Speculative Taxidermy

64RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS

process enables a fragmentation of the object/subject dichotomy, thus
outlining the role of actants in the production of material bodies that are
always, at different points, reified. Taxidermy mounts thus appear as sites
in which, as Donna Haraway would have it, concatenations between ac-
tants are inscribed.^79 But whereas the productivities of this approach are
more readily obvious in historical and ethnographic contexts, how can
this approach be incorporated in the discussion of contemporary art? In
the next chapters, it will become evident that the recovery of cultural
afterlives, the consideration of taxidermy objects as commodities serving
as a material interface for human/animal relationships shaped by prac-
tices and discourses and enabling the recovery of sometimes invisible
connections between power and knowledge, plays essential roles in contem-
porary art. Works of speculative taxidermy tend to encompass multiple
discourses and practices involving human/animal relationships. They in-
state themselves as problematization-surfaces of these very relationships
by disconnecting naturalized discourses and thus highlighting the para-
doxes and contradictions embedded in human/animal relationships.
Most speculative taxidermy usually operates in a transhistorical di-
mension in which multiple naturecultures are conflated, collapsed, or
made to overlap with the intent of gesturing toward possible and differ-
ent futures. As will transpire, the past of human/animal relationships is
just as important as present relationships: animal objectification has
taken place over millennia, and understanding the power dynamics that
govern it is essential to future change. In this sense, most works of specu-
lative taxidermy entail a moment of reconsideration in the viewer—the
access to a new level of awareness, or an ability to reconsider what we
thought we already knew. In this context, the deliberate inclusion of taxi-
dermy skins within the semantic structure of a work of art is capable of
producing an alluring charge that heightens the ontological instability
performed by the animal skin itself. This ontological instability inscribes
productive potentialities through a deliberate questioning of realism,
the ways in which we construct realism, and the effects on life and eco-
systems that our conceptions of realism bare. As a material typically
produced by the discourses and practice of anthropology and natural
history, the animal skin in the gallery space thus acquires a polysemic
valence that in its ambiguity nonetheless maintains ties with the disci-
plines that originally produced it. In other words, speculative taxidermy