Fillip 15 — Fall 2011

A Productive Irritant
: Parasitical Inhabitations in Contemporary Art

Post Brothers and Chris Fitzpatrick

The parasite is an infectant. Far from actually transforming a system’s nature, its form, elements,
relations, and paths, the parasite makes the system change its condition in small steps. It introduces
a tilt. It brings the system’s balance or the distribution of energy into fluctuation. It irritates it. It
infects it....brings us close to the subtle balances of living systems.— Michel Serres 1


In 1969, artist Harvey Stromberg walked into the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a
notebook, measuring tape, and a camera. Posing as an eager student, he returned on a regular basis,
pretending to study the museum’s collection when, in fact, he was surreptitiously measuring and
photographing various features inside and outside the museum in order to make an artwork. Later
that year, after printing over three hundred of the photographs he had taken—of light switches,
keyholes, bricks, air vents, and so on—Stromberg printed the photos out at a 1:1 scale of what they
depicted and backed them with adhesive. In a series of visits to the museum, he attached his photos
to the walls, floors, and other surfaces—subtly, and without authorization from the institution.
Although they were often found and destroyed by museum employees, Stromberg was never
caught.


Rosalind Constable noted in a 1971 issue of New York magazine that Stromberg originally executed
this solo exhibition anonymously, but after two years, decided to claim authorship of the work in
order to make “people be aware there are conflicts between museums and artists,”2 namely around
who is allowed to exhibit and who is not. By humorously inserting his own work directly into the
interior and exterior architecture of the museum, Stromberg confused what the institution had
sanctioned and what it had not.3 Stromberg inhabited the museum as a foreign agent, adopting
tactics that offered practical and conceptual strategies of artistic production through acts of
“parasitical inhabitation.”

An Irritant


A parasite is defined as an organism that lives in or on another organism, extracting what it needs
from its host without giving anything positive in exchange. We consider Stromberg’s project
parasitical because, like a parasite, he entered his target’s body through a point of weakness,
exploited its faculties and facilities, and thereby showed the museum’s impenetrability (its curatorial
selection, accessions committees, etc.) to be, like his photographic illusions, a facade. He walked in
the front door. When artists are working parasitically, context (the site, its history, its claims to
authority, its funding and organizational structures, and its habits) is perhaps the primary material
being occupied and consumed.


When we speak of parasitical practices in art, we must first refer to the work of French polymath
Michel Serres, whose book The Parasite (1980) discusses its namesake as a vehicle for introducing
“irritants” to any given order, causing subtle changes that can be productive and cumulative.4
Through a disciplinary promiscuity akin to the parasite’s ability to trespass corporeal boundaries,
Serres’s text investigates the appearance of parasitical activity in literature and science, bridging the
domains of biology, anthropology, and information theory to arrive at a conception of how systems
operate. Serres breaks down three familiar uses for the word “parasite”: the “biological” parasite,
the “social” parasite, and the parasite as communicative “static” (derived from the French word for
noise, parasite). For Serres, these linguistic significations are not distinct, but interrelated. Serres
breaks away from conventional notions of parasites, arguing that parasitism is not merely
antagonistic, but that its effects are productive, not solely reductive; its disruptions are indicative of
complex yet fundamental relations between people and between things, whether sentient or not.


For example, in its most traditional conception, the biological parasite enters a target host’s body
with the aim of diverting and feeding off the host’s energy. Along this line of thought, there would
be no mutual exchange. With Serres’s notion of the social parasite, however, which may be
analogous to an uninvited guest, an exchange occurs that is uneven and complex. For instance, in
this scenario, the guest takes hospitality and food from the host without giving an equivalent back.
Yet there are other forms of exchange: conversation, pleasantries, and humour are on offer for food,
drink, and temporary shelter in an immaterial-to-material transaction. In doing so, the social parasite
redirects the surplus energies of the host, similar to the biological parasite. Finally, Serres’s notion of
the parasite-as-noise introduces interference into communications—disrupting, feedbacking, and
dispersing information as it moves between messages and their reception.


Throughout Serres’s discussion, these three conceptions of parasites operate neither as autonomous
nor distinct entities. Rather, they are mutually defined in that there exists always a level of static, so
to speak, in social relations. In other words, Serres argues that there are always disturbances in
bodies, human or otherwise. And, there is always a loss in any act of exchange, but also something
gained. The parasite is not any one of these phenomena but is actually all three (biological, social,
noise) in constant play. In each instance, the parasite intercedes in exchange, but Serres shows us
that the parasite is not any single conception or phenomenon, but rather operates in constant
negotiation.


Stromberg’s inhabitation is similarly complex. While he may have exploited both MoMA’s prestige
and space to create his work of art, wasn’t the museum’s status in turn reaffirmed, having been
targeted by Stromberg as a host endowed with resources to spare? The potential and actual results
that can be and have been achieved by artists working parasitically is but one interest we have in the
strategy. In addition, the complexity of the relations that lead to such gestures and actions is of
significance. The figure of the parasite extends to artists a means of surveying, articulating,
questioning, and contaminating relations, a tool to determine loopholes, interdependencies,
differences, and positions within affective relations. Through this observation and redistribution of
component logics and positions within systems, the parasite becomes an expert in its host’s patterns
and can then subvert and redirect them. With Serres’s discussion of parasites in mind, in the
following essay we have chosen three forms of biological parasites as models through which
contemporary artistic practice can be considered.

First, in Candiru (Invasions Upstream), we will look to the candiru (Vandellia cirrhosa), a freshwater
fish that detects urine and then swims up this stream into its host. Its operations provide us with a
model to think about the forcefulness of a parasitical intrusion, and how the detection of
weaknesses in a potential host can lead to tangible access otherwise impossible to achieve. Second,
in Cymothoa Exigua (The Tongue-eating Louse), we follow a crustacean parasite that latches onto a
fish’s tongue, drains it of blood, and then effectively replaces the host’s tongue with itself. Related to
artists working in more discursive modes, the parasite offers a model for considering artists who
mirror, redirect, or overtake the voice and authority of their hosts, and who insert “static” into
communications of which they would otherwise not have access. Finally, in part three, Toxoplasma
Gondii, we will consider a feline parasite that has infected over half of the earth’s human population.
Spread through contact with cat feces, this strange parasite is notable for the way in which it affects
its host, changing its behaviour, but also for the manner in which it is spread (and how easily).
Through relating Toxoplasma gondii to artistic practice, we can see that the entire field of relations is
always already parasitical—a key point made in The Parasite.

When Serres argues that the entire field of relations is parasitic, what interests us is that what
parasites actually attack are, in fact, those relationships. In other words, what is useful is not just the
operational modes to be gleaned from parasites, and not just the antagonism or exploitation of the
host, but how parasitism is causal; parasites offer tactics, but their tactics create legible effects.
Moreover, parasites appear to turn their hosts into parasites, but the alterations caused by the
parasites reveal that their hosts’ statuses were already parasitical.

It is not our intention to suggest a canon of parasitical practice. Nor should this be misunderstood as
a comprehensive historical survey. Rather, we aim to proffer certain artists’ parasitical operations as
effective strategies for the manipulation of context, the introduction of unsuspected tactics, the
identification of weakness within seemingly taut and enclosed systems, and the ability to disguise
one’s appearance or to take on that of one’s host. To ride communication vectors and exploit the
logics and surplus of their targets, these artists embed themselves within a system to reveal the
system’s dependency on logics of exclusion.

Our interest in candiru and Cymothua exigua (as parasites and as frameworks) lies less in any
antagonistic position or romance of transgression and more in their strategic implications. With
Toxoplasmosis we are especially concerned with the way in which the parasite affects the behaviour
of its host. In general, our interest in parasites is in how they negotiate their surroundings and the
ways in which their presence brings about responses—how certain implicated foundations can
become productive for change; how certain infiltrations by those routinely excluded can interrupt
the status quo; how specific hosts call for precise manoeuvers and offer discrete potentials; how an
outside operator’s ability to intrude and use the system’s nomenclature can divulge an
infrastructure’s integral aspects; and how to negotiate and disrupt such naturalized or stratified
relationships.

I. Candiru (Invasions Upstream)

Although their operations and specific conditions vary widely and they can, at times, be beneficial to
their hosts, parasites are generally thought of as unwanted, harmful invaders. They exist through
external attachments to, or physical infiltrations of, a host organism’s body. Once inside, the parasite
draws energy from its new environment, but generally ensures that it does not take too much, as
this might run the risk of depleting the vitality both parasite and host require to live (though in many
cases, the parasite’s host is a vessel to be extinguished before moving on to another host).5

If the word “parasite” is almost always a pejorative, it is perhaps because the parasite’s identity is
contingent on it being a nuisance—a stranger to the host despite their intimacy. For Jean-Luc Nancy,
it is crucial that the parasite-to-host relationship is contentious. Nancy, contemplating the
paradoxical experience of a human hosting an alien organ after a heart transplant, suggests that
such an “intruder” enters its host “by force, surprise, or cunning, in any case without any right to do
so and without invitation.”6 For Nancy, that intruder’s status is always bound up in issues of
corporeality and proximity, for without “an element of the intruder in the stranger” or the parasite
in the host, the intrusion is without the necessary “strangeness” to be perceived as such.7 In other
words, an invitation or any allowance given to an intruding force would negate that very intrusion.
When individuals ingest roundworms to lose weight, for instance, does this willing introduction of
the parasite negate its harmful potential? And, how does the act of voluntary bloodletting change
the patient’s relation to the leech, when that leech is put in service to medicine? What do the
processes of regulation, invitation, and control, therefore, render? As Serres reminds us, the guest
can disgrace and abuse the charity of a host. In doing so, he notes the similarities and dissonances
between the invited parasite and the parasite as unwelcome intruder, which offers a nuanced sketch
of how parasites and their targets renegotiate their positions when confronting one another.

For Serres, The parasite is “next to,” it is “with,” it is detached from, it is not sitting on the thing
itself, but on the relation. It has relations, as one says, and turns them into a system. It is always
mediate and never immediate. It has a relation to the relation, it is related to the related, it sits on
the channel.8 Of course, the host can also abuse the guest, but there can also be intermediaries who
add further complexity to the field of relations. For example, Trisha Donnelly contributed a total of
four projects to the 54th Carnegie International in 2004, including Dark Wind (2002), which
periodically sent the sound of wind rustling through the galleries, and Night Is Coming (Warning)
(2002), in which the omen “NIGHT IS COMING,” appeared to pulse, as it was projected onto the wall.
And, in Letter to Tacitus (2004), she selected a museum guard who, dressed in an elegant suit,
recited a letter (written by Donnelly) to the Roman senator, consul, and historian, Cornelius Tacitus,
each day. As a far subtler contribution, Donnelly circulated unannounced among the lavish opening
dinner attendees inconspicuously dressed as a waitress serving water. Donnelly’s presence was
barely registered by the guests. Only curators Laura Hoptman and Liz Thomas were aware of the
performance, and their collusion with the artist—that is, their withholding of information from the
guests—furthers the complexity of Donnelly’s gesture, while at the same time allowing it to occur.
Unlike Stromberg, Donnelly was invited into the institution, but once inside, Donnelly infiltrated the
situation’s social and material relations (the class and labour dynamics of the celebratory fanfare) by
embedding herself so mimetically within the opening’s context—an act akin to the artist’s invisibility
in plain sight. Would many of the attendees Donnelly served have interacted differently with her had
they known she was an invited artist and not a waitress?
An Unattended Exit, An Unintended Entrance

Donnelly’s gesture shows that parasitism can be highly nuanced, but in its most traditional
conception a parasite elicits an image of a forceful invader penetrating the body of the host
(entering by puncturing the skin, etc.) or sneaking in through the host’s day-to-day activities (in
water, waste, food, etc.). Exploiting the weakness of their targets, the parasite finds channels by
which to burrow and feed, which the examples of both Stromberg and Donnelly support in an art
context. Yet to best exemplify the force behind Nancy’s ideas around an invader’s intrusion, let us
cite an overt intruder—an Amazonian freshwater parasitic catfish known as the candiru. Until
recently, its disturbing behaviour has, for the most part, existed only in local legends and fiction.
William S. Burroughs mentioned the invasive behavior of the candiru in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch,
describing it as “a small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long”
that “will dart up your prick or your arsehole or a woman’s cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself
there by sharp spines.”9 What makes the candiru’s tendency to invade and parasitize the human
urethra so abject is that it exposes the vulnerability of our most intimate orifices.10

Ethnological reports of the candiru’s attacks on human genitals date back to the late nineteenth
century, but the first documented case of the candiru parasitizing humans was only in 1997. The fish
penetrated the victim’s urethra while he was standing in the river urinating, where it actually
emerged from the water, travelled up the urine stream, and entered the man’s penis, filling the
entire anterior urethra.11 The candiru’s agonizing operations resonate with many artistic practices
that transgress borders—strategies that are useful for entering proscribed zones of exclusion, while
showing how simply and economically it can be achieved. Moreover, the candiru’s manner of
travelling through waste reveals how parasites operate in ecosystems more generally—their specific
role in the regulation of surplus and excess. Just as the parasite itself is that which the host organism
wants to expel, the candiru enters in through the organism’s system of exclusion, the surplus waste
products that the host wishes to dispel.

For historian William H. McNeill, however, it is a question of distribution. In The Human Condition
(1979), he describes the history of civilization through microparasites (micro-organisms, fungi,
insects, small animals like mice and rats, and other organisms that live off of humans specifically)
and macroparasites (humans who feed off of the labour of others). He argues that, in the course of
human development, microparasites such as pests and disease have thrived by infesting dense
populations, serving as a means of population control.12 For McNeill, the development and
circulation of microparasites and macroparasites served not only to regulate and exploit surplus, but
remain, in fact, the primary motivation behind clashes of civilization.13 The parasite’s actions are,
thus, seen through a classic economic model of scarcity—that is, parasitism follows a predatory
model where organisms vie for limited resources. Surplus appears through the unequal distribution
of biomass, and parasites serve to balance ecosystems over time through homeostasis.


But to understand the parasite’s behaviour, it may be more beneficial to move from the idea of a
“restrictive” economy of scarcity, as McNeill proposes, to a “general economy” of surplus, as
Georges Bataille attempts in The Accursed Share (1949). For Bataille, the infinite outpouring of solar
energy and its movement through the chemical processes of organisms creates a superabundance of
energy that must be expended. Unlike predators, parasites do not play into a simple food chain of
carbon distribution but extract the excesses produced by these processes. For Bataille, “If the excess
cannot be completely absorbed in growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be
spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”14


The “accursed share” is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy that is destined to
one of two modes of economic and social waste: it is either spent through spectacle, luxury, or the
arts; or in the destructive acts of war and sacrifice. A parasite and its host are always at war. Like
McNeill, Bataille sees war as a parasitical act, one that is meant not to gain energy, but to expend
energy and eradicate surplus. Luxury, and especially art’s extraneous and ostensibly non-productive
expense, is not grounded in use but in a production of consumption. A society’s nature is shaped by
its use of this excess: how it expends, unloads, squanders, discharges, or defecates surplus in various
ways. Bataille believed that in order to undermine the operations of restrictive economies, one must
enter through a general economy of abundance, uselessness, and excess. Just as the candiru exploits
its host’s waste as a means of entry, parasitical artists use whatever technical systems or
apparatuses they can find to enter into their targets’ bodies through excesses, drawing on the hosts’
output, energy supplies, and cycles. As Seth Price attests, “Production, after all, is the excretory
phase in a process of appropriation.”15


Infiltration

An intruder disrupted the neat numerical order implied by the title of the historic 9 at Leo Castelli
(1968), as well as the exhibition itself. On display at Castelli’s warehouse,16 the exhibition was
organized by artist Robert Morris and was to include works by artists Giovanni Anselmo, William
Bollinger, Eva Hesse, Stephen Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier,
and Gilberto Zorio. Although barely documented, 9 at Leo Castelli was an important moment in the
history of exhibitions and the development of anti-form, particularly for the way the raw condition
of the site influenced the arrangement and composition of the works on display. Yet while the
exhibition officially included the works of only seven artists (as the works of Giovanni Anselmo and
Gilberto Zorio were not delivered in time),17 the artist Rafael Ferrer also participated, uninvited, by
filling a stairwell with fallen leaves during the exhibition’s opening.


Although Ferrer knew Morris, he remained an artist outside the show. Ferrer asked his students to
deposit the leaves quickly and without fanfare. Arriving first at Leo Castelli Gallery, two of Ferrer’s
students poured four bags of leaves into a mound on the gallery floor, within an exhibition of
paintings by Cy Twombly. They then proceeded uptown to the warehouse, where they filled a
staircase with the remaining leaves they had brought. By inserting his own work into these spaces,
Ferrer tapped not only the context of the exhibition itself and his exclusion from it, but also the
spotlight exhibitions afford, simultaneously bringing more attention to his practice in return. To
return to Bataille, perhaps the abundance of leaves in Ferrer’s gesture serves as a sign of excessive
energy accumulated, used up, and discarded by an organism, and Ferrer’s delivery of the leaves,
referential as they are, constitutes an addendum to the display of “anti-form” works, while perhaps
implicitly mocking the phenomenon that such impoverished and base materials could be re-
appropriated for economic and symbolic surplus.
Parasitical Mobility
Like Ferrer, Polish Romanian artist Andre Cadere is also known for inserting his
own work into other artists’ exhibitions, often uninvited. Yet whereas Ferrer brought everyday,
essentially unaltered leaves inside the white cube, Cadere brought art objects, crafted by hand
inside his studio, outside and into public, or inside another artist’s exhibition. With these objects,
Cadere eschewed the slick fabrications and phenomenological aims of Minimalism and also, as Astrid
Ihle writes, “the hegemony of the Ecole de Paris and of the avant-garde movements of Nouveau
Realisme and Op Art.”18 Cadere’s objects were portable and could be displayed in any conditions or
context. They did not need a prescribed gallery space to exist; Cadere authorized his objects to exist
as artworks regardless of context.


Cadere’s public work sometimes took the form of serial colours, spray painted on walls or curbs, but
he is best known for presenting Barres de bois rond—cylindrical, wooden rods of different lengths,
circumferences, and weights. The Barres display varying chromatic patterns according to a system of
Cadere’s design, which contains an error that intentionally obscures that system.19 But these
physical objects were only part of his practice. For Cadere, galleries were not sites of display, but
“systems of power” to be subverted. His exhibitions, therefore, took place wherever, whenever, and
however he wanted them to occur—announced or not, indoors or out.20 Cadere stated, “My art is
the situation of my work in the art world.”21

Mark Godfrey writes that “Cadere was one of the first artists to realize that objects were inseparable
from market and institutional contexts: half of his focus was on the systems of distribution in the art
world.”22 Eventually, Cadere’s presence became a common and well-known occurrence, one that
was not always appreciated. Daniel Birnbaum relays that during a 1973 opening...Cadere anticipated
that he would be prevented from bringing a large barre into the gallery and so [he] hid a very small
second rod in his pocket. Cadere fought his host’s attempts to expel his presence; after being denied
entry with the larger work, he smuggled in this miniature parasite instead, and a tiny striped rod
soon appeared on the gallery floor”23 Birnbaum’s use of the word “parasite” is fitting (a term also
used by Astrid Ihle24), as Cadere’s Barres not only became a symbol of his contention with the
gallery systems he entered, but also one of transgression or trespass, navigating around those who
would attempt to block his access.


By the mid 1970s, Cadere was increasingly invited to exhibit his objects, which changed his status
within the system he occupied.25 When Harald Szeemann invited him to participate in documenta
5,26 however, it was under the condition that Cadere must arrive in Kassel on foot, with Barre in
hand. Cadere instead faked the voyage through a series of postcards entitled Marcheur de Cassel
(The Kassel Wanderer), and later announcing he would arrive by train, which led to Szeemann’s irate
exclusion of the artist. Cadere, of course, showed up anyway; disinvited by the curator, his presence
and that of his object became all the more parasitical. The artist’s uninvited self-insertion into the
gallery exploited, like that of Ferrer, the fact that in order for galleries to exist, they must be both
private and open to the public.


Appearances / Embodiments
An alien in an alienated world, a parasite seeks out its place by relating itself to others and
immersing itself in systems. The regulated and formalized operations of exhibitions serve as both
metonyms and exaggerations of political, cultural, or social arrangements as a whole, and,
accordingly, subversion inside and outside of such domains unveils the tenuous ideological
boundaries and functions of exhibitions. Just as Ferrer and Cadere execute both critical gestures and
acts of wanting to belong and participate by invading such sites, the Italian-born Swiss artist Gianni
Motti often enters into generic scenarios outside the confines of art—including public events,
political proceedings, and mass media—whereas Motti’s structural analysis of his hosts allows him to
place himself into the world in unpredictable ways. In 1995, for example, Motti emerged on a
professional soccer field alongside players, warmed up with the athletes, and took a seat on one of
the team’s substitute benches. Entitled Ala Sinistra, La Maladière Stadium, Neuchâtel, National A
League football match (1995), Motti’s almost unnoticed parasitical action was witnessed by several
thousand spectators and recorded by television and newspaper cameras.27 Like the contained
exhibitions that Ferrer and Cadere entered, the soccer field is a delineated zone for a limited group
of approved agents to act according to certain rules. By simply appearing, Motti broke both the rules
of who may appear and the sovereignty of that particular domain. The soccer field is shown as an
ideological space, one where the invisible actions of a subversive artist or the spectacle of a crazed
fan breaks down the system. Enacting the desire of the audience to identify with the players, Motti
resists the limitations of specialization and undermines the integrity of the game.

More activist than prankster, Motti infiltrates systems and seizes opportunities when they appear. In
1997, while attending the 53rd Session of the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Motti
noticed a vacant seat reserved for Indonesia’s delegate and replaced the absent representative,
voting alongside the attending commission members.28 When the time came to vote on the 48th
resolution concerning ethnic minorities, Motti rose and made a speech on ethnic division, aesthetics,
and human rights. Representatives of Indigenous Americans and other marginalized ethnic groups all
rallied to the words of the “Indonesian delegate” and walked out of the assembly in solidarity with
Motti’s position.

Motti infiltrates a host and takes responsibility for actions not taking place in the social body,
introducing ideas previously excluded from the conversation.29 Unlike the gallery system Cadere
railed against and Ferrer trespassed into, the primary audiences for Motti’s interventions are
completely unsuspecting spectators and agents, rendering the artist either invisible or hypervisible
(as he both follows and undermines the given protocols of participation) by making a statement to
an audience that does not expect one.30

In his quest for recognition and dispersal, Motti constructs his own self-identity by proxy, using
events and their mediation as a network in which to place himself.31 Over the course of a week in
2000, the more sensitive readers of the Swiss daily newspaper Neue Luzerner Zeitung began to
notice a surreptitious and unknown figure appearing in images accompanying the articles. In one
report with the headline “Eine Flugreise In Die Bunten 60er-Jahre” (A Flight Through the Colourful
’60s), Motti appears entering a domicile through a door directly behind a woman posing on period
furniture. In another article, headlined “Der Restaurator Im Ständeratssaal” (Restorer in the Senate
Hall), two people admire and point to a wall fresco with Motti beside them, looking curiously at the
images. While in most of the reports Motti barges into the scene at the exact moment the camera
flashes, the image accompanying an article on a teacher’s meeting features Motti sitting alongside
the participants in an act of solidarity. Motti’s seemingly random, though in reality highly calculated,
appearance in these images was both a form of anonymous promotion and the introduction of a
tangential narrative. As a witness to the events pictured rather than a maker of news, Motti’s
position in the newspaper constituted a tertiary position, which the artist occupied as silent
corroborator, a bystander. Moreover, by irritating the readership by offering an unsubstantiated
pattern of appearance for an unnecessary character, Motti was subsequently featured in other
newspapers for his actions, expanding his influence further, proliferating to infect other hosts.32


Other Embeddings

With the Mythic Being series (1972–75), Adrian Piper inhabited social conventions, city streets, and,
like Motti, the newspaper, as sites for disseminating the appearance and actions of her male alter
ego, the “Mythic Being,” into the public sphere. This histrionic caricature of a young black or Latino
male appeared mustached and afroed, smoked, wore shades, and exuded an aggressive masculine
persona, interrupting and exaggerating deep-seated yet unacknowledged fears and stereotypes of
young minority men. Just as we are all constantly at odds with our personal identifications and the
learned, indoctrinated regimes in which we operate, Piper stages identity as a parasite, foreign to
the host she occupies; she is both within and outside the culture to which she has been made to
inhabit, and both within and outside herself. However, Piper’s adoption of various personae affords
her a parasitical means of inhabiting other perspectives, however disingenuously.33 Like Cadere’s
propensity for public display, Piper’s character would appear in both “culture-related locales”
(galleries, openings, concerts, etc.) and on the streets or on public transportation.34 Piper’s actions
were obliquely complimented by the Mythic Being’s concurrent appearance within sixteen single-
panel works, published as advertisements in the Village Voice almost monthly between 1973 and
1975.35 Each included the same image of the Mythic Being and a thought bubble containing
different, brief, dated passages culled from Piper’s personal diary.36 Publicizing her private
thoughts, these phrases were treated as “mantras” by the artist by which she disassociated her voice
and anxieties through an inverted double. As Piper describes it: “the experience of the Mythic Being
thus becomes part of the public history and is no longer a part of my own.”37


Though Piper herself was quite well known at the time of Mythic Being, her gesture spoke to the
exclusion and conditional representation of minority and women artists. Working around the same
time, Robyn Whitlaw used her relative invisibility as a black woman to traverse and hide behind the
noise of culture and politics through her In-Visibility Project (1973–78). During this time, Whitlaw
exaggerated her own professional obscurity by sending simple invitations for a number of her own
secret exhibitions after they had closed. Whereas in the 1970s many conceptual artists were using
the exhibition invitation as a site for both their work and enhanced promotion, Whitlaw questioned
the “publicness” of publicity and the self-aggrandizement of artists by distorting both temporality
and the art establishment’s customary use of advertising procedures. A comment on the systemic
neglect of non-white and women artists, Whitlaw’s project was based on her concept of the “secret
artist” (an incorporation of secret agent behaviour and Watergate-era deception and secrecy).
Realizing the role invisibility played in the manipulation of power, she used clandestine strategies to
invade zones from which she was prohibited and revealed how such prohibitions were generated
ideologically and reproduced. Using a system of authentication to certify the existence of her work
and its pre-emptive dismissal, her project’s power lies in its absurdity, existing outside the market
system’s logic and expectations.

Each of these artists use invisibility to accentuate the roles visibility and invisibility play in the
proliferation and reproduction of power, entering into systems by either being too visible (hiding
“behind the noise and to-do of the devout,”38 to use Serres’s words) or cloaked in
incomprehensibility. Theirs is a game of penetrating and exposing the intersubjective negotiation
between individual and society, interrupting the system’s regime of exclusion by swimming up the
stream. By forcing themselves into the host, they make their own presence known and show their
targeted systems as “the location relative to which the included and the excluded will define
themselves.”39

Parasitical Implications / Complicity

A parasitical gesture sharing a certain visceral quality with the candiru is an ethically complex project
called El Préstamo (The Loan) (2000) by Guatemalan artist Aníbal Lopez (a.k.a. A-1 53167).40 Lopez
robbed an unsuspecting passerby in Guatemala City at gunpoint and used the pillaged money to
fund an exhibition at Contexto space.41 Thus the victim was unwillingly turned into a patron,
funding the invitations, installation, and costs associated with the exhibition’s opening reception,
implicating the spectators and exhibition space as accomplices in the crime.

Lopez communicated the robbery, as event, to viewers by means of a poster that summarized what
transpired and his motivations for committing the act. It also notified the audience that the liquor
and food they were enjoying was courtesy of that crime. With only the poster as evidence, one can
only speculate about whether or not the heist actually occurred, and those in attendance were
forced either to disregard or to acknowledge and accept the professed offense responsible for the
exhibition’s manifestation.42 Anyone who has been mugged will surely attest that there is a
profound ethical and experiential difference between an actual and fictional robbery. Regardless, as
viewers cannot independently verify it, the affect of the robbery is palpable whether the action
happened or not.43

With El Préstamo, an unequal relation between each party involved in the work (artist, victim,
witness, audience) exists, and Lopez traverses this chain of asymmetrical exchanges and induces a
volte-face in regards to the funding of the artist—taking a system in which the artist seems to be
vulnerable to the whims of foundations, collectors, and governments and making society itself
vulnerable to the artist.44 Each subject position in the act is taking without giving, complicit in the
field of relations.45 In taking money from a victim, who the artist rendered a patron, Lopez
demonstrates the degree to which Serres’s assertion that “exchange is always dangerous” can be
true, and that the “gift is always a forfeit.”46 In this conceptualization, all exchange is predicated on
abusive relations, exploitation, and unequal balances. Serres explains this idea by replacing Marx’s
concepts of “use value” and “exchange value” with the term “abuse value,” which he defines as
“complete, irrevocable consummation” that only works in “one direction.”47 Abuse value “precedes
use- and exchange-value,” according to Serres, because “exchange is always weighed, measured,
calculated, taking into account a relation without exchange, an abusive relation.”48

II. Cymothoa Exigua (The Tongue-Eating Louse)

Consider the odd crustacean parasite known as Cymothoa exigua, the tongue-eating louse. Entering
through a fish’s gills, this parasite attaches itself at the base of the fish’s tongue. Extracting blood,
the parasite causes the fish’s tongue to atrophy from lack of blood, allowing the parasite to attach its
own body to the muscles of the fish’s tongue stub and effectively replace its host’s tongue. While
the inhabited fish continues to use its tongue as before, the fish tongue—now embodied by the
parasite—is no longer a tongue exactly, but a functional prosthesis and a hybrid organism. That the
tongue specifically is the site of this struggle—and is also a key muscle of human speech—has
symbolic significance when considering the many discursive and informational modes of parasitical
practice, as does the verb form of the word “louse,” which tellingly means to ruin or spoil.

A tongue-eating louse presents a model for the possibilities and problems raised when an artist
appropriates the figurative “tongue,” or voice, of a targeted institution. It also introduces heightened
potential for parasitical artists to be instrumentalized by the institution—used, in reverse, as the
mouthpiece of its target, and thus reduced to yet another vehicle for the language and operations of
the host (whether a big fish or a small fish). Fish cannot speak as humans do, of course, but by
anthropomorphizing the fish’s tongue, the operations of Cymothoa exigua yields questions
concerning the codes and formats of institutional address, the role of parasitical noise in
communication, and the interconnected relationship between the host and parasite.


For theorists like Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser,49 the voice is an object of interpellation by
which the subject is entered into the signifying order and positioned according to the
determinations of ideologies. The tongue can therefore be seen as a vehicle for authoritative hailing.
The voice of the institution beckons its public and, in doing so, simultaneously brings that public’s
existence into being—reproducing the ideological network of policies, tastes, positions, and actions
to which one must subscribe as a constituent. These claims are circulated by an institution’s internal
agents through a variety of structures; in art such forms range from press releases, publications, wall
texts, and other didactic materials to events and educational activities, as well as the normative
curatorial processes of including, excluding, and arranging objects within exhibitions.

Reversed Lip-synching
Just before Stromberg began his illusionistic inhabitation of MoMA, there
was a clear appropriation of the institution’s voice in Whitlaw’s Monument to the Unknown Artist
(1968). Through this work, a subversive gallery tour through MoMA, Whitlaw drew connections
between the struggle for recognition in the artistic canon and the violence of the Vietnam War,
“cleverly recontexualiz[ing] culture itself as a battleground strewn with casualties.”50 By covertly
replacing the customary audio guide tapes available for MoMA visitors with a revisionist rereading of
MoMA’s galleries, she accentuated the absence of work by “unknown artists,” primarily African
Americans and women.51 By verbally deconstructing the established meaning of the works on
display and asserting that the works played to elitist ideological desires, Whitlaw’s substitution
articulated a message counter to the voice of the institution, parasitically appropriating her host’s
mode of address to both expose and derail the function of that one-way system of communication
from art institution to audience.

Like Stromberg’s photographs, Whitlaw’s tapes were uninvited irritations to the gallery. Security
officers eventually found and destroyed the tapes, presumably because ventriloquizing the
institution compromised the authority of the museum, effectively overriding the official code such
that “one tongue invades another.”52 Just as Lacan and Althusser describe the subject’s anxiety that
the voice coming from one’s mouth is not one’s own (but rather that of the ideological state
apparatus), such gestures of inhabiting the tongue frustrates power positions and exposes the
tenuous authority of the institution’s language. Inhabiting the tongue makes clear to the host not
only that its own voice can be appropriated, but also that its authoritative communication is not
objective nor indifferent, but rather constituted by ideological decisions by specific actors.

Critical Echolocation

While Stromberg and Whitlaw each entered their voices into an institutional frame, the institution’s
voice can also be replaced when it exits the space of the museum or gallery. For example, rather
than locate its intervention at the source of institutional communication, the British artist collective
BANK intercepted and redirected outgoing messages within the communicative channels of several
hosts, specifically press releases from commercial galleries. Formed in 1991, BANK spent nearly a
decade presenting similar, critical parodies of the art market through a variety of means, including
the adoption of pseudo-corporate identities.53 In BANK’s FAX BAK project (started in 1998) and the
related Press Release exhibitions (first shown in 1999 at Gallerie Poo Poo, London), BANK collected
and edited publicity materials issued by galleries, commenting on the grammar, content, tone, form,
and style of the texts directly onto the press releases in circulation at a given time. BANK then faxed
the documents its members altered back to the galleries that issued them, and later exhibited these
documents as works.54 The attention paid to these generally one-way streams of information was
redirected in almost real-time, away from the abstracted subjects to which they referred and back in
on their points of origin, stimulating reflections on not only the significance of the press releases, but
of the artists, institutions, and discourses involved. BANK’s parasitical methodology sabotaged the
institution’s rhetoric by mirroring its voice and occupying its physical circuits of transmission.
Ultimately, BANK’s interventions showed press releases to be inflated advertisements masquerading
as critical commentary and contextualization. Strategically, BANK’s position as a collective limited
any individual’s liability for the group’s actions, thereby diluting any potential for recourse.55 This
echoes corporate structure, suggesting another parasitical inhabitation—that of the shielding
properties of incorporation.

BANK’s détournement of press releases was effective, forcing galleries to rethink the language they
employed and the curatorial and programmatic choices they made, as well as the images they
projected, their graphic identities, and so on. BANK challenged the authority of the institutions, as
well as the larger system in which they operate, by seizing the tongue from which they speak to
change the conversation. BANK’s parasitic inhabitation affirms Barthes’s rhetorical question: “Does
the best of subversions consist in disfiguring codes, not in destroying them?”56 By locating its work
within its hosts’ press releases, BANK detaches the format from its parasitical dependence on
another and shows the mechanism of dissemination as the primary material, site, and receptacle for
events and ideas. The parasitic press release becomes a host for another order of parasites that
enters through and appropriates the domain for counter messaging.

A Slower, Parallel Stream

Today, discursive and promotional channels are often confused as equivalent means of mediation.
Some forty years after the introduction of conceptual art strategies, press releases do sometimes
operate as the primary site for the work’s dissemination in a globalized arena where it is possible to
find out about almost everything but impossible to know and see everything in its entirety.57 Nearly
ten years after FAX BAK, the American duo Dexter Sinister engaged in a similar form of parasitical
practice when they were invited to participate in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Whereas BANK used
the press release as material and site, for Dexter Sinister the press release offered more of a “frame
of reference” and a specific institutional mode of circulation as opposed to a specific generic
structure.


Collaboratively, Dexter Sinister produced and released a rich cache of documents from the
Commander’s Room at the 7th Regiment Armory (the offsite mirror of the museum where most of
the biennial’s programming took place). In this context, Dexter Sinister’s “press releases” took the
form of general press releases, logos, re-typeset versions of texts, essays, archival documents and
memos, email exchanges, a loose chapter of a novel, re-released magazine articles, book releases,
and much more.58 They also created an alternative audio guide for navigating the Whitney Biennial,
much like Whitlaw did at MoMA. Whereas BANK intercepted official communications, altered them,
and then rerouted them back to their sources, Dexter Sinister joined the publicity office for the
biennial, releasing information in parallel with and in the same channels as their host, yet
distributing a very different stream of information designed to expand and slow, rather than
contract and expedite, the superficial conclusions the biennial usually disperses through these
channels for reasons of accessibility, brevity, and time.

Unlike BANK’s FAX BAK, Dexter Sinister did not launch “a direct critique against the institution, or
anyone else—at least not primarily or directly,”59 but instead introduced “forms of communication
and noise” in order to examine “the ways in which information is released and distributed.”60
Looking back to artist Hans Haacke’s well-known Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A
Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), we see an artist invited to exhibit his work at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York, only to have that invitation terminated because of the
implications of that work. Haacke, in examining the real-estate business of Harry Shapolsky over a
twenty-year period, revealed ties between Shapolsky and the museum’s trustees. Whereas Haacke
was invited into the museum but soon became an overtly critical irritant in that space—in other
words, a guest turned intruder—Dexter Sinister’s response to their host was far less intentionally
antagonistic. They forced a slowness of reception and a plurality of information, which are, of
course, antithetical to what marketing channels generally achieve. Turning again to Serres: “his
parasites are eating him up, and their noise covers his voice.”61


Serres has observed that the French word parasite translates to “static,” and the parasite-as-static is
in fact a paramount model for the parasite’s intercession into the exchange of information. Both
Dexter Sinister’s and BANK’s projects introduce a certain level of noise into the transmissions they
hijack, but their productive ends show noise to be a necessary artifact to any form of
communication. There is a direct correlation between the intensity of activity on the channel and the
communication of the message, between noise and information, between parasitism and
functionality.


Resembling the Tongue

The American artist group the Yes Men parasite specific forms of address and assume the
semblances of other entities, which grants them access to sites or contexts that are otherwise
inaccessible, such as television programs, closed-door conventions, and other speaking
engagements. Yet while they are officially invited to speak, they do so in disguise as their confused
hosts are not aware of who it is they are actually inviting. Whereas BANK intervened in the
communications of others, the Yes Men actually communicate as others: they pose as particular
people or invent representatives of existing companies. Whereas Dexter Sinister introduced a
parallel stream of information into and beside an authoritative institutional stream, the Yes Men,
camouflaged, become an institution’s mouthpiece.


In fact, the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum posed as a spokesman of Dow Chemical named Jude
Finisterra on BBC World TV in 2004, on the twentieth anniversary of the 1984 Union Carbide
chemical spill in Bhopal, India. As Finisterra, Bichlbaum announced that Dow Chemical, the company
that took over Union Carbide in 2001, was finally taking full responsibility for the disaster, in which
at least twenty thousand people died and thousands more were made sick. Putting this landmark
announcement into perspective, Bichlbaum explained this was “the first time in history that a
publicly owned company of anything near the size of Dow has performed an action which is
significantly against its bottom line simply because it is the right thing to do.” Dow Chemical stock
lost value temporarily, and surely many victims were disheartened after BBC World TV later notified
viewers of the hoax, but, as Carrie Lambert-Beatty writes: “For those two hours, the world believed
that there would be something like justice in Bhopal; for that time, there existed a different model
for corporate decision-making, an ethical as well as financial bottom line.”62


Just as Motti, through the spectacle of the media apparatus, took responsibility for horrible disasters
and inhabited the voice of the absent Indonesian delegate to claim responsibility when it was not
being taken, the Yes Men stand in for their hosts, making them accountable, speaking for them, as
them, because the hosts refuse to do so. The Yes Men’s uncanny ability to transform—with the aid
of a business suit—into the semblance of their host, ostensibly becoming the host’s representative,
is a type of ventriloquism that forces the host to enunciate against its will, or even without its
knowledge.

A Silent Tongue

To parasite a channel of authoritative communication is not only to make visible the falseness of an
institution’s voice, but also to show that these contrived pathways have real-world effects. As
arbitrary as an institution’s voice may seem, the symbolic pronouncements articulated in
bureaucratic documents regulate the movements, behaviour, and self-identification of subjects. The
power granted in law to certain actors makes their decisions inviolable, and therefore the approval
of the state is necessary for a subject’s self-constitution (let us not forget the experience of people
“without papers,” who, in their exclusion from the system, are therefore illegal and thus rendered
invisible and silent, though this invisibility can also be a form of agency).63

In the flow of detached bureaucratic exchange there are often hiccups or mistakes that defer the
normal passage of information through the appropriate channels to open up a space for artists to
enter, where proclaimed impartiality can force the state to unknowingly accept false claims. For
instance, the Vietnamese Danish artist Danh Vo has a curious ongoing project through which he
constructs the life story of a fictional son by way of bureaucratic recognition.64 In this work, a
fictitious birth certificate begets a chain of events and procedures that constitute the experience of
the absent son, presumably terminating with an official death certificate. In relation to Vo, the
documents he collects and appropriates express, through an official tongue, the determination of
people’s movements and actions and are codifications and traces of such transactions. Thus, a child
exists because the documents say so.65 By using the language and formats of official documents, Vo
is subversively playing with what John Searle refers to as the institution’s “status indicators”—
“policeman’s uniforms, wedding rings, marriage certificates, driver’s licenses, passports, etc.”66—
that serve as markers of power, permission, obligation, and authorization.


Ana Teixeira Pinto observes in Vo’s work that “in the staged clash between bureaucracy and
biography, the dismaying outcome is not that bureaucracy might impair biography but that
biography is an effect of bureaucracy.”67 Vo himself has conjectured that his strategies and creative
negotiation of social apparatuses may be an outgrowth of his experience as an immigrant, perhaps
similar to the way in which Cadere viewed himself as a marginalized outsider for being part
Romanian.68 Nevertheless, Vo’s work shows that constraining systems can be and are often
undermined, but also that these codes are social and historical constructions.

There’s a similar sentiment in Kristin Lucas’s Refresh (2007). On October 5, 2007, the artist officially
changed her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas in the Superior Court of California in
Oakland. Trading in her name for the exact same name, the artist asserted that she wanted to
“refresh” her identity as though she were a Web page.69 Divorcing the particularity of the name
from the body, even temporarily, questions the construction of subjectivity in relationship to formal
measures and therefore demonstrates the contingency and artificiality of identity. Lucas petitioned
the court for a name change in the standard procedure, and after some deliberation, it was
eventually granted.


Lucas put statutory procedure into a feedback loop, forcing administrators into a double take of the
system they invest in and maintain.70 Her deference to the legal system “is both crediting the
government with more power than it actually has, and tacitly raising the question of whether, in
fact, the judge has the authority to grant a new lease on life.”71 Lucas entered, irritated, and
provoked the mouthpiece of the institution to question its own regimes philosophically and, in doing
so, forced the court’s voice, the judge, to not only acknowledge her, but to accept her existential
change. In its noisy obstruction, the parasite reinvents the host, becoming an integral part in the
system by forcing it to reorient whatever message the host transmits.
III. Toxoplasma Gondii

It is perhaps that we, like everything else, are parasites. On parasitism John Brown writes: “Nature is
not without a parallel strongly suggestive of our social perversions of justice, and the comparison is
not without its lessons.”72 Indeed, parasites operate with a brutality on par with humans, a brutality
well beyond the violence of Lopez’s previously mentioned robbery. On a certain level, separating
ourselves from parasites is as futile as distinguishing the “built environment” from “the natural
world.”

For instance, Brown notes that the ichneumon fly is parasitic in the living bodies of caterpillars and
the larvae of other insects. With cruel cunning and ingenuity surpassed only by man, this depraved
and unprincipled insect perforates the struggling caterpillar, and deposits her eggs in the living,
writhing body of her victim.73 Of course, Brown is using hyperbole, but if we read him literally, his
statements unfairly anthropomorphize and moralize the behaviour of parasites, citing the “innate
cruelty” with which they “eat their way into the living substance of their unwilling but helpless host,
avoiding all the vital parts to prolong the agony of a lingering death.”74 Every living thing takes, at
some point, without giving back. And every living thing is infested with parasites, which further
contain their own unique species of parasites; as each parasite has its own parasites, parasites make
up the majority of life on earth.75 Parasites are catalysts in evolution, their adaptability to the
conditions of their hosts forces the hosts to transform. The same can be said for artists working
parasitically.


Deconstructing the notion of the parasite by reversing and breaking down the fictitious opposition of
“host/parasite,” Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller each unmasks the paradoxical etymology of
“guest” and “host” (where parasite implies a host, and guest, host, hospitality, and hostility, all
derive from the same root, the French hôte).76 For both writers, parasites undermine the integrity
of social, symbolic, and linguistic systems by elaborating endless chains of dependence, citation, and
influence—the various ways ideas, ideologies, and institutions host contradictory concepts they’d
prefer to exclude. The host’s hospitality toward the guest is contingent upon the host being, first, a
guest in its own domain, with each position dependent on one’s acknowledgment or exclusion of the
other’s right to be there. Their mutual determination illustrates the impossibility of sustaining the
host position as a controlling subject on which the principle of hospitality is based. When brought to
bear upon the formations of social systems and particularly art institutions, theories that stress the
interrelation and interchange between parasite and host offer a nuanced way of thinking through
interventionist strategies.

Let’s return again to Whitlaw. Curiously enough, she makes an appearance in Bob Dylan’s memoir
Chronicles (2004), where he tells the story of meeting the “outlaw artist” at a dinner party. After
describing her as walking “in a motion like a slow dance,” the singer/songwriter recounts asking
Whitlaw, “What’s happening?” Her response, in true parasitical fashion: “I’m here to eat the big
dinner.”77 An unwelcome guest that gobbles the surplus of her host, Whitlaw positions herself as a
social parasite. As Serres reminds us: “To be a parasite means: to eat at somebody else’s table.”78
The host and the parasite share the food at the table, but the host is also the food, “his substance
consumed without recompense, as when one says, ‘He is eating me out of house and home.’”79 The
intruder arrives as an affront to the host’s home (hostility); the gracious host welcomes the parasite
in (hospitality). She takes from the table and gives nothing in return. In this way, hospitality begets
hostility and vice versa.80 Extracting surplus from the host and exploiting the hospitality on offer,
Whitaw was at the dinner not only to procure sustenance parasitically, but also to interrupt the
structure of affairs where manners govern behaviour, reversing the hierarchy of inviter/invited by
making visible an unsaid and corrupt social contract.


Tag
If everything is always already parasitical, then why is it that when artists work parasitically
they are able to achieve perceptible results? What is it about the conditions of art practice and
institutions today that compel artists turn to such a strategy? Let’s look once more to biological
parasites for guidance. After all, it could be that, for all of their creative and industrious trespass and
transgressions, the most gifted and effective parasites are those that possess the ability to make
their hosts come to them. Where the candiru locates an opening and enters through its potential
host’s waste, other parasites operate with an even more complex mode of infection. One such
parasite is the single-celled parasitic protozoan Toxoplasma gondii. While Cymothua exigua’s
manner of replacing its host’s tongue with itself demonstrates an impressive mimetic corporality,
Toxoplasma actually manipulates the functions, even the minds, of its host, forcing it to act counter
to its own self-interest. Toxoplasma replaces the mind from within and, in a way, remotely. Like
parasites that inhabit intermediate organisms in order to enter another, more desirable host down
the line, Toxoplasma rides a chain of mammalian and avian interactions in order to enter its
preferred host: the cat.

Sexually reproducing in the belly of felines, Toxoplasma spreads through processes of digestion and
defecation. When prey, such as a rat, comes into contact with the predator’s feces (or contaminated
soil, water, or meat), it picks up the parasite, which alters the behaviour of the infected, reducing its
ingrained cautionary fear of cat waste, and causes it to become more likely to be captured by its
predators. When the cat eats the rat, the cat ingests the parasite as well—Toxoplasma has thus
completed one cycle, and the process may begin again. The cat becomes a machine for the
production of parasites, as well as a channel for their dissemination (defecating them on one end,
re-ingesting them at the other).

Some parasites can only survive in specific hosts, but Toxoplasma is astonishingly versatile; it is able
to live in thousands of species—including humans, with over half of the global population playing
host. In most humans, the parasite remains dormant, forming a silent pact with its intermediate host
by symbiotically sharing space with the body’s defenses.81 Recent studies have found, however,
that even the quiescent Toxoplasma may affect human behaviour, connecting its prevalence to
everything from schizophrenia, to increased risk-taking and aggression, to cultural differences.82 In
terms of cultural production, Toxoplasma can be related to artist Joe Scanlan’s statement that
“success is not a matter of status, but of circulation.”83 Its distribution is almost incomprehensibly
widespread.

Appropriating Appropriation
In its host’s house, a parasite must be humble and quiet, for being too visible can be fatal. Consider
once more Whitlaw’s stealthy chicanery. In 1984, while the “Pictures Generation” of artists was
reaching a pinnacle of success, Whitlaw was apprehended while breaking into the house of a New
York dealer who represented many well-regarded artists who use the strategy of appropriation in
their own production. Ralph Rugoff explains that “during a pre-trial hearing, Whitlaw maintained
that if theft could be art—at least in the hands of appropriation artists—then her action, and those
of thousands of other thieves, should likewise be judged by aesthetic, rather than penal, codes.”84

Whitlaw’s gesture charts a chain of exploitive relations, calling each actor involved a parasite.
Attempting to appropriate from the proprietor of artists who appropriate, Whitlaw’s project can be
seen as appropriately illustrating Serres’s assertion that “the parasite parasitizes the parasites.”85 If
other artists could benefit from the theft of cultural signs, objects, and images, then surely Whitlaw
could continue this chain of colonization, extending the logic of exploitation back to the things
themselves. As the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously wrote in 1840: “Property is
theft!”86 The individual expropriation of goods replicates the general appropriation of labour and
resources in capitalism. If artists, dealers, and collectors could benefit from the theft of cultural
signs, objects, and images, then surely Whitlaw could continue this chain of colonization, extending
the logic of exploitation back to the things themselves.87

For Serres, humans are the parasites of parasites, the grand parasites of all nature. He asks, “What
does man give to the cow, to the tree, to the steer, who give him milk, warmth, shelter, work, and
food? What does he give? Death.”88 As Marcel Mauss, Bataille, Miller, and many others have
attested, the gift always comes with a reciprocal obligation, an unequal exchange that never finds a
balance and serves the interests of the giver as much as the receiver.89 But traditionally an artist
becomes an unwelcome guest when they abuse the hospitality of his or her host, turning malicious
or critical intentions onto the institution itself. The artist remains at an impasse located between the
false distinctions of opposition and complicity, still adhering to a dependency on the very institutions
that critical practitioners have sought to circumvent since the ’60s.


The mutualistic parasitism that emerges from Serres’s idea of dinner guests suggests another, more
homeopathic possibility. Perhaps the host itself needs the parasite, just as our bodies need bacteria
and other organisms to maintain homeostasis. The host uses the parasite to regenerate and
invigorate, inviting criticism in order to question, develop, and reify its status.90 This “impulse [for
an institution] to criticize itself from within, to question its institutionalization,” is not a defensive
strategy, but is, as Benjamin Buchloh describes, one of the “essential features of modernism.”91 One
can see the evolution of “institutional critique” in the recent curatorial trend towards “New
Institutionalism,” which instrumentalizes certain forms of critical practice by inviting it in placidly.
Still, there are cases in which artists, aware of the shared benefits for both the artist and the
institution, inhabit that mutualism, subverting the exchange to disrupt and expose it for what it is,
but in doing so, also show that such mutualism does not entirely sap the potential it generates.

A Parasitical Precipice
In the spring of 2000, the Viennese artist collective GELITIN and fourteen other artists were invited
to share an official studio residency on the ninety-first floor of one of the World Trade Center towers
in New York. GELITIN’s contribution was a “club house” made of cardboard, which concealed the
group’s activities from their hosts and the other residents.92 Using this privacy productively, the
four members of the collective realized a project entitled B-Thing (2000). Undetected, the group
removed a window and replaced it with a cantilevered balcony of their own construction. A group
member stood upon the platform for almost ten minutes and was photographed from an orbiting
helicopter flying a small clique of in-the-know collectors and dealers as observing participants in the
project.

GELITIN immediately dismantled its contraption and the project thus unfolded without incident.93
Still, while the group’s intervention shares some resemblance to those discussed in the Candiru
section for the way in which access is gained through subversively exploiting a weakness in the
autonomy of the host’s system, B-Thing is slightly different. Without the building, the balcony would
fall. However, it also seems to suggest that in order for the institution to remain a unified body, it
must have a parasite, an internal difference, which forces the host to reorient and defend its
boundaries. Such intersubjective negotiation shows that the parasite is never simply external to its
host, but rather engaged in a reciprocal exchange where not only does the parasite “come to live off
the life of the body in which it resides,” but “the host incorporates the parasite to an extent, willy-
nilly offering it hospitality: providing it with a place.”94 The parasite then “takes place”; it ruptures
the sovereignty of the host’s domain, turning the host’s hospitality to hostility by confusing and
occupying the space between outside and inside. Previously whole constructions are shown to be
heterogeneous, operating less as a destructive move, and more as a supplementary displacement, a
shift in the site’s regularized operations.


This dilemma between complicity and critique is even more pronounced in art institutions. Since at
least the ’60s, practices variously described as “political art,” “interventionism,” or “institutional
critique” have reproduced the figure of the artist as an antagonistic, parasitic force that attacks the
stable object of “the institution,” either divulging the institution’s latent and manifest ideological
and political intentions, or seeking to eradicate the space entirely. As the tongue-eating louse’s
predicament attests, co-optation may be inevitable for such attempts and might therefore be seen
as superficial gestures lacking critical potential. For Andrea Fraser, such gestures are “victim[s] of
[their own] success or failure, swallowed up by the institution [they] stood against.”95 While some
may believe parasites risk reifying their host systems, treating ideology and institutions as static
things, parasitical practices involve defamiliarizing the host, disrupting normative procedures, and
making clear that systems of relations are exactly that: contingent social models enacted by the
acceptance and accordance to certain rules that are not only artificial but made up of actors and
asymmetrical relationships that are performed in specific ways.

The Intestine or the Tapeworm?

A constructivist reading of Serres’s work, where the parasite’s interruption rejuvenates and forces
evolution in the host, frustrates numerous critiques in that such “interventionist” gestures lack
critical potential. To return to Burroughs, a useful question might be: “Which came first, the
intestine or the tapeworm?” Did the parasite evolve to exploit the habits of the host, or did the host
develop according to the terms set out by the parasite? In what ways does the parasite violate the
integrity of the host’s homogeneous and defended domain, making clear to the host that its
sovereign body was never its own? Perhaps the tapeworm and the intestine co-developed, providing
the perfect conditions for both to extract surplus from nourishment. The vast majority of our bodies
are populated not by our own genetic material but by parasites.96 Like the fish and the tongue-
eating louse, where the parasite is effectively the same as an organ, the host’s home is actually
already populated by functional divergent organisms.97 The parasite is as much “you” as you are
yourself, and what constitutes “you” is the collectivity of these internal and external interactions.


The host’s defenses are what Donna Haraway refers to as “biopolitical maps,”98 responsible for
negotiating challenges to the sovereignty of the self, identifying what belongs and what doesn’t. As
Ed Cohen suggests, “What the parasite reveals is that the ‘life of the body’ also belongs to life in
general, which is why the para-site can eat both with us (as guest, as commensal) and from us (the
literal meaning of parasite). In so doing, the parasite confronts us with the fact that life does not
properly ‘take place’ within a proper body.”99 “We” are no more autonomous than “they,” and our
parasites are on as intimate terms with our organs as our organs are to themselves.100 Of course,
the affective workings and effective dispersion of Toxoplasma suggests an intimacy of another sort—
the collapse of any lingering semblance of distance between “us” and “them.” In more clearly
institutional terms, Andrea Fraser states: It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and
scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It’s not a
question of being against the institution: We are the institution.101

The parasite is entrenched in the system in more than one sense: it is lodged in its host and it is a
trespasser. Intimacy and enmity are not antithetical but rather mutually defined—a strategy of
continuous association and dissociation that allows critical positions to be established and shifted.
Marisa Jahn, writing about “embedded practices” that infuse into certain cultural, economic, and
social systems, suggests that, due to their proximity and dependence on the host system, such
practices “therefore signify not from a position of pure oppositionality (antagonism), but one in
which the oppositionality is irreconcilably bound up with an empathic relationship to the larger
whole (agonism).”102 She raises the point that antagonism depends upon an essential and static
system to attack face to face and destroy, while agonism (a political doctrine taken up by such
thinkers as Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe) emphasizes the positive aspects of
dissent as a “permanent provocation,”103 one that both recognizes dependencies and differences
without the delusions of consensus. The host is shown not as a stable, closed, or homogenous entity,
but rather a body politic that is at constant contestation with itself.

What makes a project parasitical is not only that it enters and feeds off a system, but that through its
interruption, the project lays bare the parasitical interrelations within the system itself. These
component relationships are what parasites feed on; parasites exploit systems of exploitation,
interfering with perceived balances by deferring the normal route. Unencumbered by boundaries,
such cunning acts of infringement enter into the unacknowledged economies of the host, the
excesses and waste that it wants to deny. When parasites permeate paths of interaction and
communication, they not only profit from modes of circulation but also by manipulating and
deconstructing crucial codes. These efforts impart the role noise and interference plays in the
transmission of information. While parasites are dependent on the context in which they
operate,104 theirs is a game of asserting their presence in the host while deferring and distracting
the system’s mechanisms. Even when invited into the dominant field of discourse, the parasite
asserts itself as a stranger, one who recognizes not only the hidden pacts of hospitality and property,
but also how the host is only a position that can be displaced.

Through many examples we’ve shown what parasites can offer artists in terms of models. And
parasites tell us much about their hosts and the systems in which those hosts operate. But what is
parasitism exactly? Is it a strategy of convenience, an operational channel for riding the waves of
already established communication in order to exploit its scale and power? Does the parasite
identify with its host? Is its embeddedness an empathetic gesture—towards identification or
belonging? If host and parasite are constantly reversing relations, then what can be offered by
identifying and naming these positions? What is at stake in a parasitic action? What happens when
roles are inverted and dependencies revealed? Does the parasite reflect an impasse in transgression
where there is no longer an oppositional position from outside, but where change is only
conceivable from the inside? What can the parasite tell us about the interdependencies necessary
for social and communication systems? The intimate yet poisonous interaction between parasite
and host surely provides a more nuanced way of charting exploitation between parties, but does
interrupting essentialist binary models of abuse allow for identification between others, or does it
wipe away the problems between them? Does the parasite offer a model for the host, a way of
institutional arrangement that recognizes and evolves through intrusion? Can an institution be built
that reveres and learns from the parasite without making it one of its own? Is the parasite
contagious? Can subtle interruptions in specific spaces effect broader structural and ideological
shifts? When some projects bring external or marginalized voices into the institution, what is their
dependence on the institution’s contradictions? Is their inclusion just a simple use of a middleman
so that the institution does not have to confront its own exclusions? In every case of parasitical
practice, the first question is, who is parasiting whom? Though this is not the last question.


Perhaps to think through parasites is to use the parasite as an optical device with which to see
relations break down; perhaps to work parasitically is to make those relations more visible. And yet
perhaps it is less about why than what for. Both questions (why and what) are, of course,
inextricably bound to how, but what we’ve sought to show is that parasitical inhabitations are not
simply a mode of operation, a tactic, or a medium for cultural production. Surely, the most
advantageous factor in using parasites as a framework is the way in which parasites reveal the
complexity of all given relations between things (sentient or otherwise), as well as how parasites
render binaries worthless. What emerges from this clarity of vision is the ability to study and disrupt
those relations. How parasites shift according to certain rules and how their hosts must shift
according to their parasites is the very point of parasitic gestures—it is how parasitic gestures
become more than gestures. It is how they effect change.


Notes

Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1982), 293–94.
Rosalind Constable, “The Longest Running One-man Show in Town,” New York, June 28, 1971, 56–57

For Brian O’Doherty, even a fire hose presents “an esthetic conundrum” within the white cube,
which operates parasitically, subsuming anything that enters its space—symbolically divorcing it
from the exterior world its architecture serves to hide. Brian O’Doherty, “Notes on the Gallery
Space,” in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of
California Press 1986), 15.


Serres, The Parasite, 293–94.


Some parasites draw so ravenously from their hosts that they can debilitate them to the point at
which they cannot protect or feed themselves adequately (e.g., mites causing mange in dogs).

Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Intruder,” in Corpus: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, trans. Richard A.
Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 161–62.


Ibid., 163.


Serres, The Parasite, 64–65.


William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text Edition, eds. James Grauerholtz and Barry
Miles (New York: Grove/Atlantic Inc, 2001), 38.


The small, almost translucent fish normally hides in mud and attacks the open cavities of larger fish
(most often the gills), eating its flesh and blood.


The urogenital surgeon Anoar Samad attended to a man from Itacoatiara on the Amazon River who
sought medical attention for obstruction of his urethra. “Trichomycteridae candiru,” Oregon Piranha
Exotic Fish Exhibit, last modified July 7, 2009, http://opefe.com/candiru.html.

The development of surplus goods left humans open to macroparasites—to thieves, then warlords
who levied taxes in exchange for protection, shaving off the surplus while leaving enough behind for
producers to continue. This process of parasitism evolved into vast divisions of labour and value.

If microparasitism may be likened to a nether millstone, grinding away at human populations

through time, human-to-human macroparasitism has been almost as universal—an upper millstone,
pressing heavily upon the majority of the human race. Between them, the two forms of parasitism
usually tended to keep the peasant majority of civilized populations close to bare subsistence by
systematically withdrawing resources from their control. Just as microparasites have circulated
throughout the globe via trade, macroparasites have likewise evolved in the form of war, agents of
theft who steal the resources and identities of whole nations. W. H. McNeill, The Human Condition:
An Ecological and Historical View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 8.


Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), 21.


Seth Price, “Dispersion,” Distributed History,

2002, http://distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf (PDF), 14.

9 at Leo Castelli was on display from December 4–28, 1968 at the gallerist’s warehouse, then located
at 103 West 108th Street, New York, New York.


Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010),
507.

Astrid Ilhe, “Andre Cadere: Interventions in the Public Domain,” in André Cadere: Peinture sans fin,
eds. Karola Grasslin, Fabrice Hergott, and Alexander van Grevenstein (Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther Konig, 2007), 43.


In a sense, the intentional error ensured that each Barres de Bois Rond arrived with its own parasite,
a thing both in and out of place.


Cadere presented his rods throughout Europe and in New York, bringing them to opening receptions
for artists such as Robert Ryman, Daniel Buren, and Barnett Newman, or to biennials. However, he
also took them on the subway and to cafes, parks, and other public spaces.

Karola Grasslin, Fabrice Hergott, and Alexander van Grevenstein, eds., “Interview with Linda Morris,”
in André Cadere: Peinture sans fin (Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig), 17.


Mark Godfrey, “Andre Cadere: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany,” Frieze, March 2008,
181.


Birnbaum is referring to Cadere’s intervention into an exhibition of Valerio Adami’s paintings at

Galerie Maeght in Paris, which he cites in “Andre Cadere: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden,
Germany,” Artforum, January 2008, 271.


Ihle, “Andre Cadere: Interventions in the Public Domain,” 55.

Cadere was keen to keep his contrived outsider position, a position that is echoed by Nancy: Once
[an intruder] is in, if he remains a stranger, and for all the time he remains, instead of “naturalizing
himself,” his arrival does not cease: he continues to come and never stops being an intrusion; he
continues to be without right and familiarity and habits, but he remains a disturbance, a turbulence
amidst the intimacy. Otherwise the extraneousness of the stranger is eliminated before he walks
over the threshold. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Intruder,” 166.


The inclusion of an artist’s work in documenta could be seen as the ultimate symbol of acceptance
and appreciation of that work, but such an invitation would present a negation of that artist’s
parasitical status.


The artist was asked to produce a new work for an exhibition at the Centre d’Art Neuchâtel. Motti
went to a Swiss first division soccer match between the Neuchâtel/Xamax and Young Boys football
clubs at the La Maladière stadium instead, targeting a significantly broader public than an art show
could provide.

ONU, intervention at the 53rd session of the Commission on Human Rights, UN, Geneva (1997).


Perhaps the most overt example was in 2004 at the semifinal of the French Open tennis
championship during a visit by the American president George W. Bush. Gianni Motti, sitting in the
VIP stand opposite live television cameras, wore a hood on his head and kept his hands behind his
back, alluding to the controversial images taken of prisoners by soldiers at Abu Ghraib. While this
event injected politics into sports, such a gesture also brought excluded views into a site already for
protest. Robyn Whitlaw had an “appearance” in a 1972 Life magazine photograph by Arthur Schatz,
which shows the artist holding up a blank white sign above a packed street of umbrella-toting SDS
anti-war protesters. Her gesture was an act of protest and a forfeit, an elaboration of the impasse of
dissent and the invisibility and silence of numerous voices within the movement. Whitlaw’s action
protests the site of protest itself, intervening into the protest’s field of relations rather than the
content of the demonstration.
Additionally, since 1985, Motti has claimed responsibility for numerous eclipses of the moon or sun,
falling meteorites, earthquakes in California and the Alps, and even the 1986 explosion of the
Challenger shuttle (Eclipses, 1986; Revendications, Terremoto, revendication, 1996; AFP, 1986). An
autocratic proclamation, Motti’s claiming of catastrophe and change renders the world readymade,
parasitically inserting himself into global causation.

One can say that Motti resembles Woody Allen’s character Zelig (from his 1983 movie of the same
name). The faux documentary concerns Leonard Zelig, a Jewish New Yorker who comes to fame in
the 1920s when it is discovered that he compulsively imitates whatever social milieu he finds himself
in, transforming himself both physically and mentally into a reflection of the people who surround
him.


Similarly, the artist David Horovitz has been inserting himself anonymously into photographs
appearing in Wikipedia entries, on an ongoing basis. See Jeff Khonsary, “The Encyclopedia That
Anyone Can Edit,” Fillip 14, Summer 2011, 98–103.

Can a parasite and a host be one and the same at the same time, and in the same body?

Whereas Piper’s previous public actions in the 1970–71 Catalysis works played out the relationship
between abject difference and public indifference or disgust, the Mythic Being series is noticeably
more ambiguous.

To distribute the fictional persona, Piper devised a complex mathematical structure, like those she
employed in earlier works, through which she would “isolate” and mine 144 passages from her diary,
mount the same number of performances, then “publicize” and circulate the same number of two-
dimensional works through a “widely distributed newspaper.” The artist did not follow through with
the strict numerical component of the project. Cherise Smith, “Re-member the Audience: Adrian
Piper’s Mythic Being Advertisements,” Art Journal 66.1 (2007), 46.


The first advertisement appeared in the “Theatre” section of the Voice; the remainder was published
in the “Gallery” section roughly once a month from October 25, 1973, until February 2, 1975. There
is one significant exception: the ad work for June 27, 1974, was censored by the Voice because it
contains the phrase: “DON’T FEEL PARTICULARLY HORNY, BUT FEEL I SHOULD MASTURBATE
ANYWAY JUST BECAUSE I FEEL SO GOOD ABOUT IT. 6-6-70.” A small, rectangular text advertisement
appeared in its place and announced that the original advertisement could be seen at the Jaap
Rietman Bookstore on 157 Spring St.

Adrian Piper, “The Mythic Being: Getting Back,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. I, Selected
Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 117


Serres, The Parasite, 218.


Ibid.


Since 1997, Lopez has worked under the name A-1 53167, his Guatemalan ID card number, as a
gesture of both erasing assumptions about his cultural identity and immersing himself within a
bureaucratic system.

Like a parasite, Lopez terrified and threatened his host by hijacking his victim’s reserves and
diverting those resources into other uses.


Erin Starr White, “Lifting: Theft in Art, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts,” Art Lies, Winter 2008, 96–
97.

Lopez’s work is in some ways a literalization of an action Adrian Piper performed as part of Mythic
Being. Getting Back, a performance in collaboration with David Auerbach, Piper described as
involving my loitering on the sidewalk reading a newspaper, while David, a stranger, reads over my
shoulder and tries to strike up a conversation containing many of the features just described. I react
with violent and barely suppressed anger, asking him to please get out of my face. Shocked, he
withdraws, having appropriated the newspaper I’ve finished reading. But my hostility hasn’t been
fully expressed, so I decide to mug him and steal his money. I follow him to the nearest park,
jumping him from behind, throwing him to the ground, and making off with the newspaper (he has
no money). Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 147. Whereas Piper’s performance was staged
and included a knowing victim—and thus an accomplice in reality—Lopez recasts his audience as
unknowing accomplices in what is a true crime, or so we are led to believe. In both projects, the
intersubjective game of parasitical power becomes apparent by making visible the ways in which
one position in an antagonistic relation is contingent on its opposing force.

Implicitly elaborating the dependence of the artist on the charity of patrons, foundations, and
governmental bodies, Lopez intensifies this subjection, exaggerating the servile relationship
between producers and funders into one where the artist violently demands support rather than
waits for “grants.”


Since we are not party to the exchange, we are left to assume that the victim is either a wealthy
beneficiary of capitalist exploitation, a victim of such a system, or, more realistically, one who is
abused by both inequitable economic relations and an active, interpellated agent within those
structures. Perhaps this is why the work is titled “the loan” and not “the theft” or “the payment”:
though the money has been taken from the patron, it will be returned in symbolic capital.

Serres, The Parasite, 80.


Ibid.


Ibid.


See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),”
in “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121–73.


Ralph Rugoff, Circus Americanus (London: Verso [Haymarket Series], 1995), 77.


If the museum is a monument for “the unknown artist,” then its existence is as a trace marking the
absence of those excluded, unknown, or refused. A tool for critique and iconoclasm, Whitlaw also
advocated for an alternative mode of interaction with masterpieces, even encouraging visitors to
appreciate the tactile quality of a Jackson Pollock painting by feeling the surface.

Doris Somner, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004), 60.

BANK took its name from the site of its first exhibition, which was on display within a disused bank in
London. BANK attempted to reclaim control over every aspect of its work by inhabiting all of the
roles of presentation, such as marketing and funding as well as artistic and curatorial practice.

It is a common complaint that interpretive materials drain a work of its “blood,” its “life,” which
would then cast critics, curators, historians, and other cultural workers as vampiric. The standardized
proofreading marks BANK employs are a means of imposing upon and reforming the text, borrowing
from standardized institutional codes and personal regiments, reopening whatever closure these
documents may imply or cause. Moreover, BANK’s coded and graphological inscriptions are
themselves a parasitical language, semantic and asemic alike.

Grading the press releases issued by galleries on a scale of 1 to 10 and inscribing them with critiques
ranging from coy to scathing, BANK in turn received letters and answering machine messages from
the galleries, which ranged from calculated thanks to unmitigated anger.


Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 123.


The role of advertising in art’s distribution and constitution has become increasingly expansive
throughout history, but the inflated use of promotional channels as the primary site for art’s
appearance or existence may be an inheritance of tactics and aspirations from the conceptual art of
the ’60s. Conceptual artists and entities such as Robert Barry, Bulletin, On Kawara, and Stephen
Kaltenbach, among others, used these channels (press releases, postcards, subscription lists, mail art
networks) as sites for the materialization and movement of ideas, but also depended upon such
formats to justify, commercialize, and announce the very existence of their ideas. Such gestures
dialectically emphasized the correlation of “primary information” (“‘the essence of the piece,’ its
ideational part”) and “secondary information” (“the material information by which one becomes
aware of the piece, the raw matter, the fabricated part, the form of presentation”).

Other activities included two days of curator Raimundas Malasauskas randomly calling a payphone
in the Armory from the Commander’s Room and reading Tom Marioni’s Predictions ’78 (1978) to
whoever answered.


Adam Kleinman, “Dexter Sinister,” Bomb Magazine, March

2008,
“http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3117”:http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3
117.


Kleinman, “Dexter Sinister.”

Serres, The Parasite, 216.


Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October 129 (Summer 2009),
51–84.


This gesture of modifying the body through bureaucratic procedures resonates with an earlier but
also continuing project, Vo Rocasco Rasmussen (2003–), where the artist marries and immediately
divorces several people (who have been in some way influential in Vo’s life) in order to accumulate a
succession of last names. A response to debates in Denmark regarding homosexual marriage
(Denmark was the first to legalize same-sex marriage, but, until recently, did not allow same-sex
partners to apply for adoption), Vo’s gesture redefines the structure of marriage by parodying its
formal protocols.


If bodies are ruled by documents, the artist asserts, then “performance art” today is not dependent
on the presence of a body, but rather on the relationship between social rites and their certification.
Vo mentioned this line of thinking in a conversation with Post Brothers.

John Searle, “What Is an Institution?” Journal of Institutional Economics vol. 1:1 (2005), 15.

Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Danh Vo’s ‘All your deeds shall in water be writ, but this in marble’ at Isabella
Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin,” exhibition review in Art Agenda, October 27, 2010.


Carr, “Artists at Work: Danh Vo.”


When you look at a web page, you are seeing the data that is assigned to it by a server. If you hit the
‘refresh’ button on your keyboard but nothing on the server has changed, then what is seen on the
screen appears to be the same, but in fact, this is a whole new set of data retrieved from the server.
Marisa Jahn, “‘Refresh’: Versionhood and the Multiplicity of the Self, An Interview with Kristin
Lucas,” in Byproducts: On the Excess of Embedded Artistic Practices (Toronto: YYZ Books & REV-,
2010), 113.


Because the judge ordered a court recess for two weeks while he determined the case’s legitimacy,
the judge was forced into a philosophical and methodological paradox.

Jahn, “‘Refresh’: Versionhood and the Multiplicity of the Self,” 114.


John Brown, Parasitic Wealth or Money Reform: A Manifesto to the People of the United States and
to the Workers of the World (Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Company, 1898), 162.


Ibid.


Ibid.


Every living thing has at least one parasite that lives inside it or on it. Many, like leopard frogs and
humans, have many more. There’s a parrot in Mexico with thirty different species of mites on its
feathers alone. And the parasites themselves have parasites, and some of those parasites have
parasites of their own…. Scientists have no idea just how many species of parasites there are, but
they do know one dazzling thing: parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to
one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of
life is, for the most part, parasitology. Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s
Most Dangerous Creatures (New York: Free Press, 2000), xxi.


If the host is both eater and eaten, he also contains in himself the double antithetical relation of host
and guest, guest in the two-fold sense of friendly presence and alien invader. The words “host” and
“guest” go back in fact to the same etymological root: ghos-ti, stranger, guest, host, properly
“someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality.” The modern English word “host” in
this alternative sense comes from the Middle English (h)oste, from Old French, host, guest, from
Latin hospes (stem hospit-), guest, host, stranger. The “pes” or “pit” in the Latin words and in such
modern English words as “hospital” and “hospitality” is from another root, pot, meaning “master.”
The compound or bifurcated root ghos-pot meant “master of guests,” “one who symbolizes the
relationship of reciprocal hospitality,” as in the Slavic gospodi, Lord, sir, master. “Guest,” on the
other hand, is from Middle English gest, from Old Norse gestr, from ghos-ti, the same root as for
“host.” A host is a guest, and a guest is a host. A host is a host. The relation of household master
offering hospitality to a guest and the guest receiving it, of host and parasite in the original sense of
“fellow guest,” is inclosed within the word “host” itself. J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical
Inquiry III, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 440.


Bob Dylan, Chronicles, vol. 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 66.

Serres, The Parasite, 17.


Miller, “The Critic as Host,” 442.


Jacques Derrida offers the term “ipseity” to describe the twin poles of hospitality and hostility, which
he sees as a kind of choreography of complicity and intersubjective negotiation between multiple
entities. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick
Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 24.

Toxoplasma can be deadly, however, for those with depleted immune defenses, particularly
afflicting fetuses that haven’t developed defense mechanisms and people with AIDS. In this sense,
Toxoplasma becomes also an illustration for how a parasite can be benign in some circumstances (in
carriers with adequate immune defense), but deadly in others. The same strategy can yield different
effects depending on the host and how the parasite positions itself along the chain.

See Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex, 92–94; E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken, “Toxoplasma gondii and
schizophrenia,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 9, no. 11 (November
2003), http://cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol9no11/03-0143.htm Jaroslav Flegr, “Effects of Toxoplasma on
Human Behaviour,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 33, no. 3 (January 2007), 757–60; Kevin D. Lafferty, “Can
the Common Brain Parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, Influence Human Culture?” Proceedings of the
Royal Society B 273 (2006), 2749–55, http://werc.usgs.gov/chis/pdfs/Lafferty06toxoPRSLB.pdf.


Elisabeth Wetterwald, “Consumption and the Self: Elisabeth Wetterwald Interviews Joe Scanlan,” in
Rue Sauvage (Dijon: Les press du réel, 2003), http://thingsthatfall.com/interviews/dispersion.php.


Ralph Rugoff, Circus Americanus (London: Verso [Haymarket Series], 1995), 77.


Serres, The Parasite, 55.


Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism, ed. Daniel Guerin, trans.
Paul Sharkey (San Francisco: AK Press, 2005), 55–56.


Whitlaw’s meta-appropriation calls into question the authorship and ownership of the imagery
those artists used to call into question the authorship of others, while also appropriating the imagery
from the dealer who would claim to have owned those objects, and thus the stolen imagery they
contain. In the end, the dealer opted not to press charges in order to save himself from further
embarrassment.

Serres, The Parasite, 5.

To be a parasite means to divert food, money, energy—anything material—from its destined path.
Once at the host’s table, the parasite in return…must regale the other diners with his stories and his
mirth. To be exact, [the parasite] exchanges good talk for good food; he buys his dinner, paying for it
in words. It is the oldest profession in the world (Serres, The Parasite, 34). In other words, when an
artist is invited into the home of the art institution, the unspoken pact is that the artist must be
thankful and exchange the benefits of financing and resources for the symbolic capital of their
works.


Vaccination, Serres reminds us, is based upon this principle: the parasite that enters the body as
contaminant then protects it against further contamination: These logics shifting around minimal
angles are at work in other systems as well. Parasitology, as we shall soon realize, uses the
vocabulary of the host: hostility or hospitality. First of all, the parasite is always small; it never
exceeds the size of insects or arthropods. In fact, the most numerous are protozoa or bacteria or
viruses. Their small effects are usually well-tolerated by the organisms, which quickly rediscover
their health, that is to say, their silence (at least relatively). This equilibrium that is well taken care
of, thanks to the defense systems, is more solid than the preceding one. With the expulsion of
Tartuffe, Orgon’s fly is vaccinated against the next devout man. In vaccination, poison can be a cure,
and this logic with two entry points becomes a strategy, a care, a cure. The parasite gives the host
the means to be safe from the parasite. The organism reinforces its resistance and increases its
adaptability. It is moved a bit away from its equilibrium and it is then even more strongly at
equilibrium. The generous hosts are therefore stronger than the bodies without visits; generation
increases resistance right in the middle of endemic diseases. Thus parasitism contributes to the
formation of adapted species from the point of view of evolution. Michel Serres, The Parasite, 34.

Benjamin Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” in Art
after Conceptual Art, eds. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 29.


One can hardly consider GELITIN’s clubhouse parasitic, as they were invited to create it, and context
does not really provide GELITIN’s primary material. However, if one considers the balcony the group
created behind the clubhouse, a more complex set of relations emerges: between inside/outside,
guest/host, guests/other guests, visible/invisible, support/risk, etc.


In fact, the group’s gesture would have gone entirely unnoticed had it not published an account of
the action in an artist’s book containing detailed sketches and documentation. Some have suggested
that B-Thing was just an elaborate hoax, a fantasy produced through documentation. Accordingly,
witnesses and accomplices have wavered from admitting to its fabrication to producing evidence of
this truth, suggesting that the work is either a fake event made to look real or a real event cloaked in
speculation in order to defer responsibility.

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1988), 90.


Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum, September
2005, 278.


Consequently, the parasite reveals that ‘the body’ itself does not exist as a proper and proprietary
given—that is, as a natural fact—but rather incorporates a scalar narrative, a fiction, that emplots us
within what we call ‘a life’ by emplotting us within ?it.’ What we name as the body situates us within
a life story that binds up space and time, suturing us to our ‘selves’ as the jealous proprietors of our
much coveted vital property. The parasite therefore addresses us as ‘an enemy’ only insofar as we
identify the body and identify with the body as the essential psychological/political/ biological
metonym for our life. By perturbing this putatively natural metonymy, parasites reveal the
underlying paradox of modern political ontology—which perhaps explains in part why viral
epidemics seem to trouble us biologically, politically, economically, and psychologically. Ed Cohen,
“The Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment; or, How Scale Undoes Us One and All,” Social Text
106 (Spring 2011), 23.


I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy
the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of
bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at
all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly
outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with
these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many. Some of these personal
microscopic biota are dangerous to the me who is writing this sentence; they are held in check for
now by the measures of the coordinated symphony of all the others, human cells and not, that make
the conscious me possible. I love that when “I” die, all these benign and dangerous symbionts will
take over and use whatever is left of “my” body, if only for a while, since “we” are necessary to one
another in real time. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), 4.


Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System
Discourse,” in American Feminist Thought at Century’s End: A Reader, ed. Linda Kauffman
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 199–233.


Cohen, “The Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment,” 23.


As Steven Shaviro reminds us: My intestines are on as intimate terms with their tapeworms as they
are with my mouth, my asshole, and my other organs; the relationship is as “intrinsic” and “organic”
in the one case as it is in the other. Just like the tapeworm, I live off the surplus-value extracted from
what passes through my stomach and intestines. Who’s the parasite, then, and who’s the host? The
internal organs are parasitic upon one another; the organism as a whole is parasitic upon the world.
My “innards” are really a hole going straight through my body; their contents—shit and tapeworm—
remain forever outside of and apart from me, even as they exist at my very center. Steven Shaviro,
“William Burroughs,” in Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 101.

Fraser, From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, 278.


Marissa Jahn, “Byproducts and Parasites” in Byproducts: On the Excess of Embedded Artistic
Practices (Toronto: YYZ Books & Rev-, 2010), 12.

Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982), 790.


In Arthur Danto and others’ “institutional theory of art,” artworks themselves can be seen as
parasitic on the ideological, symbolic, and economic mechanisms of the institution, which has the
authority to recognize an object as art. Conversely, the institution itself is parasitic on its artifacts to
make an empty room into a zone of discourse. Equally, site-specific artworks often are regarded as
parasitic on the context of the site of display, where not only is the work embedded on or in the
host, but also the project extracts meaning and materials from its host’s reserves.


Image: Max Smith, Cymothoa Exigua (The Tongue-eating Louse).

About the Authors

Post Brothers is a critical enterprise that includes Matthew Post, a curator and writer currently
working from an elevator in Oakland. Post Brothers has recently developed projects at COCO
Kustverein, Proyectos Monclova, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Antique and
Design Mall, Queen’s Nails Projects, and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Post
Brothers’ essays and articles have been published in Spike, Kaleidoscope, Mousse, Pazmaker,
ArtSlant, Curating Now, Woo, and Snowball as well as numerous artist publications and exhibition
catalogues.


Chris Fitzpatrick is a San Francisco based curator who has organized exhibitions and events for
Artissima 18, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the Oakland Museum of California, Palazzo
Ducale, Proyectos Monclova, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues. His writing
and interviews have been taped to the feet of carrier pigeons and featured in a variety of
publications, including The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt, Cura, Mousse, Nero, Pazmaker, as
well as exhibition catalogues and books.