164FOLLOWING MATERIALITYhistorical gaze, far too quickly, defaults on the anthropocentric games
played upon the symbolic register. In this game, the hermeneutical key is
always at hand.
The material register of surrealist objects, the grounds upon which the
semantic instability of the object unravels, has been substantially under-
scrutinized. Leveraging the materiality, or remaining closer to it, prevents
interpretation from “leaving the object behind” in the production of pure
symbols. The erotic allusions inscribed in Object have always been given
precedence over anything else the art piece might be capable of doing. Its
uncanny thingness is thus castrated and domesticated with every seem-
ingly successful symbolic reading that the art historical gaze stitches onto
it. But what could be gained in refraining from the symbolic leap? And
how can the surrealist object be understood as a glimpse of a broader cri-
sis of materiality that will become exacerbated in the current stage of the
Anthropocene?
There exists an ethical and political dimension to the readymade work
of art that can only be teased out from its materiality and by following its
materiality through sociocultural transactions and inscriptions that are
specific and interlinked. This is the proposal underlying the anthropogenic
condition in art, a proposal that would entail following the materiality of
the object, daring to adhere to a literalist dimension that simultaneously
acknowledges the material histories inscribed in surfaces while enabling
the object to gesture toward narratives that remain anchored within it.
This approach is justified by the artistic choice of implementing an ev-
eryday object in the artistic discourse rather than its painted or sculpted
platonic referent. Here, therefore, lies the political charge of the everyday
object, one akin to the emergence of collage and photomontage as a strat-
egy designed to negotiate shifting and conflicting perceptions of the world.
From this vantage point, it becomes possible to peel off meaning from
the outer surface of these artworks in order to reach for a semantic dimen-
sion that lies between their materiality and the purely symbolic register
of art historical hermeneutics. In this sense, Oppenheim’s Object can be
considered a precursor of speculative taxidermy on the grounds that it
destabilizes the sovereignty of the viewer to invite negotiation of political
and ethical considerations. More specifically, this piece provides the first
and most clear model of ontological derailment incorporating a form of
taxidermy.