The Salon of Becoming-Animal

All performances in alien kinds of bodies [...] share a kind of double-negation: the person is not the species he is imitating, but also he is not not that species.

-Rane Willerslev (2004:638)

This is a reflection on the process (and experience) of making something, rather than an account of the completed project itself. Edwina Ashton and Steve Baker had been invited to contribute to the group exhibition Animal Nature, which was shown at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery in Pittsburgh from August through October 2005. Initiated by artists Lane Hall and Lisa Moline and curator Jenny Strayer, Animal Nature aimed "to create an open, experimental 'laboratory research' model," not least by encouraging the display of work that might upset traditional distinctions between creative production and academic critique (Hall 2005).

Ashton and Baker had not collaborated before this, but Ashton had been making performance-based video work with animal themes (and in animal costumes) since the mid-1990s, exhibiting in galleries in Europe and North America, and Baker had been writing about work of this kind since the late 1990s, notably in The Postmodern Animal (2000a). The Salon of Becoming-Animal was driven by a shared enthusiasm for the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially their elaboration of the concept of "becoming-animal" in A Thousand Plateaus (1988:232-309).

Art and Becoming-Animal

For Deleuze and Guattari, the "reality" of becoming-animal resides "in that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become." They write: "We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things"- by "a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off" (1988:279, 292).

This being-swept-up, unexpectedly, with which the human nevertheless goes willingly along, resembles some of what Deleuze and Guattari write about art. In moving the human away from anthropocentric meaning and subjective identity, the aim of the arts is to "unleash" becomings. To "make your body a beam of light moving at ever-increasing speed," they write, is something that "requires all the resources of art, and art of the highest kind"-the kind of art, that is to say, through which "you become animal" (1988:272, 187).

Ashton and Baker envisaged the Salon of Becoming-Animal as something more awkward and earthbound that might, almost incidentally, constitute an obstacle to (or a means of botching) Deleuze and Guattari's high-flown rhetoric of the wild and the tame-a rhetoric in which the admirable wolf is contrasted with the contemptible domestic dog, and in which the artist is of course on the side of the wolf.

Baker and Ashton took the view that there was something unsustainable in Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on art. Baker saw their insistence that "becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal" (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:238) as incompatible with the practices of contemporary art. Art's animal imitations, he had argued, tend instead to "act out the instability rather than the fixity of the thing nominally imitated," by being "both outlandish and preposterously transparent" (Baker 2000b:78). Ashton's 1997 video performance, Sheep, had been one of Baker's key examples of this kind of animal imitation.

Ashton herself felt put upon by Deleuze and Guattari's objections to characteristics and characterization, thinking of her own works as involving character, whether animal or human. In her video Bat (2005), for example, the costumed human in the guise of the leathery-winged creature of the title acts out something like the role of an unpaid janitor, obsessively brushing the dust off an empty FedEx box in the cramped broom cupboard he inhabits. The voice-over (through which the bat's thoughts are conveyed) shifts from speech to song as he explains that his landlord's family likes to "sit around and sing" to him as follows (to the tune of the old song "How Much is That Doggy in the Window?"):

We don't want a doggy or a horsey,We don't want a parrot that...