Article ID: CBB001550676

Present Signs, Dead Things: Indexical Authenticity and Taxidermy's Nonabsent Anima (2015)

unapi

Contemporary art's recent turn to taxidermy as a sculptural medium aims both to unsettle earlier traditions of realist taxidermy and to allow new explorations of the troubling authenticity derived from the recycling of animal bodies. Developing an analogy between the preserved and mounted animal skin and Roland Barthes's realist account of the photograph as an emanation of the referent, this essay turns from art to literature to introduce a third, mediating term, dermography, in response to the insistent presence of skin in the questions raised by the new taxidermy. The authors propose the ontological category of the nonabsent animal as an aid to understanding a temporally defined punctum associated with an authenticity grounded in the index.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001550676/

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Authors & Contributors
Animal Studies Group
Brück, H. A.
Brück, M. T.
Cohen, Sarah R.
Constantino, María Eugenia
Hilderbrand, Lucas
Journals
Nuncius: Annali di Storia della Scienza
Archives of Natural History
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Leonardo
Science as Culture
Publishers
Routledge
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Berg
Hilger
NewSouth Books
University of Illinois Press
Concepts
Animals in art
Preservation, tissue
Human-animal relationships
Photography
Taxidermy
Natural history
People
Barthes, Roland
Calvino, Italo
Foucault, Michel
Home, Everard
Latour, Bruno
Marini, Efisio
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, late
18th century
20th century
21st century
16th century
Places
Australia
Denmark
Italy
Spain
Netherlands
United States
Institutions
Australian Museum
International Biological Program
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