Kathy High's Embracing Animals

Kathy High’s Embracing Animal (2004-2006), where three laboratory rats were micro injected with a small amount of human DNA in order to give them autoimmune diseases, could be seen as residing in the zone of proximity and indiscernibility, becoming universal flesh ‘where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule’. Essentially, the artwork blurs bodily, individual, subjective boundaries. The artist herself has stated: ‘They are not pets. They are extensions, transformers, transitional combined beings that resonate with me in ways that other animals cannot’. Therefore, the artist and the rats are subjects to each other as much as they are objects, affecting one another in a seesaw manner, as the combination of
Therefore, the distinction between the artist, the medium, and the artwork is obscured, since rats possess their own agency and are accountable for the artistic process as well as the final product. Rats as chimeras or hybrids, therefore, act as demonic animals that offer a prospect of re-envisioning animal subjectivity. Their unfamiliarity deconstructs the notion of pure classification, human cultural hierarchy and highlight the interspecies fluidity in a form of universal flesh. The lack of such distinction, in turn, induces depersonalization, emerging non-identity and transformation into multiplicity, which is another feature of becoming-animal. As Deleuze and Guattari argued, becoming-animal ‘always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short a multiplicity’. This is perceivable in the display of the rats at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where they are provided a habitat – an experimental playground in itself playing with the notion of exchange and transition. Through glass windows, exhibition visitors could observe rats and they could watch them back, forming a kind of pack just by experiencing one
In the video, the artist herself uses various animal masks in order to diminish the boundary her face produces between the human and the animal and is shown interacting with household animals (Fig. 1). In addition, Embracing Animal, both metaphorically and directly, alludes to contagion, that according to Deleuze and Guattari, enable the multiplicities with heterogeneous terms to enter certain assemblages and it is precisely there that human beings effect their becomings-animal: ‘we form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals’. Similarly the artist stated: ‘These rats and I are engaged in like systems and routines of health and sickness’. The contagion also brings us to what Deleuze has stated about death: ‘it is not the human beings, who know how to die, but the animals’. Accepting death and retreating to die in solitude, is what could bring the human in proximity to the animal. Embracing Animal, consequently, directly confronts one with death, as the part of the artist seizes to exist, once the rats pass away. In addition, Kathy High is forced to accept and deal with the presence of an illness within her body, the same illness that bore death to the rats and herself dwelling within the rats or herself as the rat, as they act as