208THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERsymbolically conflated Native Americans and wolves, producing an in-
tertwining of metaphors and symbols that effectively purported, in
equal measure, the extermination of wolves and the killing of Native
Americans. Heads of wolves and heads of Indians were publicly dis-
played to proclaim dominance over “beasts and beast-like men.”^46 For
centuries, wolf bounties promoted the killing of wolves, supporting an
economic system of racial discrimination kept in place by the indis-
soluble intertwining of material and symbolic registers.
SPECULATIVE TAXIDERMY AS ARCHAEOLOGYIt becomes at this stage possible to outline a recurrent trait of characters
most regularly displayed by speculative taxidermy. As seen, the tableau-
objet reclaims the materiality of the medium as an intrinsic part of the
aesthetic experience for the purpose of derailing the predetermination of
affirmative power/knowledge relationships charging the work of art with a
potential for agency.^47 Through similar nonaffirmative aesthetics, Inert
derails the naturalized connections between discourses and practices in-
scribed in the material manipulation of the taxidermy skins. In this
sense—and this is perhaps its most important quality—speculative taxi-
dermy cannot be said to be a direct sedimentation of power discourses, as
can be instead claimed for the lifelike taxidermy of natural history muse-
ums. The opposite is indeed true. To draw a parallel, paintings and sculp-
tures of classical art constitute sedimentations of power discourses, such
as the historical, mythical, and religious. They relentlessly inscribed and
naturalized ethical and moral discourses while providing the ruling
classes with invaluable opportunities for operating power through the
use of well-tested representational strategies. For instance, the prepared
skin in Inert is capable of summoning seemingly unrelated discourses
and practices ranging from the mythological, therianthropic, and taxo-
nomical to popular culture and hunting-trophy souvenirs. Galanin’s
quasi-wolf equally emerges from all these practices and related discourse:
the specimen, the pest, the pet, the trophy, and the myth are all made to
collapse into one reworked animal skin. This reconfiguration of the in-
terlinks between discourses and practices makes paradoxes visible—the