Kathy High/Embracing Animal

In Kathy High’s Embracing Animal (2004) installation, she wore a pig mask as she crawled partially naked and played with a dog. Combined with other elements in the installation, such as ‘…lab coats and animal cages…casts of rats’ heads….test tubes with small LCD monitors playing at the bottom…video loops...that…depict various states of becoming animal, including Lon Chaney Jr. transforming into a werewolf, from the 1941 film The Wolf Man…’ (Nato Thompson, MASS MoCA, Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom, MIT Press, 2005, p60) her work asks us to think about our use of animals in medical experiments and our close alliances with them. However, High also draws us in the zone of Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’ A tale of Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud, a scientific cure that is not a cure, a war, the pack, contagion rather than confinement, the multiple rather than hierarchical molar, bodies without organs, intensities. The vampire is evoked in the Wolf Man, because both are hybrids, boundary creatures, which broach the ‘becoming animal’ of the human. High reveals this cleft between human and animal as superficial through the pig mask, which parodies it, but ironically mocks us in the process. Can we really experience being animal through pretense and subterfuge? High appears to reflect Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming animal’; for as Christoph Cox has pointed out: “Becoming animal”, does not mean imitating an animal…but…unlearning physical and emotion habits and learning to take on new ones such that one enlarges the scope of one’s relationships and responses to the world. (Cox, ‘Of Humans, Animals and Monsters, p.23). (Julie Clarke© 2008)