Speculative Taxidermy

FOLLOWING MATERIALITY173

through the display of animal skin as the preponderant signifying sur-
face element.^28 Rather importantly, in Shukin’s view, “rendering expands
the sense of mimesis beyond its canonical associations with realist ren-
dition.”^29 As will be seen, the representational animal migration from
painting to photography and celluloid therefore poses a set of pressing
ethical questions related to representation, sovereignty, and image pro-
duction/consumption in the modern age that is directly linked to today’s
practices in contemporary art.

ANIMALS AND ART: TAKING THE MATERIALITY

OF SURFACES SERIOUSLY

The indissoluble synergy of the representational and the material proposes
an ethical problematization of indexicality. Speculative taxidermy flaunts
its materiality as an irreducible trace of discourses, practices, and, most
importantly, past human/animal interactions. The agency of the artwork
equally rests on its materiality and on its ability to mobilize discourses
and practices through cultural allusions. The representational project of
classical art has historically been distinguished by a basic, one-directional
dynamic of transubstantiation in which the diverse materiality of the
three-dimensional world was rendered through a process of reduction into
one material. The Platonic conception of art as mimesis intrinsically im-
plied a process of mediatic transference. Thereafter, the power/knowledge
relationships that shaped artistic practices in the western world (until
Duchamp) assessed materials such as bronze, marble, tempera, watercolor,
and oil paint as preponderant vehicles for this task. By necessity, the Platonic
and Aristotelian “condition of art” was implicitly supported by this very
univocal process.^30 Therefore, an object that “imitates” another is an art-
work, and furthermore the imitation in question must be rendered through
a medium extraneous to that of the object it resembles. Of course, this
conception of art has been vastly bypassed by modern and postmodern
approaches, but new questions about the importance of materiality in works
of art have recently been emerging in the study of contemporary practices.
Especially in this sense, in its critical relation to animal materiality, specula-
tive taxidermy surpasses postmodern aesthetics to inscribe ethical questions