210THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERof paramount importance, and more specifically, they are central to a
process of destabilization between the spoken and the unspoken, the vis-
ible and the invisible, the personal and the public.^52 In the gallery space,
her taxidermy hides are displayed as freestanding sculptures or appear
secured to the walls. In either instance, unlike in Inert, the hides have
been treated and manipulated in order to suggest the absent presence of
a female human body.
The allure that her animal-made-objects possess manifests from a de-
liberate blurring of the outline of animal morphology: the intriguing
work of folds appears dramatized by a human/animal hauntology. Unlike
Inert, in which the skin appeared to be predominantly stretched flat across
the gallery floor, and clearly outlined, Mntambo’s are modeled against
her own body (and at times that of her mother) and thus indelibly bear
the three-dimensional trace of her having been there. This operation prob-
lematizes the animal skins by inscribing a double indexicality: we simul-
taneously see traces of the animals that originally bore them and traces
of the human body that wore them.
This play of presences and absences captures something of the inherent
impossibility, previously discussed, of exhausting the depths of objects—a
universal condition that not only applies to our relationship with objects
but also defines the relationships between objects and other objects.^53 As
Harman argues, the encounter between objects (in this case, the cow’s body
and the human body) can only be vicarious in the sense that no object can
access the depths of another object in full. A sensual object is, therefore,
detachable from its adumbrations, the angle at which we perceive it, and
the lighting and shadows that sensually define its presence. But can the
object also be detached from its innermost qualities? The essential qualities
of speculative taxidermy objects surely lie in the inconfutable presence of
animal skin. The element that characterizes the surface of the object and
removes the skin from an animal, to a certain degree, equates to a gesture
of appropriation of the sensual truth of the animal itself, or the outermost
register of reality we can grasp of an animal—surfaces.
Mntambo’s cowhides, through the processes of removal, tanning, mold-
ing, and setting, have become sensual objects in their own right, inde-
pendent objects that materially allude to their past adherence to the animal
body (fig. 6.4). Here and there, anatomical parts more or less clearly sur-
face from the alluded, hollow depth underneath the hide. Here, peeling off