242THIS IS NOT A HORSEpositivism, empiricism, rationalism, materialism, secularism and
scientism—the whole objectifying consciousness of the Enlightenment—
in a way that allows for a return of the soul.”^65 This operation, Gablik
argues, becomes an urgent necessity in the light of the need we have to
remediate the “mess we have made of the world.”^66 It is perhaps not sur-
prising that at the beginning of the 1990s this argument was critiqued
by some as “new-age obscurantism.” But it is evident today that much of
Gablik’s argument was somewhat prophetic.
Since the publication of Gablik’s book, two major sociocultural shifts
have substantially shaped the western artistic scene. Environmental con-
cern has become an omnipresent factor in everyday life. Global warming
is the ever-present form of anxiety today’s children live with, while the
Internet has substantially reconfigured the concept of communities on
micro and macro scales. These factors have substantially affected the art
scene in ways that Gablik could have not foreseen. The massification of
digital technologies, which has especially characterized the past twenty
years, has also substantially altered our relationship with material ob-
jects.^67 Adding to Fudge’s theorization of the recalcitrant materiality of
the animal-made-object, it can be argued that the nonreducible materi-
ality presented by animal fur in Bishop’s work, and in the work of the
other artists discussed in this book, has been substantially enhanced and
problematized by the relentless dematerialization of analog technologies
operated by the emergence of digital networks. As argued by Simon
Reynolds in Retromania, the 2000s were generally characterized by a re-
turn of past stylistic genres in music and fashion. These revivals have co-
incided with a recuperation of the tangible materiality of media, such as
vinyl records, printed books, and cassette tapes.^68
The discourses that have demarcated the emergence of this renewed
material interest in popular culture and in art practices are interrelated. As
the editors of the volume Visuality/Materiality argue, visuality and ma-
teriality should be conceived as co-constituting—as caught in a reflex-
ively productive relationship.^69 Akin to Shukin’s double entendre of the
mimetic, and sharing substantial preoccupations with Elkins’s plea to pay
attention to materials in art, the visuality/materiality paradigm proposes
a problematized contemporary cultural economy of consumption in
which materiality is nonreducible. In this context, the possible complica-
tions proposed by a fleeting and unremarkably ephemeral circulation of