Kevin Clarke

'ATCG (DNA Portrait of James D Watson)'
March 2002
Printed on Ikono gloss 250 G/M in five colours (two metallic), after original archival colour photograph 1998–1999

'Self-portrait in Ixuatio'
Archival colour photograph 1989.

“There’s nothing in the body except chemicals.”

What can an artist learn from a scientist?

Irreverence for one thing! Profound irreverence, an irreverence detached from style, from personality, from attitude. This irreverence leads us to see the world in our own way based upon our observations, and for the scientist, upon facts.

And how does an artist with an irreverent view of the world of facts make a portrait of a self-acknowledged “old fashioned Darwinian” who gives little credence to revelationist interpretations of nature and its inner workings? Of a man who compares creativity with risk taking?

Through observation based on intuition, and association.

One way to create this portrait was to find some common ground with Jim Watson by exploring his methods: go directly to the source. Read the original, not the interpretation. Understand why you are following a line of inquiry. Go beyond conventional wisdom. Keep it simple. Have fun. Then make your own conclusions. To be successful, they have to be true.

Perhaps artists and scientists best meet in the word ‘interpret’. We interpret the recognizable with a view to differing results. The scientist seeks measurable, repeatable conclusions based upon facts, pushing the boundaries to new conclusions. The artist traditionally challenges perceptions through shifting, mutable works which do not always seek to reproduce reality as much as, in portraiture, to suggest the visual contours of individual identity.

I decided early in my project that a portrait of James D Watson would be meaningful. Watson has said: “You want to get close to great people, the most interesting, you learn from them. Find the best who will tolerate you.”

I approached him, the source, with letters, telephone calls, additional letters, and with persistence. Finally, I was able to secure his agreement to sequence his own DNA and to allow me to use it in a portrait of him. In return he graciously asked me to give him “a small work of my art”. While pursuing him from 1988–1999 I heard many stories about him, read some of his books, looked for and absorbed a lot of second-hand information. Yet once I had his DNA sequence, I knew I could not use that kind of information. I had to use a different method. I had to increase my proximity to him, to study him during the moments between action, to come to know something of him. Sharing a meal together was an ideal vehicle. Whether at the Watsons’ home at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, at a midtown restaurant, or at their elegant Manhattan duplex, there were moments in which one could begin to sense the motivations behind Watson’s search for meaningful challenges and meaningful results.

If the essence of life is the knowledge that can be passed from one generation to another, then the way that the genetic information in the molecule is passed along through DNA and its replication provides an elegant mirroring of nurture and heredity. We cannot yet adequately view or portray information that is in the brain, but we have many ways of sharing it: language, maths, art, music. So we make a great effort to share information with one another, to create and preserve knowledge. It’s another kind of coupling. The easy banter at a bistro, the complexly coded self-presentations at elegant, high-powered dinner parties, the organizational lunch with its brusqueness and air of contractual purpose, all these fields of discursive action are revealing, ambient.

In my portraiture I use advanced DNA sequencing procedures which incorporate laser and computer technology to record details of the chemical and genetic configurations deep within the cells of the people of whom I've chosen to make a portrait. During a telephone conversation with Watson in the late 1980s, he suggested that I contact the leading manufacturer of DNA sequencing instruments and persuade them to create a new sequencing procedure which would be non-comparative. Only a free-standing sequence, derived from a region of the genome referencing specific individuality, would be appropriate for my portrait experiment. I combine the DNA sequence or chromosomes taken from the blood of my sitter with an image I create with my camera. I do not make this image by putting the person in front of the camera, instead, the genetic depiction refers to the source of their physicality. This frees me to make an associative and non-literal image with the person in mind. Thanks to Jim’s suggestion the company, Applied Biosystems, created the procedure using my blood throughout the experimental process for this procedure. The results were published the following year in the path-breaking article, ‘Automated DNA Sequencing Methods Involving Polymerase Chain Reaction’, in the journal Clinical Chemistry, Vol. 35, No. 11, 1989. Having gone to the source, I was now in a relationship with a research lab that was willing to create complex individual DNA sequences from samples I sent to them. My work was able to move forward. I was able to incorporate photography’s descriptive and poetic capabilities and the raw data contained in individual specific DNA sequences. The portrait evolved as a genetic meditation, a contemplation of the inner person, what I call the invisible body.

In a radio interview in June 2000, Watson said: “There’s nothing in the body except chemicals.” By discovering the structure and eventually the function of DNA, this chemist’s view of life exposed crucial understanding of nature’s way to communicate genetic information. We can debate the nuances of interpersonal, or political, or social communication, trading theories. The fact is, we now know specifically how information is transferred in the cell. The human genome project has applied new tools, data, and computer science to this search for understanding our chemical selves. Since Watson and Crick’s initial discoveries of the structure of DNA, it is now known how the building blocks of heredity are biologically inscribed and crafted.

Heredity and sexuality as well as the connections articulated among people who share space and history abound with psychological and emotional issues, sexual desire, core familial relationships and their individual and social dimensions. There is status and ambition. When the poet says, “There’s nothing in the body except love,” the brain can believe it. Perhaps artists and scientists also meet in the drive to explore the nexus between units, of cellular or social nature and between environments of communication. Hungry to pursue their respective lines of inquiry, both grapple with lived human experience as well as the mysteries of growth and passing.

“Well, how about lunch?” Too modest. How about a feast? Where? At the Waldorf Astoria for a thousand people! Why? To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick et al.

Oh, what larks! KC