This essay examines the relationship between beauty and violence in the taxidermy sculptures of the contemporary American artist Bruce Nauman. It addresses how these sculptures, specifically Carousel (Stainless Steel Version)(1988), succeed in bringing together two incompatible models of the beautiful: the neo-classical beauty of well-ordered bodies, and the beauty of irreducibly particular things. The aim of this project is, first, to make sense of Nauman's intervention by locating it in a longer history of reflections on the politics of aesthetics; and, second (and more speculatively), to suggest the continued relevance of" beauty" as a political-aesthetic category.

Bruce Nauman's Carousel (Stainless Steel Version)(1988) 1 is made up of four large, stainless steel arms that extend out from a central motorized pillar to form a rotating cross (Fig. 1). Suspended from the arms by their necks are a taxidermist's polyurethane molds of an assortment of animals: two small coyotes; a large lynx and a smaller version of the same; the front half of one deer and the head of another. All animals appear to have been skinned. As Carousel rotates and the molds drag along the floor (only the deer are fully suspended), the casts recall the bodies of animals hung awkwardly in a slaughterhouse, particularly if one focuses on the dismembered deer. But for all that, the continual circular movement and low scraping of Carousel's passengers is eerily peaceful. If the piece were dangled from the ceiling rather than set upon the floor, it might resemble an uncanny mobile, turning above some monstrous infant's crib. Nauman has stated, not of the piece itself but of the molds from which it was made, that," They are beautiful things. They are universally accepted, generic forms used by taxidermists yet they have an abstract quality that I really like"(374). So there lies in Nauman's Carousel—at its origin if not necessarily at its end—an aesthetic pleasure, an old-fashioned pleasure in beautiful things.