Speculative Taxidermy

RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS47

lection (dating from 1725) as the oldest example of known modern taxi-
dermy, from which he began writing his own historical account.^18 Sloane
was an erudite collector, knowledgeable in chemistry and botany, who
eventually founded the British Museum in London.^19 Cherry-picking this
beginning for his own taxidermy treatise helped Browne to firmly estab-
lish the practice within a purely scientific tradition, implicitly rendering
it a noble and rationalized pursuit.
Likewise, historiographers have rarely resisted the temptation to pro-
vide an essentialist, and therefore totalizing, definition of what taxidermy
is rather than what it does.^20 In The Breathless Zoo, for instance, Poliquin
contextualizes taxidermy as a practice of longing. She argues that

taxidermy is deeply marked by human longing. All organic matter

follows a trajectory from life to death, decomposition and ultimate

material disappearance. The fact that we are born and inevitably disap-

pear defines us, organically speaking. Taxidermy exists because of life’s

inevitable trudge toward dissolution. Taxidermy wants to stop time. To

keep life.^21

In a sense, Poliquin is right, but doesn’t this definition bring us back to
the realm of the transcendent? Furthermore, this essentialist logic could
be extended to all classical paintings and sculptures without requiring
much alteration—wasn’t preserving beauty and youth one of the main
purposes of the visual arts before the invention of photography? To my
point that generalizing definitions of taxidermy serve little purpose, it is
important to acknowledge that, when it comes to art objects as well as
taxidermy, it is underneath the overarching ambition to preserve beauty
and youth that the object’s originality, meaning, and agency are found.

TAXIDERMIE

Bypassing the reductive writing of metanarratives has been proposed in
Foucault’s conception of knowledge as something that does not progres-
sively advance but that instead sediments—hence his approach to rewriting
history is called archaeology. The first and most important archaeological