INTRODUCTION33images, their ability to index a “real” that transcends the limitations of
language, and their relationship to power frameworks. Therefore, this
chapter traces a genealogy of the notion of realism in art and natural his-
tory, thus problematizing the lifelike aesthetics of taxidermy and diora-
mas. The simultaneous emergence of photography and taxidermy as
epistemic tools of natural history and science is in this context problem-
atized by the discursive and technical parallelisms that led taxidermy
to transcend the ethical-epistemic, mechanical objectivity of scientific
epistemology in the nineteenth century.^61 Thereby, notions of stillness,
decorum, and ideology become central to a revisitation of Donna Haraway’s
positioning of taxidermy as a sedimentation of patriarchal discourses of
imperialist conquest and subjugation. This chapter is bookended by Mark
Dion’s anti-diorama Landfill (1999) and Oleg Kulik’s New Paradise Series
(2000–2001). In different ways, both artists engage with forms of specu-
lative aesthetics designed to address anthropogenic moments of crisis in
relation to classical registers of realism.
Chapter 4, “Tableau-objet, or the End of the Daydream: Taxidermy
and Photography,” notes that through the eighteenth century, natural his-
tory was a practice concerned with the meticulous examining, transcrib-
ing, and cataloging of animal and plant surfaces through a process of
synthetic purification.^62 During the nineteenth century, taxidermy and
photography furthered this specific epistemological project through a new
kind of absolute visibility of animals, and by simultaneously enabling the
emergence of an unprecedented cultural construction of nature. Return-
ing to the modern period as a pivotal moment in the molding of con-
temporary human/animal relations, this chapter further problematizes
the realism of lifelike taxidermy through the aesthetics of camera hunting.
The photographic diptych Dead Owl, by Roni Horn, and her Bird series,
are identified as works of art in which the inherent objectifying and pas-
sifying paradigms typical of camera hunting are subverted by the artist’s
treatment of the animal body through a reconfiguration of the medium’s
idiom. Horn’s images challenge the affirmative, anthropocentric rela-
tion between viewer and animal representation, proposing opportunities
to rethink our relationship with nonhuman beings through representa-
tion itself. This approach, I argue, is symptomatic of a cultural crisis—one
that is unavoidably underpinned by a sense of guilt and anxiety regard-
ing our relationship with the planet. Our anthropocentric conception of