70RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINSAt this point, the naming of things, as a title, encapsulates the complici-
ties and inescapably reductive processes involved in the frictions between
linguistic registers, materiality, and representation. The act of taxidermy
is here metaphorical as much as it is effective. The molding of the animal
skin over a man-made mannequin gestures toward our innate ability to
mold animals into linguistic forms we conceive as realistic. It points to
the assimilation of animals into human discourses, or the ways in which
we model them in realistic form to serve the purpose of our discourses and
practices. As a work of speculative taxidermy, the naming of things employs
taxidermy for the purpose of questioning taxidermy itself, its realistic am-
bition, and the linguistic dimension of representation that so much defines
human/animal relations. Its speculative dimension, however, is that which
moves beyond a simple rejection of realism to reveal the structure upon
which human/animal relations have thus far unfolded. Here, realism no
longer is an aesthetic standard to aspire to. It is a collection of modalities
through which embodied and mediated access strategies are constructed
in relation to specific geographies, materialities, and epistemologies.
The seal is reduced to a surface underneath which its animality has
been replaced by a modeled piece of foam. Its ultimate objectification is
inscribed in the malleability of its skin—a relative resistance that is ulti-
mately forced into shape: here the workings of language are exposed in a
visual metaphor. The project thus surfaces and problematizes the inter-
connected dynamics of naming and taming through different ontological
registers—the processual contingency intrinsic to humanist epistemol-
ogy that was originally performed by Adam and that equates to an affir-
mative act of dominance over creation.^85 In this context the medium of
taxidermy is made to emerge as a highly complex metaphorical crux—it
becomes the effective representation of the philosophical impossibility of
animal death. No longer simply the effigy of man’s subjugation of nature,
taxidermy is now the place where the recovery of the discourses, practices,
and power/knowledge relationships that have shaped human/animal
shared histories are mapped as the mechanism that governs them is
made visible. The viewer is thus compelled to piece these fragments to-
gether, to consider the paradoxes that shape human/animal relationships,
and to envision ways in which to reconfigure them.