Speculative Taxidermy

238THIS IS NOT A HORSE

been soaring because of demand from newly powerful economies, such
as China’s.^56 At a time in which fur is gaining new popularity through
emerging capitalist forces in the East, Bishop’s It’s Hard to Make a Stand
proposes imagery that invites very careful consideration of the power
relationships that produce such commodities and that shape human/
animal relations. It is because of this consideration that all three absent
animals summoned in the assemblage appear equalized upon an onto-
logical level of animal/capital values defined by prosthetic and con-
sumptive paradigms. This equalization reveals pets, fur animals, and
domesticated animals as being substantially defined by far too similar
ontological vulnerability. As the product of power/knowledge relations,
they are paradoxically produced, shaped, used, and consumed within a
shared, underlying set of animal/capital laws, administrative measures,
and scientific statements.
As a piece of speculative taxidermy, the fur coat awkwardly hanging
from the head of the horse mannequin constitutes the most charged sig-
nifier in It’s Hard to Make a Stand. Here, the fur coat is not displayed in
compliance with the iconography of fashion advertising; the non-affirmative
proposal it produces through its materiality appears ambiguous and
open-ended within the assemblage (this is part of the tableau-objet dy-
namics that this piece capitalizes upon). The retrieval of the dispositif that
interlinks the horse mannequin and the fur coat alludes to the shared,
and usually occulted, foundational technological origin of taxidermy and
tailoring, situated in the ancient practices of skinning and tanning of ani-
mal hides. After this essential rendering stage, animal hides, both those
fashioned as coats and those mounted as taxidermy skins, enter very dif-
ferent but nonetheless intermingling discourses of power/knowledge re-
lationships. Whereas an individual animal skin in taxidermy is made to
morphologically reconstitute the anatomy of the animal body from which
it was detached, the fur coat is constructed using different, fragmented
animal hides reconfigured upon the anatomical model of the human
torso. In both cases, a naturalization of the extensively rendered, no longer
living animal surface is performed by concealing joins and seams. Both
the taxidermy skin and the fur coat attempt, and equally successfully
perform, a disavowal of animal death: taxidermy by resuscitating the
killed animal through the realistic illusion of livingness, and the fur coat
by silencing animal skin into the ontology of textiles.