INTRODUCTION21might be useful to at least outline three substantially different and recur-
ring approaches to the medium: the symbolic, the surrealist, and the
political.
To some artists, taxidermy has provided an opportunity to crystallize
the animal into pure symbolic form, thus reinvigorating classical traditions
of representation based on objectification. It is worth noting that in the
early works of Petah Coyne, Claire Morgan, Kate Clark, Cai Guo-Qiang,
Maurizio Cattelan, and others,^30 taxidermy appears to ventriloquize hu-
man concerns extrinsic to human/animal relations: they essentially func-
tion as metaphors. Other artists have been more directly influenced by
surrealist agendas, as in the case of Tessa Farmer, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu,
Jan Fabre, the Idiots, Ghyslain Bertholon, and Polly Morgan. Here animal
bodies re-propose a curiosity paradigm typical of the surrealist found-
object. However, this familiar-made-strange gestures toward the possibility
of reinventing ontologies, sometimes inscribing a political proposal that
transcends lyrical aesthetics. Also inspired by surrealist aesthetics is the
work of a number of contemporary photographers like Richard Ross, Karen
Knorr, and Hiroshi Sugimoto who have invested time and energy in criti-
cally addressing the ambiguous life/death dichotomy of mounted animal
skins through the lens of the camera.^31
Lastly, a number of artists conceive taxidermy as a clear political state-
ment—they exclusively adopt it to directly challenge, problematize, and
question human/animal relations. Mark Dion, Steve Bishop, Wim Del-
voye, Marcus Coates, Andrea Roe, Angela Singer, Thomas Grünfeld,
Chloë Brown, Petrit Halilaj, Ali Kazma, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, and
Art Orienté Objet have all distinguished themselves through the pro-
duction of pieces in which taxidermy is implemented for the purpose of
altering the viewer’s conception of nature, environments, animals, and
human/animal relations. At stake in their work is the possibility to think
beyond the romanticized, affirmative, and comforting images of natural
beauty that have historically pleased art audiences.^32 They directly ad-
dress the ontological certainties of anthropocentrism, questioning the
institutional writing of history, history’s concealment of animals in the
light of man’s achievements, the histories of representation that have ce-
mented man’s exceptionalism, and the possibility of undoing such histo-
riographies through a critical use of the very medium through which
those histories were written in the first place.