Gestures of taxidermy: Morphological approximation as interspecies affinity
Abstract
Recent approaches in anthropology highlight human relatedness with other animal species, arguing for a more inclusive posthumanism in which boundaries between different categories of “life” become blurred. An ethnographic focus on taxidermy in Britain and western Europeboth troubles and supports assumptions about interspecies rapprochement. In the making of taxidermy, living humans meet dead animals in ways that are suggestive of kinship relations beyond death, expressed in morphological analogies. Instances of lifelike animation occur both discursively and plastically and are brought into sharper focus as a result ofa recent influx of artists into the world of taxidermy. A specific ethics of the body emerges, which makes a professed environmental affinity among artist-taxidermists pale in comparison with the “morphological approximation” performed by professional taxidermists in relation to the animals whose lives they claim to prolong.
Keywords: morphology, ethics of the body, taxidermy, posthumanism, interspecies affinity, morphological approximation, lifelike
Gestures of taxidermy: Morphological approximation as interspecies affinity
In comparative morphology, ... [the taxidermist] should devote a great deal of time to the skeleton and to topographical anatomy. … Normal movements of the articulations and the ligaments that control them should receive most careful consideration... Special drawings made by the taxidermist should record special points observed. (Browne 1896, 9)
The recent call for a posthuman approach to sociality, triggered by concerns over environmental unsustainability in the Anthropocene (Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2008; Van Dooren 2014), is predicated upon the need for a shift in human-animal and human-thing ontologies that insists on elasticity in the boundaries between species, living creatures, and other, non-organic entities, enabling possibilities for greater inclusivity in the category of “life” (Carrithers, Bracken, and Emery 2011; Ingold 2011). Opportunities for human empathy and communication with other animal species are considered likelier to blossom through a focus on “affect” or shared capabilities of semiosis (Kohn 2013) than through a focus on potentially divisive “reason.” Central to this posthuman philosophy and anthropology is a concern with an environment that lives, is alive, and sustains life.
Against this background, I am concerned with epistemological avenues that underpin and facilitate ways of exploring these elastic boundaries. The perhaps unlikely practice that will provide my ethnographic evidence is taxidermy, a skilled human pursuit steeped in morphology and kinesthetics while operating on the boundaries between life and death, animal and thing. Taxidermy’s gesturing at traces, shapes, and materials provides important clues for grasping what articulates forms of life, in other words, what animates, in a context of human rapprochement with other animal species and thing-like animal-objects—that is, once alive animals that are made to resemble life. Taxidermy has recently gained in popularity in Britain and northwest continental Europe, a development that is directly related to recent rethinking of human – animal relations. Current politics and social dynamics of taxidermy offer a privileged perspective onhuman ethics and rhetorics, which are performed not onlydiscursively,but also, in more discreet ways that call for close ethnographic attention, through bodily engagements with morphology.
A concern with the ways in which shape and morphology convey life was evident in Gregory Bateson’s work. He was interested in what he called “the pattern which connects” as a way to think about life. In his book Mind and Nature he asked, “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me?” (1979, 8) He wondered what it is that makes us recognize such things as being (or having been) alive. Why are we akin?Bateson found clues in morphology and homology (the likeness in structure between parts of different organisms; cf. Asma 2001, 25–26). It is the crab’s repetitive articulations that make it appear as something that once lived. Bateson spoke of “appendages” on living creatures that show rhythmical repetition and that may be compared to similar appendages on a human body. He felt that westerners had lost the sense of the larger whole as something beautiful and interconnected. We have lost totemism, he wrote, which we might interpret as a loss of the sense of parallelism between human organizations and those of animals and plants (Bateson 1979, 17–18 and 140–42). More recently, Rosi Braidotti (2013, 195), following Donna Haraway’s call for extended notions of kinship, invoked totemism as well in making a bid for a critical posthumanism that posits non-human Life or zoe as a central force in achieving interspecies connectivities: “I want to think from here and now, from Dolly my sister and oncomouse as my totemic divinity; from missing seeds and dying species.” Bateson pleaded for aesthetic unity, which he understood as a sensitivity to this pattern that connects. Echoing this stance, Donna Haraway wrote that “[a]ll critters share a common ‘flesh,’ laterally, semiotically, and genealogically” (2015, 162), andKaren Barad (2003) has insisted on the importance of entanglements of performativity between human and nonhuman bodies and things through the matter that makes up the universe.
In light of Bateson’s ideas about likeness, Haraway’s and Braidotti’s call for a broader notion of kinship, and Barad’s insistence on performing bodies, the notion of “assemblages” that is invoked in recent scholarshipontaxidermied objects as things that straddle nature and culture (e.g., Patchett and Foster 2008) needs to be explored on this strictly morphological and “fleshy” level as well: it needs to be explored for its potential to highlight a kin affinity with the animal world that, perhaps at first sight paradoxically, underlies professional taxidermy practice. My evidencedoes not point to spiritual affinities between humans and dead animals, nor does itreveal a niche of romanticized interspecies relations (Bessire and Bond 2014)—rather, my ethnography allows me to explore how interspecies relations are performed and articulated on bodies in specific western European settings through an awareness of shared morphology that blurs straightforward distinctions between life and death. Ethnographies influenced by the ontological turn have been criticized for focusing “on the bare content of abstract propositions while paying little attention to their pragmatic function, epistemological stance, affective tone, and position in a division of linguistic and conceptual labor” (Cepek 2016, 624).The ethnography I propose insteadis one of fleshy ambivalence, highlightinghuman performance of affinities through bodily laborthat complements, and stands in some tension with,linguistic or conceptual expressions of concern with the animal world. Taxidermy offers strong evidence of an ethics of the bodyon the part of professional taxidermists that has become particularly salient as a result of a recent influx of artists into the world of taxidermy, whoexpress concerns about interspecies relations through displays of animal mounts that rely on discursive credentials, rather thanon bodily analogies. Foregroundingprofessional taxidermy practice in this contexthighlights the human body as an eloquent site of affective, ethical, and rhetorical expression.
Taxidermy as natural science
Taxidermy, or “skin arrangement” (cf. the term’s etymology, from the Greek “taxis,” order/arrangement, and “derma,” skin) came into its stride in the age of enlightenment, as unfamiliar animals were collected abroad and preserved to be studied and displayed in Europe, often in curiosity cabinets to attest to nature’s divine bounty (Eastoe 2012; Morris 2010; Poliquin 2009, 2012; Sorgeloos 2011; Turner 2013). It gained importance as formal museums were established in the Victorian Age to house natural history collections. Different styles emerged in taxidermy’s Victorian heyday, ranging from anthropomorphic scenes featuring mice, squirrels, or toads in the business of dueling, playing pool, or having drinks (Fuller 2014; Henning 2007; Morris 2013) to the scientific and didactic tool of the habitat diorama, where stuffed specimens were artfully displayed in imitations of natural environments animated by powerful, ideologically driven ideas about taxonomy (Asma 2001; Haraway 1989; Wonders 1993). After the Second World War, taxidermy experienced a fall from grace, its messiness as a craft no longer fitting the bill of a professionalizing science (Star 1992). Moreover, closely associated with hunting and burdened with colonial history, taxidermy came to be considered morally suspect as exemplifying, both symbolically and materially, European domination over nature and non-western others (Mackenzie 1988; contrast Marvin 2010 and Michaud 2015 on the affective potential of hunting trophies). As embarrassing souvenirs of imperialism and male chauvinism, hunting trophies were left to gather dust in the storage rooms of the natural history museum while dioramas and so-called study skins seemed to have lost scientific relevance with the rise of visual and interactive media (Alberti 2011; Fuller 2014). Over the past decade or so, however, mounted skins (or “mounts”; i.e., taxidermied objects) have begun to emerge from the closet, as curators recognize their potential as narrative tools in postcolonial spaces. In museum environments, a trophy head or study skin may be reappropriated to tell stories about imperialist conquest or environmental destruction. Preserved animals are instrumentalized, and politicized, to talk about extinction and conservation and made to play a role in an ecology of life (see examples in Alberti 2011; Patchett, Foster, and Lorimer 2011). At the same time, taxidermy’s role as a scientific tool in museum contexts continues, confirming or refining established species taxonomies and offering new perspectives as repositories of DNA that may feature in attempts at de-extinction.
Taxidermy shifting shape as an artistic endeavor
In direct interplay with the renaissance of mounted specimens in museum spaces, taxidermy is decidedly in vogue in contemporary art. Stuffed specimens have successfully crossed over from the natural history museum to the art gallery.[i] An important impetus behind the artistic embracing of animal skins has been Damien Hirst’s use of mounted animals in his provocative installations, which play at early scientific practices of dissection and at nineteenth-century habitat dioramas. Artists are now regularly invited to organize interventions in natural history collections, disrupting established taxonomies through novel juxtapositions of animal mounts salvaged from museum stores. Contemporary takes on the curiosity cabinet in particular have become a display technique of choice as artists seek to revive a spirit of play that was allegedly lost with the rise of scientific classification (e.g., Sheehy 2006 on American artist Mark Dion; cf. Kalshoven 2015).[ii]
The revival of taxidermy seems indeed to be related to a “return to curiosity,” which is the phrase used by art historian Stephen Bann to describe a trend in museum display that is predicated on contemporary art interventions. The return to curiosity in art practice, Bann argues, constitutes a reclaiming by the artist of “realms of knowledge previously relinquished to the scientist” (2007, 120). Curiosity disturbs a normalized order and positions the displayed object in what he calls “a nexus of interrelated meanings” (2003, 120). In such an approach, tactile objects in hybrid arrangements allow visitors to make their own connections—as in an old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities. Taxidermy features prominently in these recent artistic appropriations of science.
Following this artistic interest in taxidermy and fueled by a fad for Victoriana, taxidermy has also gained a new presence in private spaces, in particular in Britain.[iii] Trophy heads and antique cases with hummingbirds make a splash in middle class interiors in London and Brighton, accompanied by a proliferation of coffee table books featuring quirky, ethnography-lite taxidermy narratives or artworks and conversation pieces, ranging from the Victorian to the contemporary and engaged (e.g., Eastoe 2012; Fuller 2014; Milgrom 2010; Purcell 1999; Snaebjörnsdóttir and Wilson 2006; Turner 2013). Concomitantly, a scholarly and media interest in taxidermy’s curious materiality has arisen. The skills of the contemporary taxidermist are sought after not only by conceptual artists commissioning work but also by social scientists and journalists intent on understanding the resurgence of this particular craft.[iv]
The taxidermied animal, then, can be considered a node in an assemblage of relations and circulating materials, as has been suggested by human geographer Merle Patchett and artist Kate Foster (2008)—it can be both a sign and a sensual thing, an object-animal gathering different temporalities, power relations, and knowledge systems. Taxidermy, by being shown and talked about in public and private spaces, helps shape attitudes and opinions about human-animal relations in former and contemporary worlds and helps make ideological statements about issues of power and environmental problems. Reflecting on the influx of artists into the realm of taxidermy, Canadian curator Rachel Poliquin has suggested that artists’ engagement with taxidermied animals challenges accepted human-animal relations. She discusses how, over the past centuries, people have projected their desires onto a variety of genres in taxidermy, according to the fashions and preoccupations in vogue at different points in time. “Taxidermy,” she writes, “is a shape-shifter, easily sliding between categories of objects and between objects and experiences” (Poliquin 2008, 124). Contemporary artists add new dimensions of critique, affect, and alienation to the mounted animal, making taxidermy shift shape yet again.
Poliquin conceives of shape-shifting largely as a semiotic process. Shape-shifting involves animal mounts changing meaning or being differently charged with meaning, rather than mounts morphing. Instead of focusing on the symbolic or sensory potential of the mounts, my project here is to highlight the taxidermist’s and the artist’s role in performing human-animal relations through their modeling of specific shapes. Over the past six years, I have carried out fieldwork in Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium with taxidermists and with artists making use of taxidermy in their artwork. Drawing on my conversations and on participant-observation with taxidermists and artist-taxidermists, I take up Poliquin’s idea of taxidermy being a shape-shifter and put a rather more straightforward morphological twist on it. Embodied practices of making revealan elasticity of boundaries between life and death and between human and non-human animals explored by taxidermists through expert engagement with morphology. This boundary-crossing potential is lodged in the matter and morphology of the formerly alive animal-object as it is welded and wielded as a heuristic tool by its human maker in a quest to articulate and animate—that is, in a quest for life. My evidence comes from visits to taxidermists’ and artists’ studios, from training sessions in bird taxidermy that I undertook in England, and from several demonstrations at the UK Guild of Taxidermists, a contact zone where professionals and artists meet (for a detailed exploration of taxidermy as skilled craft, see also Patchett 2016).
Morphology of the mount: sculpting the lifelike
Most taxidermists are self-employed professionals working for a variety of clients, including museums and other educational institutions, artists, and persons seeking to have a hunting trophy mounted or a pet preserved. Their commissions take shape in workshops that range from converted garages and sheds to a Swiss fish taxidermist’s studio resembling a dentist’s cabinet or a former horse butchery in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The arrays of tools, the heaps of sky-blue Styrofoam or woodwool used for stuffing, the sets of glass or plastic eyes,the pots of spray paint, the freezers filled with carcasses wrapped in plastic, the baths in which deer hides soak—an aquarium housing dermester beetles busy cleaning rodent skulls, a grouse comb cast from dental acrylic, which allows the light to shine through—and last but not least the colorful menagerie in different stages of being dismantled or becoming, all this matterturns taxidermy workshops into sites of intrigue that need no artistic intervention to instil a sense of wonder. It was often in these places of creation, while working on a mount, that practitioners told me about their craft. Some ofmy interlocutors had learnt the trade from their fathers, as had Leon, directorof Bouten Son, a Dutch company close to the borders with Belgium and Germany where many of itsartist-clients came from.[v] Leon’s grandfather had runa fur business and practiced taxidermy as a hobby. Leon’s father had turned the family business into a proper taxidermy outfit, which Leon, who stuffed his first bird when he was six years old, took over when his father turned 65. The company had a dozen employees covering all aspects of taxidermy, including extensive restoration projects for museums. Birds were still Leon’s forte, and although he enjoyed experimenting with materials to achieve the most natural-looking result, he still used the bird tanning liquid developed by this father. Anatomical knowledge and a feeling for model making were essential—being able to convey something of the living animal onto the model. It wasn’t just experience, Leon claimed.He would know straight away, the way an apprentice handled the animals, the tools, the materials, whether anything good would come of it. Some birds, he told me, were very hard to mount. “The wood pigeon, mallard, woodcock, their skinis as thin as toilet paper. You can hardly breathe or you’ve got a hole in it, and they are very difficult to degrease. You need a good day to tackle these.”He had made sure his son Maurice learnt a proper trade as a joiner, something to fall back on, but Maurice had followed in his footsteps to become a world champion trophy mount specialist.