Feds Won't Let Go of Case Accusing Artist of Bioterrorism

By Patricia Williams, The Nation. Posted October 12, 2007.

In May 2004 Steve Kurtz's life was turned upside down. Kurtz, a founding member of the award-winning collective Critical Art Ensemble, was a tenured art professor at SUNY, Buffalo. His work and that of the collective was of a kinetic conceptual sort, much of it aimed at informing audiences about the lack of regulation and potential risks of genetically modified (GM) food. Shortly before his show was to open at MASS MoCA, a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, Kurtz's wife of twenty years died in her sleep. When police responded to his 911 call, they saw petri dishes in his home -- part of the scheduled installation -- filled with bacteria cultures. They called the FBI.

At that point, the nation was still reeling from the 2001 anthrax scares. Kurtz was detained (not arrested, not charged but held beyond the range of due process, under the USA Patriot Act) on suspicion of bioterrorism. Within days, FBI tests showed that there were no harmful biological agents in his house and that his wife had died of natural causes. But the case against Kurtz has not gone away.

Forced to drop charges of weapons manufacture, a federal prosecutor charged mail fraud against both Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, a professor of genetics at the University of Pittsburgh who sent Kurtz the uncontestedly harmless, legal, unregulated bacterial cultures used in his artwork. The "fraud" alleged is that they did not reveal, in a requisition form, the purpose of the mailing. Neither the University of Pittsburgh nor Buffalo has asserted fraud, and neither Ferrell nor Kurtz believed that there was anything fraudulent in their dealings. The allegation of fraud is made exclusively by the federal prosecutor -- a first as far as anyone knows.

Even assuming that there was a defrauded party, one wonders why any putative misrepresentation regarding paperwork isn't being handled as a civil rather than a criminal matter. But to give it the ultimate Kafkaesque twist, the charges against Kurtz and Ferrell have been pursued under the Patriot Act. This means that the sentence for otherwise ordinary crimes will be doubled. Since mail fraud carries a sentence of ten years, Kurtz and Ferrell each face a possible sentence of twenty years.

After all this time, the prosecution has yet to set a date for trial. For the record, I do not like commenting on cases before they are resolved in court. That said, the implications of Kurtz and Ferrell's continued prosecution are far-reaching enough to warrant comment. The dropped charges make it clear that this case has nothing to do with the threat of terrorism or Al Qaeda or violence. Yet Steve Kurtz, like Andy Warhol, works in a genre of art that inverts, performs and challenges the iconography of common understanding.

If Warhol made us re-examine the representational power of a Campbell's Soup can, Kurtz opens up the proverbial can and takes a good hard look at what's inside. His art is designed to label GM food, even though it is not marked for consumers except in the European Union. He illustrates the processes by which that food is engineered as much as grown, and how corporate control of that genetic modification challenges the notion of what we think of as farming.

See more stories tagged with: steve kurtz, patriot act, bacteria, rights and liberties

For more information about this case go to caedefensefund.org.

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor."

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