?
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Themes of genetic engineering and the homunculus in Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural installation, We are Family
Since little public forum exists where the ethics
of genetic technologies may be discussed,
the laws that govern genetic science are
opaque to the public, and future genetic
research goals (and even past research)
cannot easily be scrutinised by the public.
The Piccinini sculptures compel the viewer
to critically engage with genetic science as
a new dominant social force, and become
involved in the mystique of the homunculus.
Although the sculptures present the viewer
with possibilities and future realities, these
remain feasible consequences of the bio-
technology revolution. Piccinini’s creatures are
so frighteningly aberrant because they represent
the arm of genetic science that is not geared
towards the betterment of humanity, as it is
understood in a general sense, but instead
towards the satisfaction of curiosity. It is not
the cure for cancer that humans fear; rather it
is the route that science takes to get there. Her
creatures show the death and transfiguration of
humanness into something terrible and pitiable,
and the artist shows the viewer the reverse side
of the purification and perfection of humanity.
Terms of ownership, identity and corporate
and human rights have to be renegotiated in
light of the fact that homunculi will eventually
become corporate products. This is because
genetic homunculi, or human ‘upgrades’ (that
are likely to become mandatory or perhaps
even necessary for even the most basic jobs)
will be manufactured by the businesses we
give the rights to do so. Such re-negotiating
will require the complete restructuring of our
views on what it means to be (post)human, as
well as our relationship with nature, and will be
a consequence of the outcome of our present
debates on the matter. The current Western,
capitalist approach to nature is still largely
interventionist, and this approach to nature
informs the creation of a genetic homunculus,
but it must be re-evaluated for the homunculus
itself, because of the fact that for the first time
the arbiters of the technology will themselves
be the technology.
For homunculi like these, questions of race,
gender and even culture become questions
no longer of nature but of choice – choices
made by the imperialising Other, but also by
the homunculus (gene-altering therapy and
cybernetic extensionism are the technologies
of the genetic homunculus). This can be taken
to mean that what are, for humans, issues
of dynamic cultural discussion will become,
for the genetic homunculus, a very culturally
loaded form of gene-aesthetics. By presenting
terrible abortions of form that look like animal/
human hybrids, Piccinini presents a conclusion
of the industrial narrative of history that is
presented in the genetic project. It is within this
paradigm that the viewer must somehow come
to terms with her homunculi.
Humans have already witnessed assisted
pregnancies, in-vitro fertilisation and pre-
selective genetics. The created Other, the
technological self and the technologically
created are specific realities of contemporary
science and, very soon, will be features of
modern life as aspects of genetic technology
filter through to the public. As beings with the
power to control technology and also subvert
the purposes of the technocracy through raising
awareness, it falls to every person to make
decisions about where we choose to take the
technology that will bring about an intelligent
homunculus. The genetic homunculus already
threatens human sovereignty of rights in the
continual denial of basic human liberties that
genetic homunculi face in research conditions
(MacDonald-Glenn 2003:251). Muotri et al.
(2005) observe that their part-human chimera
exists purely as a research object, much like
any laboratory rat. Genetics researchers control
the means of life and death of their subjects
within the laboratory, but this research has
consequences outside the laboratory too.
This refiguring of the modes of life and
death, evident in Piccinini’s work, is leading
humanity towards a biotechnological mode of
procreation and reproduction. After all, genetics
research will undoubtedly also yield great
marvels as well as great horrors, but this is not
to say that the genetic homunculus will be free
of its Frankensteinian stigma either way.
Closing
In We are Family, Piccinini’s hyper-realistic
homunculi sculptures are presented as
abject: wretched and pathetic animal/human
chimeras exploited as ‘endearing’ pets and
curiosities for infantile and overly curious
human masters. This might suggest that the
genetic homunculus has specific and real
social consequences for humanity in the near
future. Genetic manipulation renders questions
of race, beauty and even sex malleable, and
as such imperialising structures of belonging
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32 de arte no 79 2009
Andrew James Smith and Elfriede Dreyer
and the owner/owned become subverted. As
such, it would seem that human beings have
progressed to a state where their control over
the environment, their corporeal influence on it,
and the influence it has on them, has changed
their ideas about themselves and their ultimate
destinies.
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Notes
1 This article was submitted in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree of MA in
Visual Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at
the University of Pretoria. Andrew Smith was
supervised by Prof Elfriede Dreyer. All images in
this article were reproduced by kind permission
of the artist.
2 Ancient Greek tradition holds that Pygmalion,
King of Cyprus, created an ivory sculpture so
perfect he fell in love with it, prompting Athena
to bring it to life. Although the creature is
created by his hand, it is given the spark of life
by a divine element. The usurpation of the gods’
power has also been a feature of mythology.
When Zeus withheld fire from the people of the
earth, Prometheus stole it from him and gave it
to his mortal creations. Hebrew mythology tells
of the golem, a mindless, soulless construct
shaped from clay to protect or serve its creator;
the word truth is etched into its forehead to
bring it to life. In the case of the golem, the
inanimate clay can only be brought to life by the
holiest of rabbis. The most sacred technology
has always been stolen from or given by the
gods.
3 The utopian view in post-human theory is
centred on the seamless integration of natural
and artificial, but the utopian teleology of this
amalgam is that it should be seen as natural,
while a dystopian outcome (or rather the lack of
any positive outcome) may reveal that the fusion
is in fact supreme artificiality. The post-human
design may ultimately be revealed as utopia – a
nowhere place. The genetic homunculus must
be examined as a kind of utopia in Haraway’s
(1991) sense of nature as a topic place for a
forum of ideas and exchange of rhetoric, due
to the fact that as yet, an intelligent genetic
homunculus remains merely a theoretical
concept.
4 The term ‘homunculus’ refers to the human-
created being – a notion established by the
medieval physician and mystic Paracelsus, as
a creature created out of human generative
fluids by the alchemist’s hand, through his
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33
de arte no 79 2009
Themes of genetic engineering and the homunculus in Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural installation, We are Family
technology. Taken from the Latin for ‘small man’
(homo = man + culus = diminutive suffix),
‘homunculus’ is the term used by pre-modern
Western alchemists to describe the product of
human genesis in the retort (most often through
the cultivation of human semen). For this reason
it is practical to appropriate the term to refer
to the genetic endeavours of modern science,
which leads to its other definition. Social
objections to the dehumanisation that human
genetic engineering represents are similar to
those raised by the opponents of Paracelsus
(Newman 2004). Judaeo-Christian creation
mythology details the creation of the male before
the female, as does Hesiodic Greek Myth. The
alchemic conception of the homunculus follows
these ancient precepts, in that the Biblical
Adam was used in many instances to symbolise
aspects of the alchemical adept’s transcendent
spirit (Jung 1963). Since the homunculus was
intended as a means of spiritual transformation,
the first homunculus would be a kind of pseudo-
Adam in its own right. Although the treatises do
not preclude the creation of female homunculi
(in fact, quite the contrary), the concept’s origins
are firmly rooted in masculine traditions.
5 Alchemy and the concept of the homunculus are
part of a dominantly male-oriented philosophy
and there were very few female alchemists
until the pre-modern era, the Egyptian
monarch, Cleopatra the notable exception. The
homunculus’s genesis outside the womb serves
to further remove it from the feminine.
6 The significance of the alchemist’s tools is
affirmed by the sanctity of the ores as well as
the sacred re-enactment of the natural process.
They serve to simulate the gestation of the ore
in the womb of the Earth, hastening its journey
to gold. The alchemist’s vessels and retorts were
the sacred representations of the earth’s womb.
7 Post-human theory of nature articulates the
genetic homunculus as a post-human, artificial
technological being, with a unique genesis
based in the spheres of both nature and
technology. With the aim of contextualising
alchemy within a post-human ideological
framework, American biologist Donna Haraway’s
(1992) theory of nature as a topic-place is used
to propose a kind of profane sacred nature as
a framework for the creation of the genetically
engineered being – a proposal of a synthesis of
nature and technology.
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