intro

CIRCULATION   return to project description Gregory Sholette 9/99 Published in the New Art Examiner, November 1999 CIRCULATION is the sixth public art project by the artists’ collective, REPOhistory. Since 1989, the group’s dozen members and dozens of collaborators have produced a type of social cartography in which the invisible historical and political contours of a given place are marked and mapped. With CIRCULATION, REPOhistory approaches the island of Manhattan as a specific site, one that contains a matrix of partially detectable systems that shape its physical and discursive topography. Along with water and electricity, subways and sewers, zoning regulations and taxes there is one system that may be as invisible as it is vital: this is the daily routine of collecting, processing and distributing hundreds of pints of human blood each day. Blood’s vitality is conveyed in the statistic that nine out of ten New Yorkers who reach the age of 72 will have received a blood transfusion. Blood is drawn from a pool of voluntary donors, delivered to blood-banks, processed and dispersed to hospitals and clinics around the city and region. Used or polluted blood is even excreted out of the system via the Bronx to disposal sites farther north. The project operates with the premise that the history of blood is inextricably intertwined with its meanings as both a signifier of social and cultural beliefs and as a material thing. This one particular human organ that has forever fascinated writers, artists, philosophers, even entire nations is also now the basis of a specialized industry making it one of the world’s most valuable commodities. With CIRCULATION, REPOhistory asks the public to "read" this vital material not solely as a natural, biological thing, but as a specific historical site layered in social meaning and cultural significance. CIRCULATION becomes one possible map exposing the restless movement of this organ, human blood, as it travels through the physical and social spaces of Manhattan’s urban anatomy. The social signification of blood is as complex as it is mutable. It has changed in response to shifts in cultural ideology such as the pseudo-scientific theories of racial hygiene that developed in Europe and the United States in the 1930s. Sometimes it has changed in response to technological discoveries. As late as the 1920s draining quantities of blood out of a sick person was still considered a legitimate medical practice. In 1940, thanks in part to the pioneering work of Charles Drew, the technology was developed to store and redistribute plasma from one individual to another. Ironically Drew, an African American, was barred from becoming a member of the American Medical Association because of its whites-only policy. The evolving perception of blood and the circulatory system also affected such activities as theories of commerce and the construction of cities. David Harvey, who is credited with the discovery of blood circulation, asserted in 1628 that blood moves in a mechanical fashion, circulating within a network of tubes controlled by the heart that he likened to a mechanical pump. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) applied Harvey’s ideas of blood circulation to the circulation of capital while urban planners consciously used the model of the circulatory system of heart, lungs, arteries and veins in the designing of streets and boulevards in France and the United States. Beginning in 1750 the city of Paris enacted a series of laws obliging residents to unblock and clean city streets. Washington DC was planned to allow for the orderly circulation of citizens (Sennett, pp. 255-275). Closer to our own time the perception of blood has undergone dramatic alteration leading to a virtual paradox of signification. In the post-AIDS context blood is often perceived as both a medium of healing and a source of deadly pathogens. One outcome of this ambivalence is the misplaced fears by potential donors of becoming contaminated with the HIV virus.This has led to extreme shortages in many regional blood supplies including New York City’s while the demand for blood products increases. Other contradictions persist. Blood is often invoked as a symbol of fraternity; at the same time, it has served as an imaginary physiological dividing line that segregates people of different colors, classes, cultural backgrounds and nationalities. The social violence accompanying these ideological exclusions finds its expression in overt forms of racism in the U.S. like the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nations as well as the invisible legal mechanisms of the state itself. One need only look at the disproportionate percentage of African Americans on death row to see the ongoing destructive legacy of outmoded ideas like "racial types." Finally, the circulatory system, blood cells and plasma are the portals through which powerful new technologies of commerce, healing, and social control are being tested and refined. Important medical breakthroughs capable of improving lives have resulted from this experimentation. However some of this history involves the unethical targeting of the poor and marginalized. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments in the 1930s are but one example of this abuse. Another hidden history started after the testing of the first atomic bomb when the government began secret tests on unsuspecting hospital patients. The subjects were low income including persons of color, women and children; they received radioactive plutonium injections and for years were observed by doctors sworn to "do no harm." The field of medical sciences has provided important improvements in public health. Blood transfusions now save countless lives and hereditary diseases like Sickle Cell Anemia and Hemophilia may be on the verge of extinction thanks to new gene therapies. But who benefits from these medical breakthroughs is more a question of politics than corporate good will. With the pharmaceutical industry’s profits in the multi-billion dollar range, clearly only organized public pressure will assure ethical treatment and equal access to health care for all citizens. Consider the race amongst governmental and private interests to map the entire human genetic sequence. This project signals yet another shift in the social perception of the human body. For example Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. provides other drug manufacturers with recipes for biological molecules and genes on a pay per use basis. Despite the way language sometimes playfully and sometimes grimly modulates the public’s perception of blood, it is physical hardships and individual profits that continue to structure much of its changing narrative. This narrative, including its texture and topography, politics and aesthetics, is the subject of CIRCULATION. CIRCULATION dispenses with REPOhistory’s customary street signs, substituting instead a collection of artist-designed images and texts distributed through the mail, over the Internet, and at specific sites in art galleries and in the streets. Along with hundreds of mail artworks the project includes small objects, magnets, stickers. CIRCULATION also encompasses a window installation at Printed Matter Bookstore, a performance piece entitled "Flow" and an interactive web site www.repohistory.org that will remain on-line after the project’s other elements are disseminated. The CIRCULATION web functions like Harvey’s heart by pumping images, texts, data and ideas through an array of digital arteries. The project also features two collaborations made with New York City public high students. The Bleeding Edge is an on-line zine that features "Blood for Beginners" an illustrated dictionary and "Red-Time Stories" all produced by students in grades 6 through11 at the Institute for Collaborative Education. At City As School, high school students have produced a series of video interviews about the selling of blood for yarn, a case of baby switching caught by DNA tests, the culture of vampirism, and contracting hepatitis from raw oysters. REPOhistory’s public art project CIRCULATION encourages viewers to become active blood donors and active accomplices. By picking up postcard images at the distribution points located on the map and mailing these to others, and by logging on to repohistory.org and interacting with the project on-line, you become a mobile cell, a co-conspirator helping to reveal the all but hidden circulatory system of human blood. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Norton & Co. NY, 1994. REPOhistory artists and collaborators include: Tom Klem, Janet Koeing, Jim Costanzo, Cynthia Liesenfeld, Lisa Maya Knauer, Jayne Pagnucco, George Spencer, Gregory Sholette, Neill Nogan, Stephanie Basch, Kevin Pyle, Miguelangel Ruiz, Leela Ramotar, Carola Burroughs, Lisa Hecht, Trebor Scholtz, Jeni Sorkin, Brian Hand, Meryl Meisler, Oscar Tuazon, Andre Knight, Keith Christensen, Jasmine Gartner, Ivan Navarro, Jenny Polak, Marilyn Perez, Sarah Vogwill, Cris Pietrapiana, Russet Lederman, David Sansone, Sharon Denning, Susan Schuppli, and the late Ed Eisenberg

 

Who is REPOhistory | Our Past Work | Circulation | repohistory.org | contact REPOhistory | Email List

all images and text © 2000 by REPOhistory and participating artists