THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER197explains, it is the network they create, the contingent tableau, but also
the sunlight that hits them and the setting in which they appear. The fact
that the objects are deterritorialized from their ready-to-hand condition
also plays a key role. This situation generates an oscillation between the
withdrawn state of debris and the agency of things.
“Thing-power,” as Bennett calls it, the ability some objects have to stop
us in our tracks because of their inherent vitalism, their ability to vibrate,
applies equally to organic and inorganic objects.^12 Here lies an interesting
albeit complex aspect of both object-oriented ontology and vital materi-
alism: a substantial reconfiguration of the concept of the living. Similarly
to object-oriented ontology, Bennett’s thing-power operates an ontolog-
ical flattening that appears problematic when non-man-made objects, living
beings, or once-living surfaces are involved. However, unlike Harman,
Bennett conceives thing-power as a political tool—something the author
says might lead us to treat “animals, plants, earth and even artifacts and
commodities more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically.”^13 At
the core of Bennett’s hope lies the conviction that our conception of pas-
sive matter, something defined by capitalist materialism, has for too
long fed “human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest
and consumption.”^14 In some sense, I believe she is right—a heightened
awareness of everything around us can constitute a positive platform for
a different future. However, how can this awareness emerge through the
strictures of capitalist materialism and its construction of a realism that
dictates ethical norms? As Bennett claims, capitalist materialism essen-
tially is an antimaterialism that consistently hinders the vitality of matter
in order to enable capitalist consumption.
It is on these grounds that my curiosity for the animal skins included in
Agrimiká brought me to consider more carefully the challenges involved
in thinking about taxidermy and animal skins through the suspension
of the ethical considerations regularly involved in animal death—not be-
cause animal death does not matter, but because a relentless emphasis on
animal death has negatively characterized taxidermy through the lens of
postcolonial critique and limits serious scholarly consideration of its
agency in art. Agrimiká implicitly questions this paradigm. In this sense,
more than any other, the return of Berger’s original question “Why look at
animals?” as part of the installation title should gesture toward new
challenges of visuality and ethics.