Speculative Taxidermy

A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON73

which narratives have been woven around things that exist or are ob-

served, are important representations of our changing relationships

with the natural world. While they may be described as footnotes in the

history of science their power as narratives persists.^1

Fairnington’s engagement with natural history directly addresses the tra-
dition of illustration for the purpose of questioning its epistemological
roots and representational strategies, its discourses, its iconographies,
and its ontological functioning. His approach to the classical iconogra-
phy of natural history is, therefore, critically driven by a desire to subvert
the representational modalities that have characterized the discipline
through an emphasis on the concept of specimen. The Latin root of the
word is linked to the verb specere: to see. In zoological terms, the speci-
men is the established standard of morphological integrity representing
a whole species. In natural history, the specimen must be anatomically
perfect. It is the epistemological object par excellence: suspended be-
tween the linguistic and the material, it is the animal-object laid bare,
the building block of institutional taxonomic discourses. It lays trans-
fixed in an atemporal milieu in which any individual history is removed
by preparation and decontextualization. Fixed in death, its ideal, sin-
gular form relentlessly implies the multitude of its living referents. Its
cultural afterlife is constrained by the taxonomic grid. Perfectly situ-
ated with the system of scientific knowledge, the specimen has neither
past nor future. As the emblematic animal-made-object, it encapsulates
many of the contradictions and paradoxes typical of human/animal
relations.
Since the Renaissance, natural history illustration has attempted to
immortalize the recurrent morphological traits of animals, usually merg-
ing drawings of multiple individual animals or plants into one. This af-
firmative method was perfected toward the end of the Enlightenment
when, in the production of his beautiful ornithological illustrations, John
James Audubon would kill up to a hundred birds just to produce the im-
age of a single specimen. Fairnington’s paintings of praying mantises and
other insects first challenged the construction of the specimen as oper-
ated by natural history illustration: the artist’s intention was that of
restituting some kind of individuality to the specimen, to return the