New Documentary: Marching Plague

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MARCHING PLAGUE
(USA 2006. Cert 15)

by Critical Art Ensemble

Event, film screening, talk
Saturday 29 July 2006
ICA, The Mall, London
Tickets £10, £7.50
Box office: [phone]
www.ica.org

The first London showing of the film, Marching Plague
by Critical Art
Ensemble is presented on 29 July at the ICA and is
introduced by Steve
Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble.

Filmed on location in Stornoway, Scotland, this film
presents a
powerful critique of UK-US bioweapons research and
addresses the paranoia surrounding bioterrorism. It
centres on the recreation of secret sea trials
conducted by the UK government in the 1950s,
investigating the airborne distribution of bacterial
agents.

In May 2004, FBI agents and the Joint Terrorism Task
Force raided
Critical Art Ensemble founder Steve Kurtz¹s home,
seizing art works and research materials for the
Marching Plague project, dedicated to demystifying the
issues surrounding germ warfare. The US government has
yet to produce evidence that Kurtz is a bioterrorist,
but they refuse to return the seized materials.
Despite this, Kurtz has been able to reconstruct the
research and produce the film Marching Plague,
commissioned by The Arts Catalyst.

Bioweapons experts and artists, including Heath
Bunting and Kayle
Brandon, join Steve Kurtz, Steve Barnes and Lucia
Sommer of Critical Art Ensemble to discuss
bioterrorism, the culture of fear and artistic
censorship.

An installation in the ICA outlines the
tragedy-to-farce timeline of
germ warfare.

ABOUT THE FILM

Charting the history of germ warfare research, the
film seeks to expose
the relative ineffectiveness of this mode of attack
compared with more
conventional terrorist weapons. It aims to address and
dispel some of
the public¹s fear of bioterrorism which has increased
in recent years.
Critical Art Ensemble assert that this exaggerated
fear is based on incomplete awareness of the facts -
and that this fear has been exploited by governments
for decades in order to divert funds from legitimate
medical research.

When bubonic plague research trials took place on the
Isle of Lewis
during the Cold War, the British military began to
explore whether germs could be used as a naval weapon.
Their tests proved that germs were as unreliable and
unmanageable on the sea as they were on the land. This
film recreates the trials (using the same harmless
bacterial stimulant used in the first tests) with
similarly inconclusive results. As Kurtz says Œ²We
wanted to show how crazy these germ warfare programmes
are. Just like the navy back in 1952 we didn¹t manage
to hit the target, but did get ourselves covered with
the stimulant,² he says, ³The only thing we
successfully did was to poison ourselves.
Theoretically.²

Steve Kurtz is currently at the centre of one of the
most controversial
court cases thrown up by George Bush¹s Patriot Act. In
2004 when his
wife Hope died naturally of heart failure at their
home, Kurtz called the
authorities. The police, finding science equipment and
art materials
for Critical Art Ensemble¹s ongoing work called in the
FBI. Kurtz was
detained and later charged with mail fraud and wire
fraud. He faces up to 20 years in prison and the US
Justice Department is still seeking charges relating
to biological weapons.

Marching Plague is supported by Arts Council England.

More information on The Arts Catalyst at
www.artscatalyst.org
More information on Critical Art Ensemble
www.critical-art.net

More information on the case surrounding Steve Kurtz¹s
legal case:
www.caedefensefund.org

A review:

http://www.counterpunch.org/cox07132006.html

The Critical Art Ensemble's Biological Defense Program
Marching Plague
By STAN COX

It's not clear what qualifies an armament as a "weapon of mass destruction"; it doesn't seem to have much to do with the capacity to cause mass destruction. Nuclear bombs certainly have that ability, but their co-WMDs, chemical and biological weapons, can kill only a fraction of a percent as many people as can nukes. They're far less useful in a real fight than are conventional weapons, and they're often more dangerous to their creator than to the target.

But because they can cause gruesome results that old-fashioned explosions, projectiles, and fire cannot, the three classes of WMD do have in common an extraordinary capacity to terrify, and that terror can be put to use not just by offically designated terrorists but by all sides in a conflict. Biological weapons, or rather perceived threats of them, are particularly effective as a tool of government and military control.

A current work by the Critical Art Ensemble entitled "Marching Plague" mocks the notion that biological terror presents any serious practical threat, arguing instead that extravagant spending of tax dollars to defend against bioterror is no more than a means of "maximizing profit and consolidating power through the matrix of biocatastrophe."

Like all CAE efforts, "Marching Plague" advances on several fronts at once (with an installation, a performance piece, a film, and a book) and is not explicitly identified with any individual artist. This time out, they've taken on an unwelcome but highly effective artistic collaborator: the US Department of Justice, which continues its pursuit of a two-year-old case against one of the key artists behind the project, Steven Kurtz.

The prosecution of Kurtz is a work of political theater that starkly illuminates one of the chief arguments of "Marching Plague": that microorganisms are practically useless as weapons but are a highly effective tool for scaring a citizenry into accepting tighter government and corporate control.