The Beastly Art of Taxidermy
Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 10:19AM
Read my article in TREK Magazine on my adventures with taxidermy. A short teaser for you:
"No photographs exist from the taxidermy bonfires, but the picture is clear enough. A disorderly mountain of stiffened lion cubs, lemmings, civet cats and barking deer. A smouldering llama, a black tailed wallaby, a polar bear – more than two hundred Victorian stuffed beasts had been discarded as refuse. No museum would ever dream of burning its unpopular cultural artefacts, but these century-old pieces of nature had been heaped on top of each other and set ablaze.
I first heard about the bonfires in the spring of 2005, when I spent several weeks in England visiting family. I had recently finished my PhD at UBC in comparative literature and just wanted to see relatives, go for walks – anything but think about what was next. When I visited a little museum in the countryside, I never could have guessed that a lion with wooden teeth named Wallace, the first lion to be born in Great Britain (in 1812) and one of the few survivors of Saffron Walden’s bonfires, would determine the next six years of my work.
Opened in 1834, the Saffron Walden Museum is the second-oldest purpose-built museum in England. Throughout the 19th century, like so many Victorian museums, it collected and exhibited a random assortment of specimens: mummies, Roman coins, Anglo-Saxon swords, a motley array of stuffed beasts. The artefacts are still on display, neatly labelled and arranged behind glass. But with the exception of Wallace and a few birds, every once-living creature had been destroyed.
The story goes like this. In 1960, a young curator with a verve to modernize wrote a persuasive report to the Saffron Walden District Council. It was time to sluice out the museum’s taxidermy, which she viewed as musty relics from a less enlightened era. In an age before colour photography and wildlife documentaries, taxidermy had been the cutting-edge technology for showcasing the fauna of distant lands. But those days were long gone. She argued that television and zoos gave children a better idea of nature; taxidermy had become crassly old fashioned. Plus, 19th century taxidermy was shabby; no doubt more than a few hides were cracked with age and sprouting straw. And so, having convinced the council that the museum’s taxidermy was a nostalgic embarrassment, the vigorous young curator hauled the antique beasts to the city dump and lit a match. The bonfires lasted three days."
Read the whole article here: http://www.alumni.ubc.ca/2011/trek/2011-spring/the-beastly-art-of-taxidermy/
