by John Kinsella
Window Shopping at the
Taxidermist’s
The
permeable glass — sieve-like — drains
the liquid light, a fluid more precious
than formaldehyde, the smell of life …
A grimace or a grin stretches like a trap,
and as a backdrop a deer dispenses
with its claim to needing a heart,
it’s only there from the neck up,
though its eyes are sharp, senses finely
tuned, nervousness held in check
through a familiarity born of sharing
a display case with a pack of wolves.
The window shoppers hunt amongst the grime
of the city’s unglamorous side, their prey
the glimmering skin, the combed and shining —
here they show their skill, knowing
where to bag the finest trophy.
the liquid light, a fluid more precious
than formaldehyde, the smell of life …
A grimace or a grin stretches like a trap,
and as a backdrop a deer dispenses
with its claim to needing a heart,
it’s only there from the neck up,
though its eyes are sharp, senses finely
tuned, nervousness held in check
through a familiarity born of sharing
a display case with a pack of wolves.
The window shoppers hunt amongst the grime
of the city’s unglamorous side, their prey
the glimmering skin, the combed and shining —
here they show their skill, knowing
where to bag the finest trophy.
I wrote the above poem in 1992 and it was published in my 1993
volume, Full Fathom Five. I am pretty
sure I wrote it at the base of the Darling Scarp, though it’s actually ‘about’
a piece of taxidermy seen elsewhere, maybe in the northern hemisphere when I
was twenty (though I am pretty sure it was triggered by seeing some taxidermy
in a window in Northbridge, Perth). It is a poem-critique of a capitalist
disrespect and abuse of the dead, and also, though only by implication as it is
superficially ‘genderless’, of a patriarchy of trophyism.
Living in central Ohio in the early to mid 2000s, an excursion out
into the region would take us past taxidermists’ shops — not rare in hunting
territories. Some of the taxidermists prided themselves on ‘artistic flair’,
‘respect for nature’, and ability to deliver a ‘quality product’. If I recall
correctly, at least one of these taxidermy businesses was run by a
husband-and-wife team. Or am I wilfully misremembering? I don’t think so.
Taxidermy has haunted me since seeing, as a child, ‘specimens’ in
the Perth Museum — what others might take as a point of inspiration, the
seeding of a vocation, I took as disturbance. But though back then I was not a
vegan, and not an animal rights activist, and in fact did hunt and fish, I
found the ‘re-enactment’ side of the displays — the animating of the dead to
give humans a sense of authenticity, to provide entertainment and ‘education’
in elements of the world that cannot be shown — hypocritical and dishonest.
To illustrate, to capture
(again) the animals in a (faux) performative moment in their ‘native habitat’,
was to mock their living, individual lives. To make the dead ‘live’, to make
the temporariness of their lives
(however ended or taken from them), quasi-‘permanent’, to arrest their being in
such a manner, was grotesque to me. Their eyeballs seem particularly wrong. And
in each case, little adornments of ‘place’ — a branch, a rock, a snake rising
in the corner on real sand. It truly
bothered me.
What brought this all back, suddenly, was seeing another article (one was run last year on that year’s
instalment of the same taxidermy exhibition) on what we might term ‘new-wave taxidermy’.
And though this is an interpolation, written after what follows, I would bring
to mind Carol J. Adams’s question in The
Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Continuum,
New York, 2000), ‘Where does vegetarianism end and feminism begin, or feminism
end and vegetarianism begin?’ And consider her observation a few lines later:
‘Our meals either embody or negate feminist principles by the food choices they
enact.’ (p. 178)
So new-wave taxidermists are wishing to get away from the word
‘taxidermy’? This is ‘art’! So they’re trying to get away from the ‘stuffy’
version of weird men in back rooms playing with animal corpses? So they’re
trying to get away from the idea of dead animal ‘mounted’ as ‘trophy’?
Instead, we have a ‘gender’-angled promotion (as extension of
arts-capitalism, not as an act of liberty and liberation) in which some women
(especially younger women, it seems) are territorialising the realms of the
dead. A reconvening of the underworld in which Persephone reclaims the space of
body articulate in the domain of Hades. There’s an absurdity in this
configuring, but the subtexts of the gender issues around the new-wave
taxidermy, as conveyed by promotions and ‘teachers’ wishing to ‘modernise’
practice, are playing into these tropes. Don’t worry: all of this will suit
those ‘stuffy’ male taxidermists and death fetishists very well indeed. Their
kingdom grows through the process.
We read that we’ve gone (in Australia) from one woman over a decade
ago (officially?) playing with dead animal corpses, to over fifty in the here
and now. And now, it’s nurturing nature morte — bringing life to dead
nature. The women are placing the animals in ‘natural settings’; they are
bringing life to what is dead. A new fertility — a reclaiming of the birth of
death. This, of course, is withering gendering discourse. It is setting women
up as clichés and prisoners of the incubator, with a femininity (anxiety) so
powerful it can re-animate the dead (as Dr Frankenstein succeeded in doing, but
failed, as his creator Mary Shelley knew he must; or horror struggling with
right-wingism in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction). This is a torturously constrained
semantic display.
We read that to not understand
this is because of our ignorance, because we don’t know how to read this new
presentation of the living dead. We (male or female or non-binary) apparently
need to be taught. We need to be educated in the aesthetics of displaying
death, the rewriting of ethics through playing the ethics of gender (in)equality.
The gender of the stuffed (!) animals becomes a variable in the display. Of the
beauty of the fox (so hated in Australia) in its ‘natural’ environment (what,
the Australian paddock, the Australian national park, or the vague ancestral
memory of English fields?).
Such gendering of death-plays is destructive and demeaning, though
probably not more than a non-gendered death display, but it’s not liberating in
any way for humans or animals alike, and shouldn’t be claimed as such, outside
the machinery of chromosome counts.
The abuse of dead animals to make nature ‘art’ is an abuse of the
animal as subaltern — written into it is not only a politics of indifference
and insensitivity, but a demeaning of women as process. Okay, if people are
going to be exploiters of animal corpses — removing all sanctity and
spirituality in death from their rights and rites, then they shouldn’t pretend
it’s to do with redressing the grotesque and omnipresent social and personal
wrongs of gender inequality and gender abuse. These are facts.
Women have no ‘equal’ status in any real terms, and need to
constantly push in every context to redress this. Taxidermy is not an effective
medium for this — in many ways, it’s the endgame of patriarchy. And if it is to
become a medium to dismantle patriarchy, then it needs to be textual and
abstracted, and not literal: that is, no real corpses used in the process!
To use death as a metaphor of rights, especially within the faux
fertilities of reanimation and ‘art’ (and ‘design’), is a furphy, an
advertising ploy, and capitalism’s happy incorporation of women into its
consuming maw in yet another profit-orientated context. I am reminded of an
artwork I saw at this year’s student art exhibition at the Western Australian
Art Gallery — a commentary on different aspects of gun culture, from a form of
critique of gun violence to a personal romanticising (attempting to be the
opposite) of a ‘farm girl’ holding her rifle, owning her own destiny.
The contradictory message of this artwork wasn’t generative or
liberating (which contradiction can so often be), but entirely compliant with
the patriarchy, entirely compliant with one of the many versions of
self-empowerment and self-confidence that gun manufacturers sell to the world
(I should say that there were some superb artworks against abuse and
degradation of animals in the exhibition — across
‘genders’).
There is no ownership of destiny with weapons — no ‘good’ and ‘bad’
version. Guns kill. There is nothing outside this. Maybe the student sees this?
If so, she needs to develop her critique — maybe she will, and in doing so
offer new ways of critiquing the existence of guns in all contexts. Guns will
always be weapons, and only weapons. Guns are patriarchy whatever gender we
identify with.
And taxidermy is what the faux-animating of dead animals is. How and
why people collect the dead is also a question. The fox shot by a farmer/hunter
and brought lovingly ‘back to life’ by the artiste? Gender is part of all we
do, and has implications in all we enact, but some gender resistances and
affirmations bring positive change, and sadly some don’t.
In his 1996 preface to Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin, London, 1998), the
translator Michael Hamburger — a very ‘direct’ translator of the poet’s German
— said, regarding the act of translation and possible doubts about his method,
that ‘freedom to re-interpret, recast and even omit has never been my way. I
had probably been needled by Robert Lowell’s description of my kind of translator
as “taxidermists”.’ (p. xii)
The unwitting and grotesque irony of ‘needling’ aside (always amazes
me how even experienced poets who are constantly dealing with the polysemous might miss a slippage if their own
politico-ethics don’t allow for a broader expanse of contexts and
interpretations), Hamburger’s distress is with the fact of not only bringing a
living poem into a death, but that the poem is killed by such ‘directness’ in
the first place. He, of course, felt it was not the case, but likely is
offering the poem a life in a different habitat that is equivalent to the one
it possesses in its originating language.
Lowell’s use of ‘taxidermy’ is actually an example of an artistic
view of taxidermy as a false art of ‘life’ — one only ever moribund, bound in
its origins of death. The ‘artistic’ acts of taxidermy as aesthetic enactments
of the dead, making the dead perform for the living human audience, are of this
category error. What Lowell wanted were ‘translations’ that, above all else, lived
in the language in which they were being remade (a fine example of this is
Richard Howard’s translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal).
Ironically, for all their literalness, Hamburger’s Hölderlins
largely achieve this quality. But Hamburger’s final riposte to Lowell comes at
the beginning of the last paragraph of his preface: ‘Gaps in Hölderlin’s
fragmentary later poems have not been filled in with taxidermic stuffing.’ (p.
xv) Does this defensiveness actually suggest that Hamburger well knew what his
‘needling’ represented in the discourse, and was using it to brutal effect?
In the making of metaphors, language can grow, but its growth
doesn’t mean that cause and effect vanish for other uses of the word.
Hamburger’s first use of Lowell’s reference is, of course, scare-quoted; his
second isn’t. He has grown into his task of re-animating the supposed corpses
of the English-language versions of Hölderlin’s poems. The dead poet, the dead
era, the prophetic poet, the ‘modern’ audience as receptors, the leap across
languages and a multitude of cultural variants, and the alienation of
mortality, and the intimacy of dealing with the dead, all coalesce. In these
usages, a form of rivalry and trophyism is afoot.
Taxidermy is about control, oppression, and hierarchy in its
figurative as well as literal manifestations. And in the living world of media
and textuality, as I was going to leave this piece at this point, another news item comes in — scientists-taxidermists at the Queensland Museum putting their
‘skills’ on show (‘hands on’) for the public during a science fair. Here we have the false claims of necessity and environmentalism — the notion
that the dead are brought to life in their interaction with an audience (note
the classic journos’ promotional ploy: ‘taxidermy comes to life’ — that
headline ‘joke’ at the expense of the dead).
The museum’s colonial and imperialist urge cannot change — a museum
that makes use of the dead is denying the rights (and rites) of passing from
the corporeal to non-corporeal. A collection; a zoo of the dead. And note that
‘most’ corpses are brought in as roadkill or from some other apparently morally
benign source. Most. Historically,
naturalists have filled the museums of the world with captured specimens,
killed to inform not only scientists but their customers, their audience, and
ultimately their paymasters. Taxidermy is an act around which a language of
euphemism, deception, dissembling, and gallows humour attempts to dilute
ethics. Death is never entertainment! (Though, in the case of say, Jack White,
entertainers can clearly be enthusiastic taxidermists and collectors of taxidermy — Meg White dabbled with
less enthusiasm; so maybe taxidermists feel they can be enthusiastic
entertainers).
And ‘science’ does not require this, no matter how it’s sold.
