;)
What do you think?
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 10:25AMYesterday I received this e-mail through my ravishingbeasts account:
I have seen your web page, and I just wanted to say that you and your practice is absolutely disgusting. I do not understand how you can even think this is appropriate at all. You are just as bad as those who look into your services. I see nothing wrong with taxidermy, but you, modifying one animal with a different animal, is completely unethical. How would you feel if you got cut in half, after you were dead, and were sewn together with another half of something else? Pretty fucked up. There are not many things in the world that I am ashamed of, but you are one.
I assume that the writer (who shall remain nameless) thought that I was the creator of some item of fraudulent taxidermy. Perhaps the work of Iris Shieferstein that caused the outburst of disgust. Or Thomas Grunfeld's Misfits or maybe even Ophelia by Idiots. Who can say? Thank god the writer didn't get a peek at the Popple or who knows what I would have been called.
From "Life Can Be So Nice" by Iris Shieferstein
But despite the writer's misdirected anger (I have never created a single piece of taxidermy) and totally inappropriate language, s/he does raise an issue which is worth raising: how appropriate is the work of contemporary taxidermy artists who combine the parts of animals? Many artists are in fact using taxidermy to make strong statements for animal rights (for starters, read Angela Singer's interview in Antennae's issue on Botched Taxidermy here +). Personally, I have never been a huge fan of the sort of combinatory works that uses big theory to legitmise its existence [read here+]. At the end of the day, whatever has been said about certain works and however they might be theorised, there are certain emotional and ethical fundamentals that remain. In the writer's words, "How would you feel if you got cut in half, after you were dead, and were sewn together with another half of something else?"
So that's my question to you, readers: is the work of many contemporary taxidermy artists appropriate or not? In manipulating real animals into new and sometimes horrifying creatures, has art gone too far? You tell me. Check out some of their work here + Please leave your comments by clicking the *comment* tag above in the headline of this posting.
Reader Comments (9)
My response is more or less summed up with "And hanging their disembodied head over your mantle as a way of reassuring yourself about your masculinity is respectful?"
If you are a PETA type, who is a vegetarian, and wears no leather, and leaves all the pretty, happy, fluffy animals alone when they die, then maybe I will have some respect for your notion that doing strange and unusual things with dead animals skins is sick and wrong. At least you're being consistent.
But if you consume animal flesh, and find it totally acceptable to strip off their hides, chop them up into pieces, re-sew them to be shaped roughly like various bits of a human's body, and then wear the resultant clothing or shoes or hats on those bits... how exactly is that less respectful to the dead creature than stripping off its hide and sewing it to another creature's? I mean heck, we think nothing at all of leather jackets with rabbit fur trim, and they're doing the exact same thing! It just looks like fashion, and not like weird art.
So unless you'd boycott the wearing of fur with leather, just STFU. If you find the art too freaky, nobody is clockwork-oranging your eyes open and forcing you to look at it, so go ahead and look at something else. But telling me that I'm not being "respectful" to the dead animal when I enjoy this sort of art, while you're sitting over there eating meat and wearing leather, is just plain hypocritical.
But in the case of animals that were wild, or for which I felt no special affection in life (assuming no-one else did either), these I tend to view simply as objects - which is, of course, all that any dead animal is, regardless of what one's sentimentality would have them feel toward it.
I have created one or two 'gaffs' or composit creatures from old and worthless taxidermy, and plan on using some of the animals in my freezer in anthropomophic poses &c. Unless it is a rare or interesting animal in its own right, or a favourite pet, I prefer doing this kind of work.
Now, I understand it may not be to everyone's taste, but there can be no real argument against it. The dead animnal doesn't care, of course. Nor, I suspect, do its living relatives. It has no bereaved human owner. And so in the end it is just that: a matter of personal taste.
That said, I'm not sure I would like it - I rather like the idea of resting in peace under an old yew tree. Call me a traditioanlist.
However, I was very upset - no, angry - when I heard that the Negro of Banyoles had been taken back to Africa and given a sham burial, thereby putting out of existence one of the only traditionally stuffed humans in the world (if not the only - anyone know of any others?). I remember feeling very strongly at the time the desire to replace it somehow, and thinking that there might be nothing for it but to leave my own remains to the noble art of taxidermy. I admit that my body wouldn't hold quite the same curiosity value, though, so perhaps sewing me onto 'something else' would be just the thing to give me added interest. I could be a fawn, perhaps.