Speculative Taxidermy

INTRODUCTION39

have been for centuries, and still are, imbedded into works of art in one
form or another. These animal deaths, like the visible ones that attract
much attention in contemporary art, cannot be ignored, especially as a
renewed attention to materiality is becoming more and more prominent
in different scholarly disciplines. It is in this sense that this book takes on
the challenge of meaningfully and openly considering the presence of
taxidermy in contemporary art outside the strictures of these parameters
of judgment.

FOUCAULT, ART, AND ANIMALS

Six aspects of Foucault’s thinking have motivated my interest in his work
in relation to taxidermy in contemporary art. These aspects are the rejec-
tion of generalizations and universal normative judgment, the focus on
specific contexts and localities, the ability to recover pasts for the purpose
of critically constructing the present, the intent of discovering parallel-
isms between seemingly unrelated practices and discourses, the interest
in power relations, and the tendency to focus on the marginalized.^77 As
will be seen in the next chapters, of essential importance to this book is
Foucault’s interest in discontinuities and contradictions in historiog-
raphy. Through a substantial process of defamiliarization, this approach
proposes many opportunities for rethinking order and naturalized rela-
tionships of power.^78 One of Foucault’s merits lies in his ability to uproot
the concept of power from its Freudian/Marxist conception as a mode of
oppression, enabling instead the identification of a diffused, pervasive,
formative, and networked system of power relations: biopolitics. The bio-
political register this book is concerned with and unfolds on the repre-
sentational stratification of human/animal relations situated on the surface
of works of art. The focus is therefore not so much on governmentality or
on situating the rights of animals. Although such concerns are interest-
ing and pertinent, the biopolitical register central to this book is not con-
cerned with the discrepancies among our treatment of different species,
but instead focuses on the implicit “biopower of becoming with” that taxi-
dermy in contemporary art can inscribe. In this sense, the emergence of