The Work of Art in the Age of Post-9/11 Paranoia: Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture — Jan 21st 2007

By Karina Longworth

On the eve of a major exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, artist and professor Steve Kurtz rolled over in bed to find his wife lying next to him--dead. He called 911, and the authorities who arrived immediately began asking questions about the bacterial samples and biological equipment in his home. Finding an invitation to an art exhibit containing Arabic letters was apparently the last straw. The FBI took Kurtz away in handcuffs, sealed off his home, and detained him as a suspected bio-terrorist. He would spend the next 22 hours in custody.

Meanwhile, agents in HAZMAT suits stormed in to confiscate his computers, books, and research. The technicians sequestered his cat in the attic for several days without food or water. The agency also confiscated Hope Kurtz's corpse, which they autopsied twice before conceding that the suspect had not contributed in any way to his wife's death. The FBI continued to investigate Kurtz' work and life, and over a year later, he was indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud, in connection with the bacteria he had purchased for his Mass MOCA exhibit. He and his longtime collaborator, research scientist Dr. Robert Farrell, are still awaiting trial. They each face up to 20 years in prison.

"I heard about [the story] and dropped everything," says filmmaker Lynn Hershman-Leeson, whose Strange Culture is screening as part of the New Frontier sidebar here at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The experimental documentary places Kurtz's story within the larger context of post-9/11 paranoia, with its potentially devastating impact on civil rights. Hershman-Leeson, a Sundance veteran, is quite comfortable situating her latest film as a work of activism. "I felt this was the most important thing I could do," she says. "It was just critical to our society."
In the opening sequences of Strange Culture, we see Kurtz and his wife preparing for the MOCA exhibit. The artist was planning a hands-on installation, which would allow visitors to test their own produce for genetic manipulation by using tiny quantities of a harmless bacteria. This was a fairly typical product of the Critical Arts Ensemble, which Steve and Hope Kurtz had helped to found. As CAE spokesman Gregg Bordowitz explains in the film, the collective was created to question "the relationship between art, commerce, and biotechnology." Previous projects have included Child as Audience (2001), a consciousness-raising goody bag distributed to adolescent males, complete with a punk CD, a pamphlet on corporate oppression, and instructions on how to hack a Game Boy. But it was another CAE work-in-progress, Marching Plague, that contributed to Kurtz's legal travails.

According to the CAE website, Marching Plague was an attempt to demonstrate that "germ weaponry is not only a stupid idea, it's also impractical." Part of the piece would reenact a failed germ warfare exercise from the 1950s, in which British soldiers attempted to hit guinea pigs with a harmless bacterial spray from a mile away. Whether Kurtz would have been a better marksman is now a moot point: when the FBI showed up, they seized his materials for the project. The irony here is plain. An artist who has devoted much of his career to protesting biological warfare is now accused of engaging in it himself.

Which brings us back to Strange Culture. Due to legal constraints, Kurtz was unable to discuss his case in any detail. This forced an interesting expedient on the director: Hershman-Leeson hired Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan to portray the couple in dramatizations based on actual events. These scenes are mingled with interviews, news clips, graphics, and even footage of Swinton and Ryan interacting with real people involved in the case. The resulting hybrid packs a stunning emotional and intellectual punch. "People just started sending me information, sending me tapes," says Hershman-Leeson. "I see it as a collage of all these elements coming together."

Though Kurtz does speak in limited terms about his plight in the film, Ryan, a veteran of Hal Hartley's films, ably fills in where the blanks left by the artist. He shies away from mimicry and opts instead for an impressionistic portrait, driven by the artist' passion for his work and the ideas that fuel it. As a director, Hershman-Leeson takes pains to incorporate social criticism in the guise of art criticism. At one point, we take a detour from the main story to follow one of Kurtz's' colleagues into a classroom for a lecture on film noir. Noting the genre's symbiotic relationship to its era, the professor says, "It was black and white. No grays. And... they really didn't like Reds, either."

The Red Scare, of course, is an obvious precursor to our current fix. No wonder Hershman-Leeson makes several allusions to Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, communist, and WPA mainstay. Strange Culture includes a good deal of nostalgia for the day in which the government put artists on the payroll--or at least declined to persecute them. "Art isn't important in this country at all," Hershman-Leeson says worriedly. "You measure a society's progress by the art it produces. How will we be measured?"

Tags: 9/11, activism, art, fine art, FineArt, lynn hershman leeson, LynnHershmanLeeson, paranoia, september 11, September11, steve kurtz, SteveKurtz, strange culture, StrangeCulture, sundance, tilda swinton, TildaSwinton

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