RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS53craftsmanship at the service of hunters. In opposition, the lifelike essence
of natural history taxidermy was very much driven by the new discourses
in which realism itself became the essential aesthetic representational
force.
Technological advancements were not simply the result of an ideal
process of continuous perfecting—they reflected the imposition of natu-
ral history discourses setting clear standards for the material practices of
the discipline. And much of this new technical standard was driven by
the term taxidermie itself, for its agency of potentiality and connectivity
ontologically shifted stuffed animals into taxidermy specimens even be-
fore aesthetic realism was fully accomplished toward the end of the nine-
teenth century.^48 Focusing on the linguistic agency of taxidermie also
allows us to bypass the recurring connotation of stuffed animals as the
clumsy, aesthetically flawed, or downright worthless predecessors of sci-
entific taxidermy. This historiographical cliché has substantially limited
our understanding of these objects and the pivotal roles they have
played in shaping human/animal relationships prior to the rise of natu-
ral history. As will be seen, rethinking our assumptions regarding the
aesthetic worth of stuffed animals will bear considerable importance in
the analysis of taxidermy in contemporary art practices.
TAXIDERMY: ANIMAL, OBJECT, OR THING?Another important, yet limiting line of inquiry about taxidermy focuses
on its ambiguous ontological status: an object pretending to be alive. “An-
imal or object?” is the recurrent question that has informed much contem-
porary writing on taxidermy.^49 And while I agree that this tension is indeed
palpable, I am not inclined to dwell on ontological essentialism in order to
think about the agency of this type of object instead. Let’s be clear: taxi-
dermy produces objects—no misunderstanding there. The matter is not
so much whether these objects vacillate between the ontological status of
natural or man-made, but that they essentially are commodities that can
enable the retrieval of discursive formations, cultural conditions, practices,
and power/knowledge relationships between humans and animals.
An interesting attempt to better grasp the undeniably elusive charge
that taxidermy objects inscribe has been proposed in the contemporary