DIORAMAS109art points directly to this tie between language and realistic representa-
tion, thereby questioning the indexical nature of what is being seen as
veritable truth. Truth essentially is correspondence in a triangulation
between representation, thought, and the material world—in this rela-
tionship, representation functions as a constructed interface. Robin
MacKay, Luke Pendrell, and James Trafford, authors of Speculative Aes-
thetics, have identified the emergence of this awareness as a condition in
which “contemporary art vigilantly exposes its own compromises with the
aesthetic, in an ongoing admission of failure and culpability.”^5 As seen in
the previous chapters, the works of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Mark Fairn-
ington, and Mark Dion leverage exactly this paradigm. In parallel with
certain tendencies of speculative realism, their work directly aims to derail
the power structure of language inscribed in the visual register by recon-
figuring, overriding, reconnecting, and collating fragments of realistic
constructions. In their work, at the bottom line, the naturalization of real-
ism is revealed as our construction, not an immutable given. The aim is
neither to produce an unmediated image nor to accomplish the elusive
representational departure of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming animal,
which ultimately abstracts animals. These artists are directly concerned
with the materiality of living/dead animals. Their manipulation of ma-
teriality equates to the manipulation of language and knowledge. It en-
ables the identification and therefore the alteration of power relations and
dynamics. In their work, a precise dimension of ethicality emerges. These
artists keep animals at the forefront of their research—they cannot afford
to lose themselves in an aesthetic poetics in which the material presence of
the animal dissolves into pure symbol. Their aim is to ontologically reposi-
tion our perceptions of our relationships with animals through new regis-
ters of realism. They critically assess the ways in which images work and
have worked as mediators of the real and simultaneously contribute to the
production of a new realism in our perceptions of animals and what we call
nature. This new realism emerges from the deconstruction of traditional,
anthropocentric iconographies, and it is one in which power is diffracted
and networked. At this stage it is important to acknowledge that the aesthetic
rhetoric of natural history firmly stands in the way of new and different con-
ceptions of animality and nature, and that identifying, understanding,
and subverting the power/knowledge relationships that crystallized this
rhetoric is what contemporary art can most aptly accomplish.