Animal Art (1987) and the Split Origins of Bioart

Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 essay “Pure Painting” contains a line that would have a long life. It runs as follows: “More than anything, artists are men who want to become inhuman.”¹ When the quotation is read in its original context, one sees that Apollinaire pits becoming “inhuman” against “the merely animal,” as a potential state of human creativity and transcendence. This transformation into the inhuman is an overcoming of animality that leads to a form of becoming “found nowhere in nature.”² In this way, the inhuman is a superhuman state divorced from the dictates of naturalness and animality, which augurs quite nicely the transhumanist position, or that futurological conception of the posthuman as overcoming the essential frailty and finitude of the human animal. Oddly enough (unbeknownst to Apollinaire), his concept of the “inhuman” could serve equally well to define Western humanism’s human as a metaphysical construct built above and beyond animality—or what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as a historical procession of the “anthropological machine” relentlessly separating human wheat from animal chaff.³ This ambiguity demonstrates that there is a certain continuity between the humanist and transhumanist subject.