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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Authors & Contributors
Strekopytov, S.
Licata, Marta
Rossetti, Chiara
Fusco, Roberta
J. Jesse Ramirez
Gorini, Ilaria
Concepts
Animals in art
Taxidermy
Preservation, tissue
Animals
Photography
Human-animal relationships
Time Periods
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
18th century
17th century
Places
United States
Netherlands
Italy
Australia
Institutions
Australian Museum
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