The Barbican’s current Magnificent Obsessions exhibition examines the artist’s role as collector and curator rather than as creator of objects. Featured in it is Damien Hirst’s collection of taxidermy. The exhibition is fascinating for its elucidation on how our ‘things’ rather than our creations might define our identities – what the objects we collect, value, and hoard, for reasons other than their innate value (I personally have a fondness for crap garden gnomes), say about us. Moreover, this macabre collection in particular is resonant for other, more specific, reasons.
This is because stuffed animals have suddenly become really hot stuff. Taking on a life of its own in London, there isn’t a bar in Bethnal Green that isn’t scattered with a stuffed tiger in a hat or a mounted head or two. You can now also take taxidermy lessons alongside your beau or bestie, taking selfies holding up tiny mouse organs, whilst sipping fancy cocktails with punny names. The grotesque aspect of this trend takes its form in the penchant for anthropomorphic taxidermy in particular; dressing up mice in clothes and posing them alongside other rodents with hats, newspapers and pipes on a park bench in the style of Walter Potter’s triumph of the Victorian bizarre with his kitten tea parties.
A dedicated print publication called #taximag includes an interview with one artist who poses tiny superheroes riding astride stuffed birds, as well as features on a fashion shoot set-designer who likes to incorporate displays of feathers and fur alongside, well, other feathers and fur on human beings. There is also a particularly niche (if you can believe it can get any nicher) offshoot of taxidermy in the prizing of disfigured animals; calves with two heads or cats with wings sewn onto their backs, that have a whiff of the morbidity of The Human Centipede about them. The interest in fashioning or sourcing anatomical abominations taps into a kind of conceited belief in the human power of arranging life; a Frankensteinian revenge on our sense of our own vulnerability to higher powers who, like little boys, treat us like flies and ‘kill us for their sport’.
It would be easy to dismiss taxidermy’s appeal purely because of a squeamishness or proclivity to hipster-bashing. What the classes at Viktor Wynd’s Hackney-based ‘Last Tuesday Society’ museum and bar involve, however, is a realisation of the fragility of life.
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While delicately sliding a scalpel under a mouse’s fur, peeling back its flesh tentatively so as not to rip it, and pulling out organs carefully so as not to rupture them, it would be impossible not to step outside of your jelly-shoes and beanie combo for a moment and consider the wider picture.
Taxidermy becomes an art, rather than an artefact or novelty item, when it makes us view our own condition with a kind of empathetic poignancy. The bedecking of animal corpses with pearls, reminiscent of the bejewelled living tortoise featured in Brideshead Revisited, forces the viewer to ask the uncomfortable question of whether its now-valuable shell will be reused after it dies.
Meanwhile, the artist Casper Grooters’ work with chicks that are sourced from the by-products of an overzealous battery-farm egg industry shows us our own responsibility for thousands of deaths, as most male chicks are thrown wholesale into wood chippers as soon as they are born for their inability to lay eggs. The effect of Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, when you stand facing its open jaws, comes from an unavoidable realisation of the inescapable, and therefore egalitarian, fact of death.
So while you might dismiss the stuffed fox with a monocle staring you down in your local boozer as a mere fad, or a revival of a kind of perverse pleasure in niche, aristocratic pursuits, take a second look at the place where its eyes used to be.
