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Taxidermy, once the province of natural history and dedicated to the pursuit of lifelike realism, has recently resurfaced in the world of contemporary art, culture, and interior design. In Speculative Taxidermy, Giovanni Aloi offers a comprehensive mapping of the discourses and practices that have enabled the emergence of taxidermy in contemporary art. Drawing on the speculative turn in philosophy and recovering past alternative histories of art and materiality from a biopolitical perspective, Aloi theorizes speculative taxidermy: a powerful interface that unlocks new ethical and political opportunities in human-animal relationships and speaks to how animal representation conveys the urgency of addressing climate change, capitalist exploitation, and mass extinction.
A resolutely nonanthropocentric take on the materiality of one of the most controversial mediums in art, this approach relentlessly questions past and present ideas of human separation from the animal kingdom. It situates taxidermy as a powerful interface between humans and animals, rooted in a shared ontological and physical vulnerability. Carefully considering a select number of key examples including the work of Nandipha Mntambo, Maria Papadimitriou, Mark Dion, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Roni Horn, Oleg Kulik, Steve Bishop, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, and Cole Swanson, Speculative Taxidermy contextualizes the resilient presence of animal skin in the gallery space as a productive opportunity to rethink ethical and political stances in human-animal relationships.
— Susan McHugh, author of Animal Stories and Dog
Speculative Taxidermy makes a fascinating contribution to the nonhuman turn and invites us to find new ways to envisage the relationships between human and nonhuman animals. It will be a significant text for ethical and political debates in animal studies and the environmental humanities.
— Hannah Stark, University of Tasmania
In Speculative Taxidermy, Aloi gives us a contact zone between humans and animality, art and the nonhuman. While there are a number of recent works on taxidermy, this is the book many of us have been waiting for—broad ranging, keen-eyed, insightful, and informed by animal studies as well as art history.
— Ron Broglio, Arizona State University
...a dynamic work with a strong narrative component.
— Ari Larissa Heinrich, University of California, San Diego
Giovanni Aloi makes an important contribution here to the non-human shift and invites us to renew the approach to inter-species relations. Speculative Taxidermy is a call to moderate our judgments and reflections and proposes a meticulous and in-depth examination as well of the history of the materialities as of the social history which could appear on and even "in" the skin of animals.
— Anne-Sophie Miclo
Taxidermy is a pretext to reflect on the sources of animal representation in contemporary culture and discourse of natural history, as well as to show the abovementioned relationships in the context of ecological, economic and environmental crises, and the uncertainties characterizing the "dark ecology" of the Anthropocene...an extremely valuable contribution to Ecocritical studies and the still developing field of animal studies.
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Carnal Immanence of Political Realism—Realism, Materiality, and Agency
Introduction: New Taxidermy Surfaces in Contemporary Art
1. Reconfiguring Animal Skins: Fragmented Histories and Manipulated Surfaces
2. A Natural History Panopticon: Power, Representation, and Animal Objectification
3. Dioramas: Power, Realism, and Decorum
4. The End of the Daydream: Taxidermy and Photography
5. Following Materiality: From Medium to Surface—Medium Specificity and Animal Visibility in the Modern Age
6. The Allure of the Veneer: Aesthetics of Speculative Taxidermy
7. This Is Not a Horse: Biopower and Animal Skins in the Anthropocene
Coda: Toward New Mythologies—the Ritual, the Sacrifice, the Interconnectedness
Appendix: Some Notes Toward a Manifesto for Artists Working with and About Taxidermy Animals, by Mark Dion and Robert Marbury
Notes
Bibliography
Index