The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn
The exhibition Gene Worlds
Panel Two of Seven, Cibachrome on Sintra
In April, 1992 I sent invitations to a drawing to John Cage and Merce Cunningham.
John was especially intrigued by the approach and we met in June. I arrived at their
loft with a registered nurse, a very discreet woman named Reiko Saito. After some
conversation and showing of pictures, John rolled up his sleeve, and Reiko drew
some blood; seperate vials would go to one lab for DNA sequencing, while the other
lab would process and photograph the chromosomes. Later, Merce also permitted
blood to be drawn. That day the blood was sent by overnight express to Applied
Biosystems in California, where the DNA was sequenced. New York University
Medical Center processed the karyotypes.
In 1995 Curt Marcus asked me to create a special installation in his gallery.
I proposed a portrait of John Cage of up to ten panels, as I was interested
in expanding my sense of how my portraits could be experienced: they were
not necessarily , static, single image works. By making a portrait that required
one to move about the room, experiencing the work would be slower, more
nuanced, and flexible. I called the installation One or Ten or So... ,
Portrait of John Cage. It was exhibited in 1996.
I randomly assigned positions for each of the fourteen views of variously
stacked frames. The DNA sequence, expressed as a pulse, courses through
the bottom of the fourteen images, linking them into a specific order. Each image
(panel) also features a group of Cage&Mac182;s chromosomes in the lower right corner.
Each panel is of approximately human scale, and printed on a rather reflective material.
Seven panels were produced for the original installation and they were hung on the four
walls of the room, linked by the lines of the DNA sequence. The work can also
be exhibited in a line, or as a single panel, or as a group of up to fourteen panels.
The seven panels were also exhibited for one year at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn
during the exhibition Gene Worlds. This website features panel eight.
