artwork 4
GFP Bunny,
by Eduardo KAC (Brazil/United States), 2000
EDUARDO KAC & THE ART OF SPINNING A GREEN BUNNY
Brazilian bioartist, Eduardo Kac, is indisputably a great master of the spin, a veritable communication genius. By means of a most ordinary image, he fashioned a hyperreal sign that has come to represent, for many, "bioart" and bioengineering practices. The image is of a lime-green rabbit, its distinct hue evidently acquired by Photoshop manipulation. It floats in the center of a white background along with the caption, Alba, the fluorescent bunny, situated just above the photographer's (not the artist's) name.
This image of a decontextualized rabbit is reminiscent of René Magritte's La Trahison des images (1928-1929), an illustration of a pipe on a white ground, with the French caption stating: Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe).
Similarly, Kac's image of the fluorescent green bunny is not a real rabbit, nor is it even a documentation of an exhibition of such a living artwork. But this is where the resemblance with the Surrealist image ends.
Where Magritte's points to reality that lies elsewhere, Kac's image operates as a hyperreal sign that assumes the status of reality.
The pervasive image of the green bunny has certainly taken on a life of its own, spawning an impressive network of media events, sensationalist commentaries and discourse.
Certain lessons on the art of spinning a very plain image of a green rabbit can be learned by visiting the artist's website, and clicking onto the various links on the GFP BUNNY page.
To discover the origin of this hyperreal sign, scroll down to Kac's story also entitled, GFP BUNNY. Here the artist recounts his tale of a real rabbit, born in 2000, in a laboratory in Jouy-en-Josas, France. This particular albino bunny, which Kac appropriately named Alba, was one of several offspring of a female rabbit whose genes had been inserted with a green fluorescent protein (GFP) taken from a jellyfish. Alba was the only one in the litter to manifest the effects of this genetic manipulation, having the singular ability to glow a fluorescent green under ultraviolet light. Kac's transgenic experiment, potentially producing a live artwork, was conducted in collaboration with the artist-zoosystemician, Louis Bec, and the bioscientists, Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Prunet. It so happened, however, that the laboratory became the only abode for this transgenic bunny. Born at the height of the mad-cow disease alert in Europe, Alba was never allowed to be exhibited in public. Even though this bunny could never hop her way to the status of a live transgenic artwork, a digitally-manipulated image, representing Alba, was created forthwith, which soon thereafter gained great notoriety.
And so it came to be that, the year of Alba's birth, Eduardo Kac conducted a series of public interventions, such as GFP BUNNY - PARIS INTERVENTION, which included the artist placing large posters of the green bunny on city streets, giving lectures, having street conversations, writing articles, as well as making television and radio broadcasts.
The Alba Flag was hung in many locations as were large-scale photographs entitled, FREE ALBA!
All this media hype was, of course, also disseminated in cyberspace, particularly on the artist's website.
Testimony to the success of Kac's media blitz can be found in the Alba Guestbook : 2000-2004.
It provides four years' commentaries by web visitors on the green bunny's predicament, including some animated opinions of Kac and his biotech experiment.
Public response to the Alba phenomenon was also published in 2003 in a book entitled, It's not easy being green!
Kac soon created offshoots of this hyperreal sign of the green bunny in the form of new drawings and photographs, all of which were exhibited in galleries.
First, there was Le Lapin Unique, a public installation at Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France in 2003.
Then the following year, an exhibition, Rabbit Remix, was held at the gallery Laura Marsiaj Arte Contemporânea in Rio de Janeiro.
It included the artist's book, photographs, drawings, flags, and web art as well as public interventions, with the infamous images of the green bunny displayed throughout the city of Rio.
Although Alba is not yet a household name, her hyperreal image has received more popular press coverage in newspapers, television and radio than most major artworks in the annals of art history.
At least so it seems if one visits the artist's interactive web work, , The Alba Headline Supercollider (2004).
It ingeniously displays a collision of sensationalist headlines that have appeared in the popular media across the globe: from Montreal to Paris, and from Rio to Tokyo.
It is in fact quite remarkable that despite the fact that the real fluorescent rabbit has never been exhibited in a public space, her ersatz image has become undoubtedly the most well-known representation of a bioartwork to date.
The serious implications concerning biotechnological practices and the creation of transgenic green bunnies has not gone unnoticed, generating dozens of critical essays as well, all of which are referenced on Kac's website.1
The green bunny has even drawn the attention of the Canadian prize-winning novelist, Margaret Atwood.
In her novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), the author brilliantly conveys the serious repercussions that can occur when biotechnological research is coupled with unrestrained capitalist imperatives.
Roaming an apocalyptic landscape, the protagonist, Snowman, encounters an array of transgenic chimerical creatures, some quite vicious. There, he eventually comes across "a rabbit, hopping, listening, pausing to nibble at the grass with its gigantic teeth. It glows in the dusk, a greenish glow filched from the iridicytes of a deep-sea jellyfish in some long-ago experiment…Even in Snowman's boyhood there were luminous green rabbits, though they weren't this big and they hadn't yet slipped their cages and bred with the wild population, and become a nuisance."2
Atwood's novel about the significant issues relating to biotechnological practices, such as transgenics, contrasts sharply with the hyperreal image of Alba. There is indeed the inherent problem that too much spinning of the green bunny obscures the very issues that Kac himself addresses in several essays and lectures, notably those regarding biodiversity and the need for taking responsibility for transgenic animals. Although the artist avows the importance of raising public awareness and debate, these important matters are eclipsed by the hyperreal sign he has fashioned. Indeed, as theorist Jean Baudrillard has often argued, hyperreal signs are like a screen and network, having the quality of assuming the status of the real. Yet, as a master of communication, Eduardo Kac no doubt has new surprises up his sleeve. Now that the image of the GFP Bunny has entered the public arena, he may well opt to reinsert the significant and complex issues, inherent in current biotechnological practices, into the realm of knowledge production, thus generating fruitful debates -- perhaps even by continuing to play the role of the bad-boy artist or mad scientist.
Notes
1 : See Selected articles and interviews about GFP Bunny and Transgenic Art Bibliography. 
2 : Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp- 95-96 (traduction de Serge Marcoux).
See Oryx and Crake See Oryx and Crake on Kac's bibliographical page.
Ernestine Daubner
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