FOLLOWING MATERIALITY175patriarchal epistemic structures. Taking the materiality of works of art
seriously can therefore challenge the intrinsic anthropocentrism embed-
ded in our relationship to objects, leading to the recovery of networks and
agential relationships inscribing a political agenda, as seen through the
work of Jane Bennett or Karen Barad. In the Anthropocene, materials no
longer are inert conduits for meaning, and as anthropologist Tim Ingold
argues, they are substances-in-becoming: their qualities are histories that
invite us to follow and retrieve agential engagements between human and
nonhuman networks.^38
In this context, rendering becomes the starting point for the configuring
of a human/animal studies–influenced and Foucauldian-informed theory
of resilient materiality as central to this book. This materiality is burdened
by an undeniable indexicality; it is charged with a specific type of allure,
relentlessly gesturing toward human/animal power/knowledge relation-
ships culminating in animal deaths. But to follow this line of thought, it
will be necessary to return to the early modern period as shaped by the ana-
lytics of finitude, Cézanne’s experimentation with still-life paintings, the
increased popularization of photography, and the emergence of film.
Reconsidering the materiality of surfaces in early modern art inevitably
leads to Braque’s and Picasso’s experimentation with the last stage of cub-
ism, known as synthetic.^39 In those works, the artists furthered Cézanne’s
analytical work and implemented so-called primitivist aesthetics, thus
radically challenging the boundaries of painting’s classical conception of
technical materiality. They therefore juxtaposed nonartistic surface tex-
tures as deliberate, nonaffirmative, formal elements upon the canvas.^40
Braque’s and Picasso’s derailment of classical affirmation was exclusively
operated through the insertion of man-made, mechanically produced
materials in the painterly plane (fig. 5.4). In this aesthetic challenge, the
basic relations among art materials, surfaces, sign, and discourses, were
willingly misplaced, proposing an ontological collapse between the repre-
sentational plane of painting and the outside world that it used to straight-
forwardly represent.^41 In this sense, we can understand cubist collage as
opening a path, not to modernism at its most arid, but to the recontextu-
alizing strategies of postmodernism.^42
The ontological reconfiguration played out by the juxtaposition of
material surfaces in cubism was further problematized at the beginning
of the twentieth century by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and the