FOLLOWING MATERIALITY189tologically flattened manner, different and compromised forms of repre-
sentation, from a long-awaited recognition (although tongue in cheek)
of taxidermy as sculptural practice worthy of artistic attention, to the
Duchampian readymade (the tire and the tennis ball), to painting, collage,
photography, and traces of inked human feet. Placed next to each other
and haphazardly networked in this system, they all reveal their inabilities
to match reality—their limitations and intrinsic contradictions are thus
made to emerge. Monogram situates itself at a crisis broader than that
between human and animal. It inscribes the human/nonhuman crisis
in the registers of ontology, realism, representation, and their indissoluble
intermingling in contemporary visual production and consumption modes.
It does so by questioning the essential differences between man-made
objects and animal-life, technology and nature, two-dimensional images
and three-dimensional ones, painted pictures and photography, and life
and death. Through the juxtaposing of indexical and representational
tropes, Monogram questions different conceptions of realism, challeng-
ing all and favoring none. Its ultimate, essential challenge might be the
proposal of a “compulsory reality check.” In this sense Monogram is a true
precursor of speculative taxidermy. Its aesthetic does not suggest that
something has gone wrong with our relationship with animals, but that
our ontological rationalization of the world is superficial, contradictory,
and ultimately unattainable—and thus is responsible for our complex
and conflicted relationship with animals.
Most importantly, Rauschenberg’s combines were instrumental in re-
introducing figurative representational imagery in the discourses and
practices of the modern period, its break from realistic illusionism and
its Greenbergian predilection for medium specificity. Clearly, Rauschen-
berg’s artworks cannot be understood as autonomous or independent en-
tities in a sense that Fried would have agreed with. And it is here that the
strength of what speculative taxidermy can achieve in art can be better
appreciated. The work of contemplation that Fried elaborated is one that
outright dismisses aesthetic theatricality and conceptualism as strategies
worthy of attention. Fried despised the fact that minimalist art conflated
the artistic idea within the object itself. The blurring of the boundary be-
tween art and objecthood was thus perceived as a threat to transcendental
purity. According to Fried, the mere existence of an object, as such, lacked
a substantial signifying power.^84 However, one important contingency