ABSTRACT
Empathy with animals and Earth perhaps, like art, provides a glimpse into the unknown. By being with the dead and frozen animals in the taxidermy and photographic examples discussed to see differently, becoming aware of human dominance in looking and attitudes toward animals, and opening being-toward death. This chapter explores these ideas, where baroque perspectives are ancillary to baroque reason and exemplary of the depth of experience described as flesh by Merleau-Ponty. Dumas' photograph Yellow shows a dog in a New York animal shelter. The photograph reveals human entanglement with her life, and Yellow's disenfranchisement. Domesticated with humans, this pit bull is slightly different than Taza, the wolf Dumas photographed in a Norwegian sanctuary. Dumas' animal portraits in the aptly-titled Paradis are of dogs, wolves, tigers, and horses in captivity. Dumas' photographs and the taxidermied sculptures are contemporaryvanitas. In the seventeenth-century vanitas, as now, this included excessive consumption and the tautology of positivism and rational description.
