20INTRODUCTIONmetaphorical overlaps between shooting with a camera and shooting with
a gun, Haraway configures the natural history museum as an epistemic
site substantiating the dichotomic contrast between pristine nature rep-
resented in dioramas and the corruptive technological impact of early
capitalist economies.^26 As the crucible of multiple natureculture unfold-
ings, taxidermy is here revealed as the embodiment of seemingly unrelated
discourses and practices involving exhibitions, eugenics, and conser-
vation. And even darker tones emerge in Jeffrey Niesel’s “The Horror of
Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Horror
Films,”^27 where taxidermy representationally embodies the morbid de-
sires of the filmic serial killers in Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
2 , and The Silence of the Lambs.^28 As Niesel argues, “taxidermy, because it
takes the fetish to its logical end (murder), exposes connections between
consumerism, aesthetics, and patriarchy and shows how these systems
contribute to creating relationships of violence particularly in the effort to
render feminine subjectivity silent.”^29 In this sense, taxidermy is config-
ured as the tangible manifestation of the ways in which commodification
constitutes our preponderant modality in the incorporation of the world—
a trait that will become central to the examples discussed in this book.
TAXIDERMY IN CONTEMPORARY ARTScientific taxidermy, the realist kind in natural history dioramas, was
never accepted by the artistic canon as a legitimate form of high art. In a
sense, the same is true today. However, over the past fifteen years, taxi-
dermy has finally entered the exhibiting space, yet it has not done so in
the way its Victorian supporters would have hoped for. It is not the real-
ist accuracy conquered by the craft that has enabled the ontological shift
from craft object to art object. Paradoxically, it is the very problematiza-
tion of realism intrinsic to the medium that has finally enabled it to par-
take in artistic discourse. Many artists engaging with this medium have
produced a very original and personal approach, contributing to the out-
lining of a richly fragmented and aesthetically challenging turn in con-
temporary art practice. Therefore, any attempt to map or exhaustively
summarize this phenomenon would inevitably fail to do it justice. But it