THIS IS NOT A HORSE243images in contemporary media-saturated societies should also be taken
into account.^70 The mode of inattentiveness in which images are gener-
ally consumed in our everyday lives constitutes a political problematiza-
tion of ethical value as the material world is relentlessly compressed in
immaterial file formats and exposed through flat screens inviting mate-
rial indifference.^71 How will this shift away from materiality in popular
culture affect human/animal relations and the aesthetics through which
these approaches appear in contemporary art?
The recursivity with which this “immaterial condition of consump-
tion” is informing media industries such as film and music results in a
collective practice producing an apparent sameness, ultimately justifying
the disinterestedness with which contemporary consumption is imbued.
The new, high-speed technologies of the early twentieth century, such as
film, radio, and telephone, those that Lippit linked to the disappearance
of animals in everyday life (and that emerged at the same time as the sur-
realist assemblage), have all today been absorbed and made hyper by
cyberspace.
It is within these practices and discourses producing increasingly
affirmative experiences characterized by absolute sovereignty, and in-
scribed in the disembodied experience proposed by the contemporary
technocapitalist conditions of consumption, that the appearance of animal
skin in contemporary art (along with numerous other strategies) provides
a material-based, charged problematizer—an alternative constructed register
of realism. It is also within this paradigmatic set that a more demarcated
human/animal studies context can enable the conception of the presence of
animal skin in contemporary art as a gesture of resistance, rather than a
simple sign of human domination over animals.
As proposed by Broglio, animal skin constitutes an entity of “contact
and resistance,”^72 even and most importantly when the animal is no lon-
ger alive and therefore can no longer physically resist. There is a shock of
physicality at play, Broglio claims, in the encounter with animal surfaces
that “enlivens the surface of the animal body as something other than an
object enframed by human desire.”^73