Speculative Taxidermy

FOLLOWING MATERIALITY165

Pushing aside the transcendentalism of the symbolic register can thus
reveal that Oppenheim’s teacup alludes to the increased availability of
the mass production of objects at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury; the affirmation of exploitative regimes of industrial production align-
ing the human and the animal; the convergence of multiple environmental
impacts of unprecedented magnitude involving slavery, slaughter, defor-
estation, and the emergence of mass-agricultural production; the local
(the mouth) and remote (the tea and sugar trades) forms of interrelated and
self-perpetuating colonialist economies of production and consumption;
the decorum inscribed in a social ritualistic object defining class and cul-
tural status; the expectation of feminine fragility as defined by patriarchal
values; the full assimilation of animals as ontologically aligned to mass-
produced objects; and the pacification of animal skin, which, although
removed from the animal, still looks lively, thus metaphorically never
allowing the absent animal to die. This is the matrix of the material condi-
tion that will become central to object-based contemporary art in the An-
thropocene: a set of inextricable entanglements in which multiple histories
collide, unveiling inherited epistemological contradictions and recover-
ing the all-important, and yet utterly overlooked, interconnectedness of
biopower.

CÉZANNE’S DOUBT

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Cézanne began to experiment
with space, lines, and color. His ultimate aim was to incorporate and re-
configure the affirmation of classical representation. Cézanne’s land-
scapes, but more so his still-life paintings, subtly revealed the materiality
of the medium of painting as an intrinsic part of the aesthetic experience,
without renouncing representation. His breakthrough, later called multi-
focal perspective, was a representational system generating an embodied
scopic field that assembled multiple and personal viewpoints into one
flat plane.^5 This aesthetic modality essentially constituted a nonaffirma-
tive maneuver. It derailed the affirmation typical of the power/knowledge
relationships established by quattrocento painting through the introduc-
tion of what Merleau-Ponty termed the “lived perspective.”^6 After Manet’s