Speculative Taxidermy

FOLLOWING MATERIALITY177

ject further problematized the economy of materiality and surfaces initi-
ated by cubism. Duchamp’s interest in the aesthetics of industrialized
functionalism proposed by the readymade was suggested to the artist by
a visit to the Salon de la Locomotion in 1912, where he is reported to
have said, “Painting’s washed up. Who’ll do anything better than that
propeller?”^45 Similarly to Henry Ford’s experience of the mechanization
of Chicago’s meat-packing district, the direct experience of the new aes-
thetics of mechanical objects informed Duchamp’s radical line of ques-
tioning introduced by the readymade objects.
At this point, implementing Ron Broglio’s proposal for a heightened
attention to surfaces in art to Shukin’s sensitivity for animal-materiality
in dealings of animal capital will provide a sound base to outline a mod-
ern genealogy of speculative taxidermy. As seen in chapter 2, the main
premise of Broglio’s book Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and
Art lies in taking animal, human, and artistic surfaces seriously.^46 The
totalization of the anthropocentrism of humanism through the positiv-
istic violence of the Enlightenment reduced animals to beings “living on
the surface.”^47 In opposition to the cogitant/spiritual depth of man, accord-
ing to Cartesian conceptions, animals cannot engage in critical reflection
and therefore lack the depth required by self-reflexivity.^48 This reductive
view condoned animal objectification, enabling cruelty against them.^49 In
the light of this, Broglio proposes to reconsider our relationship with radi-
cal otherness, instrumentally adopting the metaphorical and literal flat-
ness of animal and artistic surfaces as productive epistemological inter-
faces through which the reconfiguration of human/animal relations can
be operated. Art “has a particular investment with surfaces that is useful
in unhinging philosophical concepts and moving them in new directions,”
according to Broglio.^50 This proposition is worth further exploration.

MATERIALITY, TECHNOCAPITALIST ECONOMIES

OF VISIBILITY, AND THE SURREALIST OBJECT

Despite the art historical conventions that emphasize the demise of figu-
ration (largely caused by the omnipresence of photography) and the rise
of abstraction, one of the most important and yet neglected turning