Artist’s show takes on his prosecution

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Artist Steven Kurtz has never been shy about challenging the establishment, using a blend of performance art and science with his Critical Art Ensemble to stir debate about such things as genetically modified crops and germ warfare.

A 2007 performance had CAE members launching, with some fanfare, a harmless strain of bacteria onto volunteers in Leipzig, Germany, to re-create the U.S. military’s secret 1950 mock anthrax test on San Francisco.

Kurtz’s latest installation is another questioning of authority -- with a personal twist. The show’s subject is a four-year federal criminal prosecution of Kurtz that began when petri dishes in his Buffalo home set off bioterror alarm bells for police.

The closely watched case was dismissed in April when U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara ruled that a 2004 mail and wire fraud indictment was “insufficient on its face.”

The exhibit, “SEIZED,” at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center through Saturday, was initially conceived as a public-relations tool as the artist headed toward trial. It has taken on a slightly more celebratory tone with the legal victory.

The show has CAE’s intellectual past projects sharing space with the more mundane physical remnants of his legal ordeal. A centerpiece is an artfully arranged stack of pizza boxes and sports-drink bottles that Kurtz said were left behind by Joint Terrorism Task Force agents who raided his home after police responding to the death of his wife, Hope, reported the petri dishes they had seen in the Kurtz home. His wife died of heart failure.

“If you say, ‘What is this show?’ ” the University at Buffalo professor said on a recent afternoon at Hallwalls, “it’s about, one, everything that the FBI took away from us, and two, everything that the FBI left behind.”

The U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of Kurtz became almost overnight a rallying point for artists and scientists around the world, who saw the case as an attempt by the United States to intimidate those who criticize government policy.

Kurtz was charged with felony mail and wire fraud even after explaining that petri dishes containing bacteria and other lab equipment that agents took from his home were part of his artwork.

Kurtz is not quite ready to say it’s all behind him.

“I’ve been at war for four years here,” he said. “That doesn’t just turn off with a judge’s decision.”