Speculative Taxidermy

“Things” are no longer passively waiting for a concept, theory, or sover-

eign subject to arrange them in ordered ranks of objecthood. “The Thing”

rears its head—a rough beast or sci-fi monster, a repressed returnee, an

obdurate materiality, a stumbling block, and an object lesson.

—W. J. T. MITCHELL, WHAT DO PICTURES WANT?

Whatever we might think of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to realism, he does

insist on a distinction between the visible and invisible realms. For as he

puts it, with typically seductive prose, the visible thing is “a quality preg-

nant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a mas-

sive being, a grain or corpuscle borne by a massive wave of being.”

—GRAHAM HARMAN, GUERRILLA METAPHYSICS

AGRIMIKÁ: ANIMAL SKINS AND OTHER OBJECTS

The lighting is dim, and the air is filled with a distinctive musty odor of
glue and leather. This is the first and lasting impression of the rooms in
Maria Papadimitriou’s installation titled Agrimiká: Why Look at Ani-
mals? at the fifty-sixth edition of the Venice Biennale. These spaces are not
the fictional fabrications of the artist, like in Mike Nelson’s labyrinthic

6

THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER

Aesthetics of Speculative Taxidermy