Art in the Age of Terror

The movie of The United States v. Steven Kurtz would be film noir. It would begin with an aerial shot of Buffalo photographed in the cool, dystopian, post-industrial blues of that city, and descend past the empty streets and abandoned buildings into the heart of downtown, through the windows of a home in the Allentown neighborhood, the Greenwich Village of Buffalo, where artists, professors and graduate students mingle with the poor and indigent. The camera would rest on a couple in their forties, Steve and Hope Kurtz, lying in bed.

Kurtz would awaken to discover that his wife, Hope Kurtz, wasnt breathing. He would call 9-1-1. The ambulance would rush to the scene but paramedics would be unable to resuscitate her. The camera would track her body to the hospital, where a white-coated doctor, surrounded by pristine nurses and shadowed in the background by men in brown suits, would pronounce her dead, the cause to be determined later. We would follow the men in brown suits – agents of the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force – back to the house, where they would consult, out of earshot, with the mustachioed officers of the Buffalo police department.

A voiceover would begin: On the morning of May 11, 2004, Steve Kurtz, a man of peace, an artist and a professor, woke up to find his wife dead. When the police arrived, they found in his home the tools of an unusual trade: laboratory equipment, samples of bacteria, books on biological warfare and bio-terrorism. Steve Kurtz was an artist, you see, but not an artist like you and I know, not a Vincent van Gogh before a blank canvas, a palette of oils cradled in his arm. He was a private dick in artists clothing, a man who haunted the borders of the system, looking for truths in its cracks and trying to expose them to the sunlight. And for that he would pay a price.

Steve Kurtz was indicted yesterday, June 30th, and charged with wire and mail fraud. The Pitt professor who sent him the bacteria the FBI found was also charged. He has not yet had his trial but his life has already been blasted into disarray. "I was detained for 22 hours by the FBI," Kurtz wrote in an e-mail to a sympathetic online writer, his only public communication since his wife's death. "They seized my wife's body, house, cat and car. These items were released a week later. In the house they seized computers, science equipment, chunks of my library, teaching files, ID, and all my research for a new book. The only thing I have gotten back is my wife's birth certificate."

In particular, the FBI seems interested in his work as a member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an artist collective that explores the intersection of art, technology, politics and the law.

At least 11 other people, most of them affiliated with CAE, were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury that convened on June 15. A curator at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington was questioned by FBI agents on the content of a CAE project that was exhibited there in 2002. At Mass MoCA in North Adams, CAEs Free Range Grain, a mobile lab that invited the public to test foods for genetic modification, has been reduced to four posters, two computers and a piece of paper that explains that the rest of the equipment is in the possession of the government.

The subpoenas refer to the Biological Weapons Statute, a law whose scope has broadened over the years as the country becomes ever more concerned with the threat of terrorism. Most recently, in 2001, the USA Patriot Act expanded it to prohibit the possession of any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system of a type or in a quantity that, under the circumstances, is not reasonably justified by a prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purposes.