Animal Remains

Membrana, 2019

The notion of being human revolves around our perception of what it means to be an animal or beast -and this relationship is constructed through the medium of photography (among other media). Photographs of animals always held a significant presence throughout the history of the medium, a testimony of particular fascination and desire to either decode or ascribe meaning to the non-human. The sheer number and diversity of photographic representations of animals (and non-photographic pictorial tradition of representing imaginary beasts) testifies of co-dependency of the relationship. Whether used as commodities for exchange, marketing tools for commodification, tools of scientific research or tokens of domestic familiarity, silent trophies from exotic places or city zoos, the images speak of a certain process of domestication of both a sign and a referent. Nowadays there seems to be a shift from the old photo-humanistic belongingness of The Family of Man to the growing disillusionment of Anthropocene. A certain demand for a new kind of responsibility, a new kind of belonging arises -not only trans-cultural but also trans-species.

2010

This essay will ethnographically explore some social, material and visual dimensions of contemporary art praxis, focusing on its conjuncture with ‘the animal question’ and other animals’ bodies1. It will demonstrate that an anthropological approach to art, as defined by Gell (1998; 1999), is invaluable in beginning to trace some of the multilayered ethnographic pathways that constitute the ‘art-objects’ and/or ‘art-events’ that are at the centre of today’s complex ‘art-world’ scenes. In exploring these issues it will address such questions as: what is the place of nonhuman animals in contemporary art? Does the presence of the animal body in contemporary art imply the address of ‘the animal question’? Is it socially acceptable to inflict pain or cause the death of other animals ‘for the sake of art’? Throughout this paper it will be demonstrated and argued that using Gell’s idea of the art “nexus” (1998: 12 et al.) for ethnographic research is invaluable to engage critically with the at times obscure, murky and dazzling worlds of the ‘postmodern’ art scenes. It will also, towards the end of the text, and perhaps as a playful alternative to Vogel’s net and Gell’s traps as artworks, present the work of Angela Singer as what art might look like if it were produced by (some) anthropologists.

Configurations, vol. 27, no. 2, 2019

Interventions: International Journal of Post-colonial studies, 2018

Postcolonialism, much like Graham Harman’s well-wrought hammer, does not exist because it can be used, it can be used because it exists. The well-wrought hammer of postcolonialism is worked upon on selected contemporaneous but disparate narratives, Vicki Constantine Croke’s Elephant Company (2014) and Tania James’ The Tusk that did the Damage (2015), to crack them open for an assessment of the extent to which as-yet invisible but already-present traces of former imperialism remain embedded in the texts. Neither the non-human animal nor the human beings in the narratives are a monolithic block. Each group, whether animal or human, establishes a distinct relationality with the others. When the entire ensemble is gridded in Cary Wolfe’s species matrix, latent, implicit, power relations become visible.

Unpublished web article, 2006

When is it that an animal becomes an object? In the case of a taxidermy mount, is it when the animal is set in a rifle sight, or at the moment of death? When it is mounted, or added to a collection? Or perhaps when it is put on public display? The taxidermy specimen differs from certain orders of museum object in that it was once animate. Like almost all museum contents, it is possible to chart its object biography and to talk of its after-life (Kopytoff 1986). This paper considers the afterlife of one particular taxidermy mount: the Leiden Blue Antelope. By exemplifying recent research charting the complex object histories of the blue antelope, theories of the animal as object and the distributed agency of museum objects are scrutinised, and an argument is made for a ‘geobiographical’ approach to museum curation, where wider stories of collection, practice and display are told through the mount. A spatial study of taxidermy specimens would consider the mechanics enabling dead animals to be trafficked across different sites and states. Movement from the field to the workshop to the museum (and from life to death and back again) required differently placed people and their skills in various sorts of operation and arrangement. The work undertaken here is part of a larger collaboration, enlisting an artist-in-residence, geographers and a museum curator in efforts to re-map, re-label and re-present the blue antelope and its museological remains. Such a project introduces diverse possibilities to re-frame and re-tell taxidermy collections – and all museum collections for that matter - where the status of object may not contain all that the animal still has to offer.

Free extract from my latest book! 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

Southern Cross University Law Review, 2011

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault observed that liberal humanism was 'sovereign and untroubled'. The sovereign subject is one that 'runs in empty sameness throughout the course of history'. As an attempt to problematise this assertion, this paper has emerged as an artifact of a troubled journey and a 'journey of trouble'. As both a voyage of discovery and a nomadic wandering through error, the traveller's passage through the sovereign terrain of humanism has been beset with detours, digressions and dead-ends. As she traversed territories and excavated strata, the traveller encountered opportunities and obstacles, all of which gave rise to unanticipated lines of flight upon a rhizomatic landscape. The traveller took comfort in the notion of rhizome, a concept used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in connection with theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. The m...

An artist and a geographer asked the same question: what is a zoological specimen and how can it be used? Considerable attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass – in other words to their representation. We challenge the priority given to representation by getting under the skin and behind-the-scenes to show how specimens have been entangled ‘in life’ as well as how we have creatively taken part in their ‘afterlives’. These efforts are aligned with work in cultural geography seeking to counteract ‘deadening effects’ in an active world (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000), and stay alive to the ‘more-than-representational’ aspects of life (Lorimer 2005). The paper documents two of our experimental attempts to revive and repair zoological specimens and collections, work which was underlain by observations of taxidermy practice. First we show how the creation of a ‘webarchive’ offered an expanded repertoire of interpretation and engagement for an extremely rare zoological specimen. Secondly, we show how a temporary exhibition in a zoology museum highlighted the transformative potential of crossdisciplinary efforts to re-present zoological material.

2019

Journal of the History of Biology, 2019