THIS IS NOT A HORSE241mentioned. Since speculative taxidermy has its feet firmly planted in the
ground, its indexical matrix anchors readings in a carnal register of tech-
nocapitalist consumption. So it is no surprise that it might, in turn, ap-
pear somewhat dark.
In 1991, Suzi Gablik’s controversial book The Reenchantment of Art laid
the foundations of many essential artistic/political concerns that have be-
come central to today’s discourses. The book diagnoses the traits of a
cultural crisis essentially caused by modernism, which, according to the
author, substantially impoverished artistic discourses and art making in the
second half of the twentieth century.^63 In opposition to an object-focused
art system, Gablik advocates the need to overcome the artist/audience
dichotomic relationship based on shock tactics (little did she know that
the Young British Artists [YBAs] would be soon capturing the attention of
the artworld with unprecedentedly intense and brutal shock strategies)
for the purpose of establishing aesthetics of interaction and connection.
But most importantly, Gablik argues that this new relation should be
employed in light of the need to overcome the hegemony of technologi-
cal and materialist views that have compromised any other possibilities
to form connections between humans and nature. A reenchantment of
art, however, has nothing to do with a return to religious art, but instead
is centered around the possibility that new mythologies may arise in order
to define new alternative realisms—realisms that are not defined by the
empiricism of scientific thought.
Perhaps Gablik challenged the predominant sociocultural paradigm a
little too soon, but in a sense, the excessive, obsessive, self-indulgent, and
narcissistic gestures of the YBAs (and other commercial movements)
might have heightened the desire for a different, quieter, slower, and more
meditative aesthetic register. The disenchantment of art, a phenomenon
partly caused by oppressive consumerist frameworks, was linked to sci-
entific objectivity and to the Greenbergian/Friedian modernist emphasis
on an art model in which the object is autonomous. Gablik acknowledges
that Cartesian philosophies have “carried us away from a sense of whole-
ness by focusing only on individual experience” and thus advocates the
importance of placing interconnectedness at the center of the picture.^64
For the purpose of defining new aesthetic models, emphasis should be
placed on new concepts of communities and environments, a reen-
chantment capable of moving beyond “modern traditions of mechanism,