art that uses taxidermy

is this ethical?

is it disrespectful to dead animals to display them in art museums?

is it okay to be disrespectful to dead animals if you're trying to make a broader point?

where does a college freshman go who wants to understand their uncomfortable feelings about damien hirst, lisa black and tessa farmer?

trying to help a friend, thx for links

I love my dead gay son.

no necro jokes plz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJP1DphOWPs

has anybody credible ever claimed that damien hirst is bad art because it uses a dead shark? or refuted that claim?

Not sure if this'll work, but there's a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Welfare on art and the use of dead animals, which I found by googling 'Damien Hirst' 'animals' and 'ethics'.

i appreciate that, but i'm trying to steer my advisee away from "google research" in favor of contacting "experts" and i personally don't have time to sift through and evaluate a bunch of sources (i have like five other advisees and a million other things to do).

that *does* look like a really good source, though. i am less concerned about finding the actual sources themselves and more with helping the student come up with a bibliography of names ... which it looks like that article will be really good for! thanks!

Yeah, I realise that googling isn't really the best way to go about answering the question, but I was kind of interested to look at the debate myself. The first results were nowhere near expert - one remark from a shark trust website and another thing from the Daily Mail about his butterfly bike - but that did actually look useful.

Personally I'm okay with people recycling old taxidermy and the like for art projects, but I do have qualms about killing or ordering an animal to be killed purely for the purposes of art.

Does the research go into film as art at all? I had a bit of thing a while ago about animal abuse/depiction of animal abuse in European '70s films, and did actually see someone give a paper on the subject too. Not sure if it'd be publicly available, though.

FUCKED UP: Matthew Herbert Foiled in Plan to Record the Death of a Pig

I love my dead gay dad.

i think animal killing / animal abuse as art is outside of the scope of the project. just want the ethics of using the animal carcass as an entertainment object. the person has PETA-type views about fur and is vegan so she takes a bit of a hard-line stance on it.

has anybody credible ever claimed that damien hirst is bad art because it uses a dead shark? or refuted that claim?

― mr peabody (moonship journey to baja), Saturday, September 17, 2011 11:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

As opposed to claiming Damien Hirst is bad art because his "art" stinks and he's a talentless, poser cunt? Because you know, I don't know if I count as credible to you, but drag me out of bed any night to take that particular stand.

I can't offer any useful links but arguments by analogy seem pretty clear and pertinent here - i.e. don't do to animals what you wouldn't do to people, if you think animals and people have similar rights. Can't think of any reason to treat art taxidermy as a particularly special or difficult case.

In other words: in the case of Damien Hirst, it has nothing to do with the dead shark, or the diamond skull, or his lousy drawings, but all with the man's own inability and smugness.

Yeah, I'd be fine with using human remains as part of artworks - again, provided you didn't kill them yourself (or take them without permission from the place their owners put them). So I don't see much of a difference with animal remains.

xpost

But to answer your question: try to steer clear of animal rights advocates and their opposites. It only clouds what you are after. Then again, you are asking after the ethics of using dead animals in art. The ethics will always depend on the person. I don't see any difference personally between human remains and animal remains

Dutch artist Tinkebell made a purse out of her dead cat, stripping the skin off her cat and making it into a purse. She made a book with all the hatemail that she received afterwards.

Sorry, I feel I have plenty of ideas on all of this but am not at all being helpful.

xp

My Dearest Cat Pinkeltje

This may or may not be relevant, but animal remains often feature in artworks as ingredients in paint pigments, inks, glues and dyes, not to mention hair used in paint brushes and gelatine used in photography. Sure, these elements aren't as obvious as eg a dead cow in a tank, but they're there nevertheless.

There are some artworks where the suffering and death of an animal is a central part of the work. Could never quite figure out whether or not it was an internet hoax cos it just seemed so unneccessarily cruel, but Guillermo Vargas's suffering dog atrocity is a recent one - iirc he chained a dog up in a gallery and left it to starve to death. Herman Nitsch is another one - ritualistic performance art based around animal sacrifice. Not a useful comment but these fuckers pretty much make my piss boil.

Hey here you go, there's a few more examples here:

http://webecoist.com/2009/01/10/animal-torture-art/

there's another dude that paid for animals to be slaughtered in mexico and filmed it ... PETA allies managed to cancel the SFAI show (though iirc they haven't managed to close a single mcdonalds)

but the scope of the project is taxidermy and ethics, maybe starting w/ Victorian cabinet of curiosities and maybe ending w/ hirst and farmer

She must be considering the comparison of human remains on display as part of the context, though? I mean, particularly if she's going into the modern era, something like Gunther von Hagen's Bodyworlds is incredibly pertinent.

i guess so. on the other hand, while i'm not an expert on ethics by any means, i don't know if comparison to human remains is always a particularly good argument. like, for example, it's perfectly okay to pick up and eat roadkill (if rather gross) everywhere i've ever heard of, but i bet the human equivalent would be a crime in just about any country.

This artist is a friend of mine:

http://www.customcreaturetaxidermy.com/Site/index_.html

http://1800recycling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Sarina_mothers_little_helper.jpg

love it

one of richard serra's first show featured both live and stuffed animals. i think it was called animal habitats live and stuffed.

just want the ethics of using the animal carcass as an entertainment object.

Perhaps just poor word choice but art and entertainment aren't one and the same...

There was a taxidermy window exhibition down the street from me for a couple weeks, in a gallery/junkshoppe, and I was surprised that i found it disturbing - perhaps too much like entertainment, not reverent/respectful enough. But at the same time, I like it when art provokes such a response. There's an ethical line though.

Re: artists being cruel to animals in their work, the galleries, curators and buyers are just as implicated.

Anyway, is your friend looking for art theory/history to cite or just instances (incl in the media) of taxidermy in art?

An artist acquaintance of mine, who is primarily a painter, had a show last year that featured animals she had taxidermied herself + paintings - it felt respectful and was actually quite beautiful, a collision of sad finalities and blissful ends, capturing the animals in mostly restful positions - you could just tell she'd spent time with their bodies in death if not life, and was showing the contemplation that came from that, how the divide between life and death broke down in a weird way.

i have seen a lot of art that is in the tradition of ernest haeckel that is really beautiful - prepared slides of plants and sea creatures that are just gorgeous - so i understand what you mean.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2114/2513484775_11cb822755.jpg

i have set up a turtle tank in my house and i have gone to every effort to make it an extremely clean and sterile and minimal turtle tank (i am using like 10x recommended water filtration) so most of the time my turtle looks like he is floating in space like a jeff koons basketball ... he is a really happy and well-cared-for turtle but on the other hand he is less of a "pet" and more of a trophy (he hates being handled) ... i definitely think about the ethics of what i am doing quite a bit, but i also think that the hours i spend every week caring for this animal give me a deep appreciation for ecology

ANYWAY

friend is looking for art theory / history but friend is pretty young so it should be comprehensible at something like AP / first-year level

and it was definite word choice ... the distinction in your second paragraph - "perhaps too much like entertainment, not reverent/respectful enough" - is exactly the distinction she's trying to understand ...

my art history sort of stops w/ hal foster and 80s "october" so i don't know enough to say whether there is any go-to text on the subject. the one google link from emil.y seems really productive, i would like to find something along those lines that is more specific to taxidermy.

It's something I'm really interested in but haven't done much direct research on though I've talked to artists who use images and parts of dead bodies (human and animal) in their work - most often it's about presence in representation, can get equally as heady as emotional. But yeah, your friend could obv go in a number of directions with her inquiry - I'd say go with the one that most interests her, whether it's actually ethics or something else. Though perhaps some ethics questions can't be avoided no matter what. Anyway, I'm interested!

this is interesting - part artists talking, part art history profs theorizing: http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/baker.html

some readings for a class list at UCL on the culture of preservation:

Morris, Pat: A History of Taxidermy. Art, Science, and Bad Taste, Ascot 2010
he's written a lot about taxidermy:
Ibid.: Walter Potter and his Museum of Curious Taxidermy, Ascot 2008
Ibid.: Van Ingen & Van Ingen. Artists in Taxidermy, Ascot 2006
Ibid.: Edward Gerrard & Sons. A Taxidermy Memoir, Ascot 2004
Ibid.: Rowland Ward: Taxidermist to the World, Ascot 2003

i would like to read this book: Stafford, Barbara Maria: Artful Science. Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, Cambridge Mass. 1994

some articles:
Desmond, Jane: "Displaying Death, Animating Life: Changing Fictions of ‚Liveness‘ from Taxidermy to Animatronics," in: Nigel Rothfels (ed.): Representing Animals, Bloomington 2002, 159-179
Wainwright, Lisa Susan: "From Norman Bates to Annette Messager: Taxidermy for a Reason," in: The New Art Examiner, vol. 23, no. 9 (Mai 1996), 18-22, 37

Incidentally I'm going to be taking a course with this person who writes on stuff like taxidermy. Unfortunately the class has nothing to do with it.

Heh, I was writing my post as the previous one was, so I missed it, but yeah. I'm taking a course with the person teaching that class.

also, not art-focused, but an interesting short piece on museum-based taxidermy as a dying profession: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125914878&ps=rs

oh cool, can you post his googleproofed name or a link to something he's written?

The thing that's been playing on my mind since the question was posed but hasn't yet been fully addressed is the nature of fetishisation which is at the heart of taxidermy. But I can't quite work out my position on it, so...

There is also the question of the spectrum between entertainment and education. We have a place called The Booth Museum of Natural History, which is an educational museum nowadays, but Booth himself seemed to be very much in the Victorian taxidermist tradition - a self-styled 'naturalist' man of leisure. And how much information does one have to include to be educational? Is merely putting otherwise-unseen creatures in a case with a label enough to remove 'entertainment' and provide 'education'? I certainly have no moral qualms with the Booth museum, in fact I love visiting it, but I'm just not sure what our relationship *should* be with such things.

http://www.antennae.org.uk/ANTENNAE%20ISSUE%207.doc.pdf

^ haven't read it but it looks like there should be some useful material in this journal

xxpost: see the above link

http://www.deyrolle.com/magazine/spip.php?article648