The Right Stuff

Photo by Fabio Paleari, courtesy the artist

Polly Morgan working on "Still Life After Death (fox)"

Courtesy Cai Studio

Cai Guo-Qiang with early production models of wolf replicas for "Head On," Quanzhou, China, 2006

Damien Hirst Maurizio Cattelan Cai Guo Qiang Mark Dion Thomas Grunfeld Annette Messager Shaq's Big Debut The Appendix: Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul H-O

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Recent years have seen an unexpected rebirth of taxidermy as a resource for art. But this rebirth is also necessarily and purposely a stillbirth, a balked resurrection. In traditional taxidermy, it is the animal that is put on display; in the deployments of taxidermy by contemporary artists, it is arrangement itself, the taxidermic dispositif, that is on show. Art upstages taxidermy. In Susan Bozic’s Northern Harrier (Hawk) (2002), from her "Incarnation" photo series, a hawk perches on an Underwood typewriter, sharing the space with a pair of binoculars and a scroll tied with a ribbon. It crouches over the instrument with a fiercely proprietary air, as though over captured prey. Where taxidermic displays typically reduce the animal to an exemplificatory role, here the hawk seems to have taken possession of the space of the photograph, rendering the seemingly superseded instruments of observation (the binoculars) and description (the typewriter, the scroll) the mere signs of sign making.

The resurrectionist subterfuge of traditional taxidermy is also eschewed by Polly Morgan, who stuffs dead animals and mounts them as corpses. These animals are not restored to life but, so to speak, resuscitated into their deaths. Traditionally, taxidermy mounts the carcass of the animal, giving it not just volume but the illusion of vigor. By contrast, Morgan’s works all emphasize the dying fall of the animal’s body, often precisely by means of the visible splints and supports by which they are propped up. In Still Life After Death (rabbit) (2006), a magician’s top hat floats above the figure of an unresponsive white rabbit. In Still Life After Death (fox) (2006), a fox is snugly curled in an outsize champagne glass. And in Mind over Matter (2006), a small bird is cradled in a spoon. (Haunch of Venison in London is featuring Morgan’s work in the exhibition "Mythologies," on view from March 12 through April 25.)

It is not clear that "Oh, how sweet" cuteness is kept entirely at bay in these works, especially in the miniature chandeliers that Morgan rigs up for some of her lyings-in-state. Indeed, To Every Seed His Own Body (2006), in which a long-tailed tit lies on its side on a prayer book under one such chandelier, seems to make explicit allusion to Walter Potter’s precious Death and Burial of Cock Robin (1861), which congregated 98 species of stuffed British bird to illustrate the nursery rhyme: "‘Who’ll make his shroud?’ ‘I,’ said the beetle. ‘With my thread and needle. I’ll make his shroud.’ ... ‘Who’ll be the parson?’ ‘I,’ said the rook. ‘With my little book, I’ll be the parson.’" (This piece was in a collection that Damien Hirst unsuccessfully bid £1 million for when it was offered for sale in 2003.)

Taxidermy is an art that conceals art and aims to create something like a photographic sculpture of the animal, in which the animal’s body is the raw material used to suggest its appearance. A number of artists use photography to effect an ironic displacement of taxidermy, perhaps in confirmation of the claim made by Annette Messager — whose work of the 1990s, especially Anonymes (1993), which impaled 22 stuffed birds and squirrels on spikes, helped to initiate the revival of taxidermy in contemporary art — that, in preserving objects against change, photography itself already "is taxidermy." In this space of irony, the struggle of the animal to escape the ordeal of ostension becomes the spectacle itself. The squirrel, for example, who has evidently just done away with himself in Maurizio Cattelan’s Bidibidobidiboo (1996) is richly ridiculous in a Tom and Jerry way, but the logic of the piece coils spikily in on itself. If a squirrel were really able to live the kind of doll’s-house life we give to it in fantasy — precisely this kind of fantasy — it would very likely find it unbearable enough to want to die. Having dispatched itself, it would, then, naturally, be available to be stuffed and mounted in just some such scene as this.