Play with Man Ray: Human-canine intra-action in William Wegman’s video art

During the 1970s, American artist William Wegman created seven reels of short video works including many created in collaboration with his canine companion, Man Ray (e.g. Dog Duet, Tails, Eyes of Ray, Drinking Milk, New and Used Car Salesman, Milk/Floor, and Spelling Lesson). These video works have received minimal scholarly attention beyond Susan McHugh’s analysis (2001), which established how their ‘pack aesthetics’ (or collaborative production) troubles the notion of singular artistic agency. Further displacing anthropocentric aesthetic agency, this article will shift the analysis away from an auteurist framing of William Wegman’s work and instead focus on the intra-action (Barad 2007) of human and nonhuman playmates: Man Ray, Wegman, props, and the spectator. I revisit the videos through new frameworks, not only accounting for developments in animal studies, posthumanism, and new materialism (particularly agential realism) since McHugh’s article, but also centralising the concept of play. Drawing on theories of play by Gregory Bateson (1972), Brian Massumi (2014) and Loretta Fois (2022), this article considers how play and improvisation in Wegman/Man Ray’s video art create radically different dynamics to Wegman’s later photographic work featuring his signature anthropomorphism of Weimaraners. The framework of play helps us to reconceptualise what is occurring between human and nonhuman participants as ‘a co-constitutive event’ (Nielsen 2021, 143) in which trust, manipulation, irony and unpredictability are playfully explored between human and nonhuman ‘actants’ (Bennett 2010, viii). This re-examination of Wegman/Man Ray’s 1970s video art demonstrates how the absurdist, conceptual humour is generated by playful intra-action and invites us to reconsider the centrality of play to human/nonhuman communication and aesthetics onscreen.