32INTRODUCTIONAcknowledging the commodity status that underpins taxidermy, and
considering it as a thing, but also as an interface inscribing animal after-
lives, this chapter bypasses previous interpretations of taxidermy that
have centered on abstracted notions of longing and loss favoring an
analysis of the reification, dispersion, and sedimentation. Adopting the
critical lenses provided by Arjun Appadurai, Bill Brown, and Garry
Marvin, the intrinsic work of agential concatenations can be recovered
from the manipulated and preserved animal skin.^60
The end of chapter 1 recapitulates and expands these important threads
through an analysis of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s between you and me
(2009). The piece is contextualized as an example of speculative taxi-
dermy: the typology of works of art that enables viewers to recognize the
totalizing force of the linguistic nature of realistic representation and
make us reconsider human/animal relationships beyond their natural-
ized transparency. This emergence substantially depends on the threads
explored here: the impact of linguistic statements upon materiality, the
synergic relationship of language and representation in the production of
realism, and a conception of commodification that results from their
synergy—a material trace of human/animal epistemic cruxes, a productive
point of access for a discussion of human/animal relations in the gallery
space.
In a discussion ranging from early religious texts, herbaria, and natu-
ral history illustration to cabinets of curiosities, chapter 2, “A Natural
History Panopticon: Power, Representation, and Animal Objectification,”
further excavates the cultural and material conditions that enabled taxi-
dermy to emerge as the ultimate objectifying gesture operated by humans
upon animals during the Victorian period. The focus here shifts to the
discourses and epistemic strategies via which “the real” of nature is con-
structed through history. In this context, the spatializations of knowledge
and their material specificities are evidenced as defining actants in the
production of natural history realism as a substantially panoptic modali-
ties of observation. It is in this context that Mark Fairnington’s post–
natural history illustrations and Mark Dion’s critical cabinets of curiosi-
ties enable the outlining of the Foucauldian informed concept of the
“natural history panopticon.”
Chapter 3, “Dioramas: Power, Realism, and Decorum,” focusses on the
recent ontological turn in philosophy, its impact upon the appraisal of