Keynote
Speculative Taxidermy: Indexicality, Vulnerability, and Representation
Giovanni Aloi, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Speculative taxidermy is a resolutely non-anthropocentric take on the materiality of one of the most controversial media in contemporary art. It challenges the conception of panoptic power, which characterizes natural history taxidermy and dioramas, to pose pressing questions about human-animal liminalities and coevolutions.
In opposition to naturalistic taxidermy, in which the hand of the craftsman must conceal its work, speculative taxidermy flaunts the manipulated essence of preserved animal skins as an indelible material-trace of shared pasts and problematic presents. Through its emphasis on materiality, speculative taxidermy reveals the ineluctability of physical and ontological vulnerabilities shared by humans and animals alike.
Harnessed by the urgency inscribed in its indexicality, the remodeled animal skin in contemporary art can enable the recovery of cultural inscriptions—stratifications of indissoluble human-animal histories interlacing racial and gender politics, capitalist exploitation, and mass extinction. In the hands of contemporary artists, this non-realistic manipulation can reveal chains of human-animal vulnerability normally concealed by the naturalization of common practices like domestication. It is in this context that speculative taxidermy offers the opportunity to contemplate the possibility of more ethically, politically, and ecologically sustainable futures.
In this talk, Giovanni Aloi explores these themes through Cole Swanson’s installation Out of the Strong, Something Sweet and the anthropomorphically remodeled cowhides of Nandipha Mntambo.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in environmental subjects and the representation of nature in art. He has published with Columbia University Press, Phaidon, Laurence King, Brill, and Prestel and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota series “Art after Nature.” Since 2006, Aloi has been the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. He is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? – The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), and Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019). He has contributed to BBC radio programs and is a regular public speaker at the Art Institute of Chicago and is USA Art Correspondent of Esse Magazine. Aloi currently lectures on modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York.
