THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER209manipulation of the skin here stands as the materialization of the differ-
ent conceptions of animality we produce in order to dominate animals.
Galanin’s animal skin is no longer a wolf but a third object. This is where
the most noticeable productive strength of speculative taxidermy lies: as
characterized by its precarious balancing between realism and abstrac-
tion, it nonetheless retains a signifying openness, a level of freedom,
that ultimately enables the juxtaposition and critically addresses a range
of human/animal power/knowledge relationships.
Further problematization of Inert emerges if the tensions between ab-
straction, figuration, and the symbolic are carefully considered. This con-
stitutes one of the most important differences between botched taxidermy
and speculative taxidermy. While the “wrongness” and abrasiveness of
botched taxidermy gestured, in a resigned manner, toward things that ap-
pear to “have gone wrong with the animal,” speculative taxidermy pro-
poses nonaffirmative aesthetics in which taxidermy skins become the very
interface upon which intra-active human/animal becomings take place:
zones of resistance and inscription of transhistorical practices that have
shaped the coevolution of humans and animals.^48 In opposition to botched
taxidermy, which sees symbolism as that which makes the animal disap-
pear,^49 speculative taxidermy recovers symbolism as an essential feature of
human/animal relations focusing on the meaningful instances in which
animal symbolism directly affects the living animals represented by the
taxidermy skin. In this sense, speculative taxidermy functions as a Fou-
cauldian archaeological site. Archaeology concentrates on rewriting—it
does not propose a return to an innermost ever-elusive origin, but it in-
stead engages in a description of discourses, practices, and the objects of
both.^50 In the process, it attempts to defamiliarize the familiar for the pur-
pose of rethinking the past in order to reimagine the present.
THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF SKINSNandipha Mntambo’s remodeled cowhides further problematize the
speculative taxidermy aesthetics mapped through Galanin’s Inert. The
artist’s interest in forensics and science brought her to experiment with
the preservation of animal skins.^51 As Mntambo explains, materials are