INTRODUCTION35In chapter 6, “The Allure of the Veneer: Aesthetics of Speculative
Taxidermy,” four works of art enable a comprehensive mapping of differ-
ent strategies employed by speculative taxidermy in contemporary art:
Maria Papadimitriou’s installation Agrimiká: Why Look at Animals?
(2015), Inert (2009) by Nicholas Galanin, Nandipha Mntambo’s Mirror
Image (2013), and Berlinde De Bruyckere’s K36 (The Black Horse) (2003).
These pieces are problematized from the perspectives of object-oriented
ontology, vibrant materialism, and agential realism. Agrimiká: Why
Look at Animals? offers the opportunity to consider the productivities
and challenges involved in nonathropocentric perspectives grounded in
flat ontology. The juxtaposition of everyday objects and taxidermy skins
in Agrimiká questions our bioethical stance in relation to an ever-present
sovereignty of the gaze in human/animal relations. Nicholas Galanin’s
Inert further problematizes the relationship between realism and ab-
straction through a focus on the linguistic aspects of realistic representa-
tion. In this instance, speculative taxidermy functions as a site in which
naturalized discourses and practices are deliberately disconnected and
reconfigured in ways that enable ethical reconsiderations of human/
animal relations. This process, in the hands of Nandipha Mntambo and
Berlinde De Bruyckere, enables the recovery of embodiments of the
physical vulnerability that we share with animals. Mntambo’s work es-
pecially alludes to the transhistorical, metaphorical, and economic
overlap between woman and animal through notions of exploitation and
domestication, while De Bruyckere’s reworked horsehides construct an
original iconography of human/animal vulnerability in which specific
material manipulations gesture toward the naturalized systems of op-
pression and co-becomings that have substantially shaped human/animal
relations in the Anthropocene.
Chapter 7, “This Is Not a Horse: Biopower and Animal Skins in the
Anthropocene,” focuses on the influence of the Duchampian readymade
through the second postwar period as a new contestation of bourgeois
principles and values, highlighting how this paradigm informs the emer-
gence of speculative taxidermy.^69 Neo-Dada’s anticonformist spirit drove
artists to incorporate new materialities in contemporary art, reproposing
the readymade paradigm through a problematization of Duchamp’s no-
tion of “aesthetic disinterest”—a preponderant attitude toward the object
designed to refine the task of aesthetic analysis. In this chapter I argue