72A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONepistemic strategies as the quintessential discipline through which
“the real-register of nature” was constructed. Better grasping the artistic,
scientific, philosophical, and technical processes and discourses that led
to the golden age of taxidermy will contribute to a clearer understanding
of the emergence of speculative taxidermy in contemporary art.
For this purpose, this chapter is bookended by Mark Fairnington’s
paintings (plate 2) and Mark Dion’s cabinets of curiosities (plate 3). Their
work incorporates, or indexically inscribes, taxidermy, raising a range of
aesthetic preoccupations relevant to the current interest in speculative
aesthetics. In a number of ways, the work of these artists is concerned
with nonhuman actants, the registers of interconnectedness that the
taxonomical systems of natural history deny, and the desire to chal-
lenge the relation to philosophical affirmation that asserts that cogni-
tion ultimately grasps a real that is not constructed. Thus the specula-
tive aesthetics employed by Fairnington and Dion provide opportunities
to appraise the ways in which the experience of nature has been con-
structed in the past and how experience might be deconstructed and
reconfigured in the present through a careful and critical manipula-
tion of medium-specific idioms and their defining materialities. These
speculative aesthetics bear a political force and can be seen to influence
the processes of subjectivation, which the agency of the image is capa-
ble of. As will become more apparent in chapter 4, speculative taxi-
dermy gains traction upon the formulation of ever-new speculative
aesthetics that constantly defy past notions of anthropocentric realism.
For this reason, this chapter takes a few steps back to recover the past
aesthetic approaches that defined a transhistorical process of animal
objectification. Victorian taxidermy emerged from these discourses and
practices.
Mark Fairnington’s practice has been characterized by a critical stance
designed to challenge and problematize ontology and representation of
the nonhuman. Many of his best known works are concerned with taxi-
dermy and the space between seeing and saying from which naturalistic
representation emerges. As the artist states:
One focus of my research is the line that can be traced between observed
fact and speculated fiction. Within the natural sciences these fictions, in