38INTRODUCTIONimportant considerations should be drawn here. The artists discussed in
this book do not kill animals in order to make taxidermy. They either
appropriate or repurpose vintage objects or garments, or they closely
work with veterinary institutions involved in the unavoidable and moni-
tored euthanization of pets and farm animals. Some might disagree with
these approaches too, but I argue that this level of ethicality already con-
stitutes an important stance in art making. In this book I have deliber-
ately refused to align my own views with those generally held by many
animal rights and vegan scholars, for these are most regularly structured
around ethical paradigms predominantly relying on visuality. More pre-
cisely, as I have extensively argued in my 2015 stand-alone editorial for
Antennae titled “Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room,” the
discursive registers of animal rights and veganism tend to rely on a logic
of witnessing that is intrinsically humanist and simultaneously anachro-
nistic. In that editorial I argued that this logic has proposed a range of
productive opportunities in contemporary art, but that it has also lim-
ited discourse to a serious degree, especially at a time when the relation-
ship between biopolitics and materiality is becoming more urgent. So
this is not to say that animal rights and vegan ethics are inherently
flawed, but my invitation to reconsider some aspects of the visuality
upon which their agendas rely should be understood as an acknowledg-
ment that times and perspectives do change and that frameworks need
to be updated accordingly in order to retain relevance in contemporary
discourses.^76
Contemporary art involving taxidermy is usually rejected outright in
many animal studies circles on the grounds that an animal skin repre-
sents an undeniable gesture of animal objectification and human suprem-
acy over animals. This argument is extremely simplistic, it is not in line
with discourses of materialities in contemporary art, and it effectively
hinders any academically valuable exchange on the subject. I regularly
remind those who complain at the sight of taxidermy in a gallery space
that animal products are always in the mix of the materials used for the
making of all classical, the majority of modern, and a large number of
contemporary works of art. Animals have been rendered invisible, but
they are undeniably present in brushes, paints, and varnishes: mollusks,
fish, eggs, rabbits, horses, boars, hogs, oxen, squirrels, goats, and badgers