As taxidermy sits increasingly badly with general audiences and contemporary sensitivities to the natural world - so much so, in fact, that natural history museums have become almost apologetic about their displays, taxidermy has become increasingly common on the international art scene. Damien Hirst, Thomas Grünfeld, Paul McCarthy, Maurizio Cattelan, and Mark Dion are just a few of the artists whose work incorporates animals and animal parts in their installations. The works are purposefully ambiguous, troubling, and ruthlessly physical.

As Steve Baker highlights in Postmodern Animal, “across these works, regardless of any ethical stance, materials count, materials create knowledge, or at least encourage open and imaginative thought.” The materials in question, however, are not paint and lumber but animals – sometimes alive, sometimes stuffed, sometimes only presented in parts, or, as in Thomas Grünfeld’s Misfit series, sometimes the parts of various animals are sewn together into seamless mutant species. Materials certainly do count, but the sort of imaginative thought they provoke is less directed towards gaining knowledge and more towards generating unsettling encounters.

While some artists draws upon the world of fairy tales and enchantment (see Ophelia +) , many of the animals in contemporary art engage viewers with a very different sort of story telling: the meaning given to animals by the natural sciences. Recent historians of science have chipped away at the foundational mythology of science, which has tended to construct its practitioners and practices as above or somehow outside the biases and beliefs of the general culture. Far from being an antiseptic generator of irrefutable “truths,” science and its veneer of objectivity have been scraped down to expose questionable underpins which at times have been constructed from cultural manipulation, value-laden paradigms, and prejudiced assumptions.

If science is anything but neutral, the visions of the natural world it constructs are likewise anything but impartial representations. As Kate Soper explains, such postmodern critique of the natural science is “nature-sceptical,” not sceptical of that nature exists, but rather sceptical about the abilities of science to uncover and make known the meaning of the natural world and its inhabitants. If science attempts to fit nature into hierarchies and classes and impose a static structure, nature, always “messy and multifarious” as Stephen Jay Gould described, always breaks or climbs or slithers free of rigid law or formulae.

The animals in many works of contemporary artists engage such questions about how we come to know the natural world and what such knowledge means for human-animals. Nature and animals become not fixed entities fully explained by the hierarchies of natural order but provocative forces “whose properties remain radically unknown and unknowable,” as Norman Bryson writes about Mark Dion's installation The Library for the Birds of Antwerp. On display are questions about the ability of science and philosophy to make sense of the world, about the limits of human understanding, and the potential for alternate systems of thought to provide a less confident but more holistic perspective on our relationships with the natural world and its other non-human inhabitants.

Damien Hirst is perhaps the most well known among this new breed of animal artists. His medium of choice is formaldehyde, although he does make excursions into taxidermy. His acclaimed works include The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) consisting of an pickled 17 foot tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde, a cow and calf both laterally bisected and displayed in four cases (Mother and Child Divided) a lamb (Away from the Flock, 1994), similarly bisected and presented, all arranged so that the animals’ insides and outsides can be viewed simultaneously. His works are abrasive, confrontational, and ultimately bewildering. Are these scientific experiments or art? Are we meant to learn anatomy or critique the aesthetic?

Mark Dion’s work is aimed even more precisely at the issue of how knowledge is generated by natural objects and – conversely – what images of nature have been constructed by particular systems of thought. Dion’s installations expose science as a cultural practice with its own particular biases and aesthetic resonance. What constitutes as “science” is hardly stable: different ages have used different sets of objects to construct particular images of the natural world.