34INTRODUCTIONthe world has led us to a state of alienation in which we constantly recoil
upon ourselves, incapable of connecting with other beings and environ-
ments beyond utilitarian values. This chapter is structured around five
key concepts from Foucault’s texts on art. These are quattrocento paint-
ing, the tableau-objet, resemblance, similitude, and the event.^63 “Onto-
logical mobility,” a key concept I theorize in this chapter, provides an
opportunity to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experi-
ence through art.^64 The taxidermy object is here connoted as an unstable
speculative tool questioning our modes of perceiving, constructing, and
consuming animals.
Chapter 5, “Following Materiality: From Medium to Surface—Medium
Specificity and Animal Visibility in the Modern Age,” is bookended by
Meret Oppenheim’s Object and Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram, some
of the very first works of art to employ the taxidermy medium with an
unprecedented critical awareness designed to destabilize the viewer’s an-
thropocentric standpoint. This chapter returns to the emergence of ani-
mal skin in the gallery space for the purpose of refining the concept of
speculative taxidermy as three-dimensional object. This intention leads
to a recovery of Cezanne’s multifocal perspective as a meaningful mani-
festation of the analytic of finitude.^65 As argued by Foucault, and thereaf-
ter by Akira Mizuta Lippit, the emergence of modern man as object of
knowledge and subject who knows, or enslaved sovereign and observed
spectator, proposes an epistemic circularity from which animals have
been excluded by the very processes that enable man to emerge as a finite
being.^66 Problematizing Berger’s and Lippit’s view that animals disap-
peared from everyday life and that they simultaneously reappeared in
the economies of visual media underwritten by capitalism,^67 the concept
of a “representational animal migration” reveals an important connection
between medium, materiality, realism, and representation in relation to
new economies of visuality. Upon this specific contingency characteriz-
ing the first half of the twentieth century, the surrealist object is recov-
ered as a revolutionary site in which, for the first time, animal skin appears
charged with a political potential that will become central to contempo-
rary, speculative taxidermy. Nicole Shukin’s conception of “rendering,”
Ron Broglio’s “flattening of animals,” and Johanna Malt’s “commodity
fetishism” in surrealism play key roles in the emergence of the political
proposal of taxidermy in art.^68