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'This is right out of Hitler's handbook' (20/10/2005)

From one or two of the things Steve Kurtz says in this interview he sounds a loose canon, though refreshingly sane compared to the likes of Eduardo Kac and artists who dress up hi-tech eugenics as a new art form*. But nothing can justify his extraordinary treatment at the hands of the authorities.
*
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=226
---

'This is right out of Hitler's handbook'
Steve Kurtz was just another subversive US artist - until the FBI accused him of bio-terrorism. He tells Christopher Turner why he won't be silenced
The Guardian, October 20, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1596029,00.html

On May 11 2004 Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife dead beside him. He would come to refer to this date as "5/11"; it was the day his life took a Kafkaesque turn. When paramedics arrived at his house in Buffalo, New York State, they noticed a makeshift laboratory on an upstairs landing, with an incubator full of toxic-looking bacteria, and alerted the police.

Kurtz assured them his lab was, in effect, his studio; that he was an internationally recognised artist, as well as an art professor at the University at Buffalo, who used molecular biology in his work. He was forced to give the police an impromptu presentation while Hope lay dead in another room - he even stuck his finger in a Petri dish of bright scarlet bacteria and tasted it to prove it was harmless. "They thought I'd germed her to death," Kurtz says. An autopsy later showed that Hope, his partner of 27 years, had died of heart failure in her sleep.

The day after the death, however, when Kurtz returned from the funeral home, three car-loads of FBI agents were waiting for him. He was now suspected of bio-terrorism. His house was quarantined with yellow police tape. In what became a media spectacle ("Bioterrorism Blunder?" asked NBC news), five regional branches of the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defence, the Buffalo police, fire department, and state marshall's office swarmed over Kurtz's home. They were protected by white chemical suits and wore breathing apparatus. In the middle of all this, his next-door neighbour put up a sign of support in the window: "He's not a terrorist, he's my neighbour!"

I meet Steve Kurtz, now 47, at the "crime scene", where he's offered to put me up for the night. "You're staying in the rock'n'roll bed," Kurtz says, gesturing towards a mattress in the hallway. "Henry Rollins, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Circle Jerks' Keith Morris, and someone from the Bad Brains have slept in it." It's after midday, and he has just woken up. His curtains are perpetually drawn and from the street you can see that his bedroom windows are covered in silver foil. "The FBI made such a big deal about it," he says of the foil. "It's because I sleep in the daytime - I need the room really dark. I asked my probation officer, 'What the hell were they thinking?' And she was like, 'You ever hear of curtains? It's just not normal!'"

Last June a federal grand jury was convened to evaluate bio-terrorism charges against Kurtz. He was indicted, but not under the biological weapons anti-terrorism act. He and Robert Ferrell, a professor of human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, were charged with mail and wire fraud, accused of colluding to illegally furnish Kurtz with $256 (GBP146) of harmless bacterial cultures. The crime carries a sentence of up to 20 years. Kurtz's lawyer, Paul Cambria (who defended pornographer Larry Flynt against obscenity charges), is arguing the case should be thrown out of court. The government's "paranoid over-reaction" is, he says, a political attack on Kurtz's subversive art.

The artistic community has rallied to the cause, staging protests and organising an auction - with work donated by 50 artists, including Richard Serra, Hans Haacke, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelly and Sol LeWitt - that raised $170,000 (£97,000) for his defence. His case has not yet come to trial but Kurtz has already become, as the New York Times put it, "an unlikely art world martyr-hero". Perhaps, as a sticker on his fridge puts it, he might be better described as a "prisoner of art".

In 1986, Kurtz and his wife co-founded Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a small artists' collective "dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory". Their work is often mistakenly lumped in with the emerging field of bio-art, which fuses art and science, messing with DNA to spawn Frankensteinian aberrations, such as a rabbit that glows a fluorescent green thanks to a gene isolated from jellyfish.

Kurtz, a self-taught scientist, is keen to distance CAE from these stunts. "What we're interested in is the political economy of biotechnology," he says. In a project titled Free Range Grains, CAE set up a DNA extraction laboratory in a museum and invited people to bring along food for testing, to see if it was contaminated with genetically modified organisms. Almost everything was, so the group created "defence kits" for those who felt they were "having the GM revolution forced upon them". They obtained copies of the patents to one of Monsanto's pesticide-resistant plants and devised a way in which this resistance could be destroyed using a supplement available from health food shops. "This was probably where we crossed the line," Kurtz reflects.

In CAE's most recent manifesto, Molecular Invasion, Kurtz encourages his readers to carry out other acts of "fuzzy biological sabotage". "The fuzzy saboteur," the book declares, "has to stand on that ambiguous line between the legal and the illegal (both criminally and civilly), in areas that have not yet been fully regulated." The reader is advised to avoid direct sabotage, such as arson, in favour of "pranks". Cues are taken from the CIA - their lacing of Fidel Castro's cigars with LSD is considered model behaviour. One idea is to release genetically mutated and deformed flies in biotech research facilities and nearby restaurants to stir up paranoia.

When the FBI raided his house, Kurtz was researching the history of germ warfare for a new project. He was growing simple types of bacterial cultures, routinely used in high-school biology classes, that could also be used to simulate the mushrooming of anthrax and plague. (CAE recently came to Britain to simulate, with a pontoon-load of guinea pigs, an unsuccessful bio-weapons test conducted off the Isle of Lewis in the early 1950s.) Kurtz is interested in how ineffective chemical weapons are - how useless as a terrorist tool. Last year Bush allocated $5.9bn to bio-terrorism defence. Kurtz points out that only five people died of anthrax poisoning in the 2001 scare (the FBI traced that particular strain of anthrax to a US Army lab at Fort Detrick) but the incident has been exploited to create an all-pervasive fear.

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