INTRODUCTION25fixed, constant qualities—objects that can be easily categorized in taxon-
omies of stereotypical genres.
Although transcending the aesthetic concerns of botched taxidermy, to
some extent, speculative taxidermy can still be understood as a “strange
being encountered and experienced, rather than rendered familiar through
interpretation.” But, as will be seen, speculative taxidermy does not involve
an aesthetic wrongness, and it is not defined by its “holding together.”^42
These essentially were postmodernist values that are no longer preponder-
ant in contemporary art. Most specifically, at times, the essence of botched
taxidermy was haunting; at others, it was formally elusive. In both cases,
the animal presence was, as expressed by Baker, “dumb”—a victim of ge-
neric human wrongdoings emerging from a traumatic past, unable to rest.
As will be seen, speculative taxidermy is anything but dumb. Works of
speculative taxidermy inscribe discourses and practices rendering the
preserved animal skin into a charged interface tracing actual human/
animal agential relationships: naturecultures. Boundaries between human
and nonhuman are thus questioned through the consideration of a host of
material/discursive forces constituting processes of materialization.^43 And,
most importantly, speculative taxidermy does not present itself as an ob-
stacle to meaning, like botched taxidermy did; rather, it provides tools to
think with.
Most specifically, my theorization of speculative taxidermy bypasses
the use of the terms botched and wrongness because of their intrinsic
normative roots: the ways in which these terms somewhat imply that re-
alism bears a model of (negative) rightness, and the intrinsic comparative/
pejorative relativity that they imply. Speculative taxidermy is not con-
cerned with notions of aesthetic wrongness, holding to form, or open-form,
or messiness, but with interconnectedness, intra-action, materiality, and
indexicality. It is concerned with the questions raised by the actual ma-
nipulation of animal skins (manual as well as mediatic) and the biopoliti-
cal registers inscribed in such operations; the discourses and practices
that reciprocally shape humans, animals, and environments; the recovery
of historical pasts of human/animal intra-actions that have sedimented
in discourses and practices defining assemblages of political, geographi-
cal, and historical entanglements; and the possibility to envision alter-
native futures in the evidence of the ethical challenges that speculative
taxidermy enables us to identify.^44