140THE END OF THE DAYDREAMenvelop. The deceit of the senses that they operate plays out exclusively
upon their surfaces. Some surfaces thus become ambiguously political—
simultaneous everything and nothing. They usually are the sites upon
which forms of representation like painting and drawing unfold, and as
such, they are especially important in our relationship with animals and
art alike.
More recently, an interest in the materiality of objects has arisen
equally in philosophical and art historical discourses, where the need to
reconstitute the presence of an embodied human within a material world
has become more and more pressing. Like speculative realism, new ma-
terialism aims to be connected with current ethical and political concerns
related to science and technology—climate change, global capital, popu-
lation flows, biotechnological engineering, and the digital, wireless, and
virtual prosthetics that make our lives what they are today.^8 Rethinking
materialities thus entails surpassing Cartesian conceptions of matter and
the dualisms that conceived nature as a quantifiable and measurable en-
tity that can be subjugated.
A CRITICAL DISTANCINGSpeculative taxidermy is a dual phenomenon—one simultaneously in-
volving the representational tropes of two-dimensional media, such as
photography, and three-dimensional sculpturalism. The importance of
the former lies in the proposal of a critical distancing from the taxidermy
object itself. It is in this double distancing from the live animal, first through
the rendering into taxidermy and thereafter through its transposition
into another indexical medium, that a critical approach, an undoing of
human/animal past histories and future potentialities for engagement,
can arise. This mediated taxidermy representation thus proposes the possi-
bility of what I have called ontological mobility: the opportunity to recon-
figure our taken-for-granted modes of being.^9 Ontological mobility is a
specific moment in the phenomenology of art involved with, but not ex-
clusive to, works of speculative taxidermy. It is the result of the agency of
the work of art, its ability to leverage preinscribed values and structures in
order to take the viewer through a critical appraisal of realism and to