INTRODUCTION37controversial book The Reenchantment of Art laid the foundations of
many essential artistic/political concerns that have become central to
today’s scene. For instance, Gablik proposed to abandon the “modern
traditions of mechanism, positivism, empiricism, rationalism, material-
ism, secularism and scientism—the whole objectifying consciousness of
the Enlightenment.”^73
Cole Swanson’s Out of the Strong, Something Sweet (2016), the only ex-
ample discussed in this chapter, operates a series of ontological derail-
ments designed to map the intermingling of multispecies relationships
connected by mythical, transhistorical, and material ties. Central to this
installation are different notions of mimesis and indexicality, their im-
plicit ability to structure different registers of realism, and the material-
ity through which realist narratives are implicitly validated. Different and
seemingly unrelated techno-ecological economies are made to intersect
in Swanson’s installation through the very cunning notion of sacrifice: in
Lippit’s words, “a melancholic ritual, replete with sadism and ambiva-
lence, which repeats the origin of humanity.”^74 The underlying principle
of Out of the Strong, Something Sweet is in fact bougonia, an ancient rit-
ual, recounted by Virgil in the Georgics, involving the miraculous rebirth
of bees swarming from the rotting carcass of a calf.^75 With its poetic and
yet sharply symbolic sacrificial antidote to apocalyptic destruction, Out
of the Strong, Something Sweet situates itself at the heart of the current
anthropogenic crisis: in the face of ultimate life-threats, the means
through which propitiation might be secured entails the rather cunning
proposal of regenerating bees by sacrificing the cow—a plea for a sustain-
able human/animal/environmental coexistence.
The appendix of this book, “Some Notes Toward a Manifesto for Art-
ists Working With and About Taxidermy Animals,” is provided by art-
ists Mark Dion and Robert Marbury. Although this book does not aim to
promote the use of taxidermy in contemporary art, its content might
arouse interest in practitioners who intend to implement it in their work.
It therefore seemed appropriate to include a set of ethical guidelines writ-
ten by artists for artists in order to lay down some shared concerns.
I am aware that to some animal studies scholars and students this book
might, at first, appear ethically questionable: the suggestion that a criti-
cal contextualization of taxidermy might instill positive change in
human/animal relations may seem in itself an odd proposal. Yet, a few