In an intriguing art-science collaboration, New Zealand scientists have compared the bacteria on artist, Billy Apple’s 46-year-old used toilet tissues to 2016 samples from the artist. Their findings substantiate growing evidence that a “core” part of our bacteria population remains stable as we age, and that at least some of the bacteria are actively selected by our genes.
This means that advances in personalised medicine may have to consider not only our individual genes, but also our unique microbiome – the population of microbes that live in and on us - and how the two interact.
It started with a conceptual work about art and life in New York, Excretory Wipings May 18-October 21, 1970, for which Apple collected his daily toilet tissues, soiled with excrement. Significantly, he recorded the time and date on each sample making them eligible for use by science. Born in New Zealand, Apple had attended London’s Royal College of Art then moved to New York in 1964. Part of the breaking wave of Pop Art, his works were always idea-driven and he went on to become a founding member of the Conceptual Art movement.
“I decided that I’d become the subject for any work I wanted to do,” says Apple, now 81, who changed his name in 1962 to rebrand himself as an art work, having come to see that art also works as a commodity in cultural markets. (In 2007, he had his name registered as a trademark while investigating the legal concept of intellectual property.)
Excretory Wipings was due to be exhibited in Apple’s 1974 exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and although the tissues were included in the accompanying publication, they were excluded from display. Fortuitously, Apple carefully stored the tissues.
Fast-forward to June 2016, when a serendipitous meeting between Apple, now based in Auckland, and molecular biologist Dr Justin O’Sullivan seeded the idea for a study: Apple would produce new faecal samples so Dr O’Sullivan’s team could compare his gut bacteria from each period to see how they changed.
The findings have just been published in the Human Microbiome Journal with Apple as a co-author.
“This is a unique study because people don’t tend to keep the samples that are necessary to perform it. So nothing has been done on this time-scale before,” says Dr O’Sullivan, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland-based Liggins Institute.
Just as Apple’s art work challenged boundaries between what is and isn’t art, the findings challenge boundaries between what is us and what isn’t us.