44RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINSkeen to rediscover the history of the craft, to learn how it was made and
who made it first.
Recently published titles like Melissa Milgrom’s Still Life: Adventures
in Taxidermy and Dave Madden’s The Authentic Animal have presented
lively narratives capitalizing on the colorful and eccentric personalities
that for years have punctuated taxidermy competitions in the United
States.^1 Others, like Ta x i d e r my by Alexis Turner and Taxidermy Art by
Robert Marbury, are presented as lavishly illustrated coffee-table books
packed with interesting and well-researched information.^2 Meanwhile,
academic publishing has critically embraced the return of taxidermy
through some challenging and highly informative titles like Pat Morris’s
A History of Taxidermy, Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo, and Life on
Display by Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain.^3 Most notable in the
artistic publishing field have been the contributions of the artist duo
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson (Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson).
An edited collection on taxidermy that documents their epic project
nanoq, and Snæbjörnsdóttir’s own Spaces of Encounter: Art and Revision
in Human-Animal Relations, offer extremely important institutional cri-
tiques as related to the medium.^4 Also attesting to the growing popularity
of taxidermy in art are two issues of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in
Visual Culture published in 2008 and entirely devoted to the subject.^5 A
number of edited collections on natural history and museum displays
have also featured important essays on taxidermy.^6
One recurring element shared by many of the aforementioned texts is
the persistent desire to legitimize the practice through the construction
of a historical metanarrativization of taxidermy’s development through
time. This approach mirrors that of the nineteenth-century texts in
which authors aimed at popularizing taxidermy as a noble pursuit and
scientific endeavor. According to most, taxidermy developed from a
clumsy and haphazard stuffing of animal skins reaching the heights of pure
realism in natural history dioramas. Authors regularly claim that taxi-
dermy was shaped by slow and steady technological advancements: small
refinements in the preservation and mounting methods led to the perfec-
tion of hyperrealist dioramas that enthralled audiences in the nineteenth
century. But in the suspicion that this metanarrative, like all others,
would conceal more interesting realities, I decided to return to the origi-
nal books that charted and shaped the history of taxidermy for the