THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER207back half of this piece is contained, a captured trophy or rug to bring
into the home, while the front continues to move. It is sad and the strug-
gle is evident.”^44 Some claim that the artists had in mind the uncontain-
able sprawl of human expansion, thus pointing toward the generalized
and relentlessly present dichotomies between nature and culture, do-
mesticated and wild, animal and object, that persistently still shape the
world we live in. Contemporary artworks are quintessential, polysemous
objects, and thus it is in the interlacing of multiple readings that these
objects might be able to, sometimes contradictorily, gesture toward pro-
ductivities involving human/animal relationships. The challenge posed
by the anthropogenic lens involves the task of mediating symbolism
and materiality so that the former does not obliterate the latter, thus
erasing the histories, discourses, and practices that are inscribed in the
animal skin.
The wolf is one of the oldest and most complex Native American totemic
symbols. Its relevance is inscribed into numerous stories that provide a
demarcation of the differences between the generally negative, shape-
shifting, symbol of twilight and othering European wolf, and a more
benevolent American counterpart that is essential in tribal and ceremo-
nial life. In this sense, a psychoanalytical reading of Inert would conceive
of the taxidermy wolf in the work as a European wolf, while the artist’s
intention seems to situate the animal directly within his own Native Ameri-
can cultural past. But it is in this very tension between geography, history,
and animal symbolism that Inert’s allure is magnified in a speculative
taxidermy sense. If we do not refuse the work of symbolism as relevant to
animal representation, it becomes possible to consider human/animal
relationships in which the symbolic and the material are indissolubly
bound—they are a part of the same object. So it is true, as Baker argues,
that “symbolism is inevitably anthropomorphic,” but it is also not always
true that it makes “sense of the animal by characterizing it in human
terms, and doing so from a safe distance.”^45 In many instances symbolism
actively shapes human actions toward animals; it influences their geo-
graphical situations, commodification values, probability of extinction,
and likelihood of survival. Wolves are central to the myth-making that
exceeds white colonial legends and its contribution to the shaping of
specific American identities in which Europeans and Native Americans
collided. For instance, in the seventeenth century, English colonialists