36INTRODUCTIONthat the readymade-informed artworks of the neo-avant-garde equally
incorporated aesthetic strategies borne of the Dadaist and surrealist read-
ymade for the purpose of surpassing aesthetic disinterest. In this ma-
neuver lies a deliberate will to politically engage with the material world
beyond the transcendentalism of modernist aesthetics. According to An-
dre Breton, the surrealist object had expressly emerged for the purpose
of “challenging indifference through a poetic consciousness of ob-
jects.”^70 The first half of this chapter therefore follows this line of argu-
ment, advancing the idea that to engage in an aesthetic experience that
presupposes a consistent and sustained disinterest for the object’s physical
existence is simply impossible within a framework informed by animal
studies when animal skin or animal matter is deliberately implemented
within the economies of visibility of the art object.
Thereafter, the Foucauldian conception of dispositif leads a biopoliti-
cally oriented analysis of It’s Hard to Make a Stand by Steve Bishop, a
piece of speculative taxidermy strongly inspired by surrealist sensitivities
to materialities and by the work of the neo-avant-gardes. Simultaneously
a monument and a ruin, Bishop’s assemblage is configured as a Foucaul-
dian heterotopia—a spatialization characterized by an existence in a re-
ality demarcated by an ontologically unstable heterogeneity.^71 At this
point, Foucault’s anatomo-politics of the human body, technologies of the
self, conceptions of docile bodies and relationships of domination, and
governmentality enable the recovery of intertwining transhistorical,
transspecies, human/animal sets of power/knowledge relationships of the
type inscribed in domestication, domination, and consumption.^72 The al-
lure of It’s Hard to Make a Stand poses important questions: Where does
domestication begin and domination end? How much do these rela-
tionships of power overlap and where do they differ in order to remain
relatively ontologically distinct from one another, so as to be differently
named? And most importantly, what are the implications involved in
the intrinsic impossibility of clearly distinguishing the underlying dis-
courses that perpetrate these types of relationships?
In “Coda: Toward New Mythologies—the Ritual, the Sacrifice, the In-
terconnectedness,” the themes explored in this book are considered in the
light of the potentialities entailed in participatory installation art that in-
volves animal materiality. In the early nineties, the first signs of discon-
tent with the cynicism of postmodernism began to appear. Suzi Gablik’s