The Ballad of RS99GP3
Post-mortem for Animals/People mid-term project. Take one animal and create two pieces, “two small companion projects – one from an external POV (objective), and one from an internal POV (subjective).” We made plastic casts of rat parts as the object, and wrote a medieval ballad about the trials and tribulations of RS99GP3, a scientific abomination, the descendant of a lineage dating back to times before rats had names.
Chris Alden and I used the laboratory rat, commonly touted as “the hero of science.” The lab rat happens to be the same species (rattus norvegicus) as the species that ones notices on the subway tracks of New York, the Aleutians, in London, and nearly every continent. The wild rat is considered our sworn enemy, the “shadow” of our species, and humans have long been at total war with them. The rats used in laboratories today are descended from various samples of wild rats from the late 19th and early 20th century, cross-bred and in-bred for various traits. The nearly absent genetic difference between individuals of a strain, the fast rate of reproduction, and the similarity to the make up of humans made rats them perfect Cartesian machines for scientific tests.
In discussing the subjective elements of lab rats Chris and I remembered Elizabeth Costello in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals drawing the parallel between kept animals and slave races. We took it a step further, based on our war-torn history with rats, and imagined them as ancestors of prisoners of war, a derived from the captured enemy. Our diptych intended to build a mythos around the prototypical lab rat– produced, tortured, used, scrutinized, killed, disposed of– similar to how the martyrdom of some saints might be recounted in medieval modes of storytelling. We wanted to create pseudo-religious icons that symbolize the body of the fallen hero, honored by those by whose hand the hero may have died. Based on first hand accounts of our friends who work in labs, its easier to do things to animals if you see them as objects rather than individuals, like cogs in a giant science wheel. Quoting John Burt in Rat:
“the story of the standardization of the laboratory rat resembles the twentieth-century story of factory farming, as the rat increasingly became a sophisticated factory product . . . the connection between the rat and the machine component seemed to haunt organizational thinking at Wistar [a producer of rats specifically for laboratories], with its interest in the ‘efficient production of large numbers of quality controlled animals’. The 1910Director’s Report reflected this when the Director, Milton Greenman, used as an example of efficiency the standardization of screw threads.”
This seems to contradict the anthropomorphizing notion of the “hero” of science. Paraphrasing Elizabeth Costello, perhaps humans created gods to relieve ourselves from blame accrued by ritualized murder in the form sacrifice, to undo the guilt we feel when we see ourselves committing gross acts to others, be they animal or human. On the one hand the rat is an object bereft of agency, to be pulled apart, and on the other hand the rat is a hero, who conceivably has character traits to which we should aspire.
To understand how science’s treatment of the lab rat (and other species) might be negated, how to retroactively apply acknowledgment and respect, we looked to ideas of chivalry and the “warriors’ code“. These ideas were useful in thinking about the contradictions between scientists objectifying and venerating lab rats:
- “One reason for such warriors’ codes may be to protect the warriors themselves from serious psychological damage.”
- “Grossman writes about the dangers of dehumanizing the enemy in terms of potential damage to the war effort, long-term political fallout, and regional or global instability”
- “In a segment on the “Clinical Importance of Honoring or Dishonoring the Enemy,” psychologist Jonathan Shay describes an intimate connection between the psychological health of the veteran and the respect he feels for those he fought. He stresses how important it is to the warrior to have the conviction that he participated in an honorable endeavor: “Restoring honor to the enemy is an essential step in recovery from combat PTSD. While other things are obviously needed as well, the veteran’s self-respect never fully recovers so long as he is unable to see the enemy as worthy. In the words of one of our patients, a war against subhuman vermin “has no honor.” This is true even in victory; in defeat, the dishonoring absence of human themis [shared values, a common sense of “what’s right”] linking enemy to enemy makes life unendurable”3.
The last quote within a quote may hold the key. “a war against subhuman vermin ‘has no honor’”. Through domestication, production and perceived utility rats have been promoted from vermin to hero, yet in practice they have been denied the honor that noble humans would grant their subdued enemy. It would appear that the title of hero is as much an impotent gesture as the identity-denying objectification is an excuse for carte blanche.
Chris and I began assembling these ideas . We thought about how naming an animal is the simplest way to create a bond, and realized that we had no idea how scientists kept track of lineage. The Google gods pointed us to this site that outlines the MGI guidelines for nomenclature in rats and mice. We were fascinated by the ways in which scientists keep track of which strains are used, and how they insert location of breeding, scientists names, genetic and behavioral traits into the names appending super script, dashes, italics– for example: ”C57BL/6JEi-tth : The tremor with tilted head mutation in the C57BL/6JEi strain.” This method of naming gives detailed personal information about individuals of a particular strain without functioning as our names do; they do not give individuality. We read the interview between artist Kathy High and Joel Taurog, Professor of Internal Medicine and Immunology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who co-invented the HLA B27 transgenic rat line. Kathy High adopted some of the HLA B27 transgenic rats and treated them as pets, and included them in her artistic practice. This inspired us to name the rat in our song RS99GP3, and relate the deeds of this rat through the lenses of medieval chivalry, heroism, and martyrdom.
We paired up the dismembered body parts of RS99GP3 (objectified) with a medieval ballad that relates the deeds of an individual rat (subjectified). We both agreed on aspects of each part, and wrote the lyrics together. While I sculpted RS99GP3′s body parts out of plastiline clay, Chris composed the music on his mandolin. To make the music sound more medieval and foreign, he used the mixylodian mode. I molded the body parts in Dragon Skin silicone, and then casted in Smooth Cast 300, liquid plastic. For the presentation in class, we wanted to push the sense of honoring the fallen hero/foe. Chris and I appropriated the archetypal white lab coats that are commonly associated with scientists, and eulogized the body parts with our song, The Ballad of RS99GP3. The lyrics are below. More pics of making are in this Flickr set. Pics of the finished product as we presented it, and video to follow.
The Ballad of RS99GP3
Here lies a hero of great comport,
Not for naught died she.
Her life lost thrice under the knife,
And back but not free.
Though names are but numbers and letters between,
A home beyond cages sterile and clean.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3,
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.
A rat was born an abomination,
But destined for valor was he.
Placed in the labyrinth hideously wrought,
But soon again she was free.
Upon him rubbed the most noxious unctions,
With resolve he chose to survive.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5.
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5,
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5.
Her blood was let and dripped and drained,
Into a thousand vats.
He was denied the brotherhood,
Of any fellow rats.
Given neither sword nor shield,
To defend against scalpels that hands do wield.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat hung, flayed and peeled.
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.
Tags: Animals People and those Inbetween, art, arturo vidich, RATS