| Summary: | Taxidermy is an old craft that requires a confrontation and even intimacy with dead animals; it is also a process that is not often seen or experienced by the general public in Western societies. I am an artist using the taxidermy process as the material for time-based work. My 2014 'work cuddle' involves swapping the insides and eyes of a dead rabbit and a teddy bear. One section of the work involves the display of these artefacts alongside video documentation. In this article the experience and somatic awareness of dead animal bodies serves as the cross section of ideas in posthumanism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. I provide an analysis of 'cuddle' and examine how video documentation alongside dead animal bodies intersects with concepts of ‘liveness’ and presence in performance art. Using both Peggy Phelan and Phillip Auslander’s concepts of ‘liveness’ and performance, I argue the potential of the olfactory in live performance, particularly the smell of dead animal bodies, and how our senses that have not yet been mediatised contribute to our experiences of live art. This analysis of 'cuddle' combines these theories of ‘liveness’ with Aurel Kolnai’s 'On Disgust', Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, and Phelan and Herbert Blau’s readings of mortality in the experience of an artwork as a live performance.
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