Speculative Taxidermy

THIS IS NOT A HORSE223

However, his approach did not remain unchallenged for long. On the first
page of the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton stated that the implementation
of everyday objects in surrealist art is expressly operated for the purpose
of “challenging indifference through a poetic consciousness of objects.”^5
As emphasized by Ulrich Lehmann, materiality plays a key role in this
ontological subverting agency.

Although the Surrealist’s own categorizations and typologies of the ob-

jects over the course of a decade do not necessarily reveal a linear devel-

opment, it becomes apparent how the various Surrealist interpretations

trace the course of a broad historical movement that not only defined a

changing perception of materiality, but over and above this, also dem-

onstrated the instrumental transformation of the understanding of ma-

terialism. This means a transformation from an empirical, mechanistic

comprehension of the world to a revelation of the objectifying, alienat-

ing structures within it.^6

It is critical at this stage to acknowledge that, in the surrealist object-
assemblage, materiality can perform a political critique of the techno-
capitalist economies of visibility defining human/animal relations in the
Anthropocene. The substantial difference between Dada objects and
surrealist objects is, from this vantage point, an ethical one.
Historian Erica Fudge argues in favor of the irreducible agency of ani-
mal skin in objects through the analysis of case studies from the English
Renaissance.^7 Stressing that a human/animal studies framework should
consider animals as “truly active presences in the world,”^8 Fudge chal-
lenges the strategies of technocapitalist ontologies of production, which
conveniently disentangle living animals and animal-derived-matter for
the purpose of facilitating consumption: “Like subject and object,” Fudge
argues, “they are utterly intertwined.”^9 Therefore, Fudge’s animal-made-
object paradigm is in many ways akin to Shukin’s rendering, and presents
another fitting double entendre that emphasizes the surface of materi-
alities: on one hand we have the animal body/matter, reified as object/
commodity, and on the other, we have the culturally objectified animal.
The alluring recalcitrance of the animal-made-object is thus configured
by Fudge as an active, irreducible agent in human/animal relations, one