PROLOGUE11The materiality of objects in contemporary art, including taxidermy,
should therefore not be understood as a site of truth of a higher kind but
as a heightened register of realism that garners its semantic strength from
the sociopolitical implications that have produced it. From this vantage
point, realism acquires a carnality capable of inscribing past livingness,
or vibrancy, that momentarily derails subject-forming linguistic struc-
tures—Whistler’s reported inability to utter meaningful words in front
of Little Dancer exemplifies this. So how does Degas’s Little Dancer Aged
Fourteen relate to what I call speculative taxidermy in contemporary art?
There is something about the making visible, the mistrust for classical
realism, the desire to make viewers uncomfortable, the investment in
indexicality, the inclusion of organic matter, the embedded challenge
posed to naturalized power relations, and the ability to unravel complex
interlinks between humans, animals, social realities, discourses, and
practices outlined in this prologue that will turn out to be essential to the
aesthetic strategies and semantic capabilities of speculative taxidermy.