By Kari Lydersen Infoshop News (news.infoshop.org) August 27, 2007
When Steve Kurtz’s wife Hope died of heart failure in her sleep on May 11, 2004, his nightmare was just beginning.
Buffalo police who responded found Petri dishes holding a harmless bacteria, Serratia marcescens, which the Kurtzes were cultivating for an art projects with the Critical Art Ensemble, a group which does science- and technology-based exhibits to expose and challenge corporate hegemony in these fields.
As portrayed in a new independent film, “Strange Culture” produced by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Hope Kurtz’s death kicked off a saga which showcased both the ineptness and vindictiveness characteristic of the war on terror.
The officers figured there could be some kind of bioterrorism act in the planning at the couple’s home, and called in the FBI. FBI agents interrogated the shocked and mourning Kurtz, zeroing in on Arabic writing on a postcard for an upcoming exhibit and the tinfoil he put on his windows to make it easier to sleep during the day; and then took him into custody and sent his wife’s body to the FBI lab at Quantico.
Soon after state officials announced there was no security threat from the Kurtzes’ work; the bacteria are common, harmless research agents that can be ordered over the internet. But federal agents didn’t like what they discovered – or already knew – about Kurtz’s politics. A professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo and well-known activist/ artist, with Critical Art Ensemble Kurtz had mounted works challenging the ethics and safety of GM foods, among other things. A grand jury was convened, with Kurtz’s friends and colleagues subpoenaed and questioned about everything from his views on Bush to his love life. (Apparently they were also considering the possibility he could have killed his wife of 27 years.)
Investigators couldn’t find anything related to terrorism – or murder – to pin on Kurtz. But Kurtz and University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health professor Robert Ferrell were indicted on two charges each of wire fraud and mail fraud. That’s because Ferrell used his university position to purchase $256 worth of the bacteria for Kurtz, a resource-sharing practice they say is common in academia. Their lawyers explain that what would normally be at most a civil, administrative issue between the university and the men is being treated as a federal criminal case which could carry a sentence of 20 years in prison. Three years later, no court date has yet been set and the case is still hanging over Kurtz’s head.
The assistant US Attorney overseeing the case, William Hochul, is notorious for prosecuting the “Lackawanna Six,” six young Yemeni-Americans in the Buffalo area who were convicted of providing material support to terrorists on scanty evidence after they were essentially forced to plead guilty to avoid indefinite detention in secret military prisons. And the US Attorney in charge, Michael Battle, was forced to resign because of his role in the firing of seven US Attorneys this year.
As he explains in “Strange Culture,” which includes documentary interviews and dramatic re-enactments, Kurtz thinks the government wants to both punish him for his political beliefs and use the case as a wedge to extend Department of Justice reach in academia and the arts.
He describes, laughing, how on a trip to Austin during the investigation, a young man repeatedly asked him about buying or selling drugs, and another complete stranger launched into a tirade about Bush and asked didn’t he just want to kill him. It could have been a coincidence, he notes, but it certainly smacked of FBI entrapment.
Ferrell, who was battling cancer at the time and suffered a stroke during the investigation, said he felt he was “collateral damage” in the government’s attack on Kurtz’s politics -- though Ferrell himself is a well-respected critic of biotechnology and corporate and industrial involvement in science.
“GM foods insert genes from one plant or animal into another,” he said in a statement in the film. “We have no idea what the long term effect of those transplants will be…all citizens of the US have been turned into unwitting victims of experiments.”
Meanwhile during the course of the investigation, FBI agents seized reams of research and computer files from past and ongoing Critical Art Ensemble projects. The materials still haven’t been returned despite having no relation to the mail and wire fraud charges, according to the film. Among other things agents seized material for Critical Art Ensemble’s book “Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health” (Autonomedia) which was eventually released last year, dedicated to Hope Kurtz, after much of the research and work was reconstructed.
“Marching Plague” documents the history and ultimate inefficiency and foolhardiness of germ warfare throughout history, not only on ethical and humanitarian grounds but also from a strategic military and financial perspective. Even the original use of germ warfare in the Americas – blankets infected with small pox given to Native Americans – ultimately backfired on white settlers, the book notes, as they themselves suffered high casualties and became infected by highly virulent strains that developed among Native Americans.
Likewise with the colonialist Tartars who reportedly catapulted dead bodies infected with the Plague over the walls of a Genoese settlement in the 1300s. They infected and wore down the residents, who fled and proceeded to help spread “Black Death” across the Mediterranean, and eventually all of Europe.
“Between [these two examples], most problems and issues that haunt biowarfare to this day are evident: the boomerang effect, incapacitation vs. destruction of manpower, stealth and tactical limitations,” the book says.
A companion DVD to the book documents Critical Art Ensemble’s recreation of a 1952 British experiment in spraying the bacteria that caused bubonic plague from a boat onto a pontoon of guinea pigs.
For the project, which was showcased at the Whitney Biennial last year, Kurtz and other collective members went to the original test site -- the Isle of Lewis in Scotland --and with a local animal welfare observer on board, sprayed the harmless serratia marcescens bacteria onto a boatload of guinea pigs from a mile away, then cultured the animals’ fur for signs of contamination. The results, in typical fashion, were “inconclusive.”
“If it seemed a little absurd we would do such a thing and come all this way, well you’re right,” says Kurtz in the video. “This indeed is the very metaphor for a germ warfare program. It’s absolutely crazy, it’s useless, it’s absurd, it’s an exercise in stupidity. I can’t imagine why anyone would expand an existing germ warfare program or create a new one.”
Cut to clips of President Bush lauding an expanded germ warfare program post-9/11, increasing its budget exponentially at the same time Americans are sickening and dying from various other infectious diseases that could be ameliorated with more investment in public health.
Whether the government wanted to silence this message with its prosecution of Kurtz or just wanted to save face after over-reacting to the Petri dishes in the Kurtzes’ house isn’t totally clear. Regardless, both “Strange Culture” and “Marching Plague” deliver information and a warning that is needed now more than ever – including the hollowness of government fear-mongering about biological attacks and our ability to respond to them; and the bizarre extent to which the government will go to crush free speech and artistic expression.
Kurtz’s lawyer, who also represented Larry Flint and Marilyn Manson on free speech issues, says he thinks it is unlikely Kurtz will be convicted, but if he is the case could go to the Supreme Court. Kurtz does see prison as a distinct possibility, and is trying to keep himself as healthy as possible to prepare for it. But he and the rest of Critical Art Ensemble have not let the case subdue their work and activism.
“Hope would never forgive us,” if they backed off, Kurtz said. “She always said never surrender, never give up.”
For more information on Critical Art Ensemble, “Strange Culture” and “Marching Plague,” visit: www.critical-art.net and www.strangeculture.net. To contribute to Steve Kurtz’s defense fund, visit www.caedefensefund.org.
-- Kari Lydersen is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, In These Times, LiP Magazine, Clamor, and The New Standard.
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