Websites such as Crappy Taxidermy reveal how the role of the taxidermied animal has changed dramatically. No longer a definitive source of scientific information and knowledge, the taxidermied animal becomes either vehicle for ethical and aesthetic considerations or a source of amusement and entertainment.
Such a change in status is partly attributable to changing scientific practices. As Susan Leigh Star argues, “the industrialization of biology at the turn of the [twentieth] century negatively affected the status of taxidermy as a scientific field, in fact returned it to the status of a hobby” (258). The erasure of the “materials and tools” of scientific practice risks the erasure of the “politics of science and technology”: “It is precisely in this mess of practice that much of the gender, class, and racial politics of science are to be found. This is because it is in the selection of materials, the conduct of menial and manual labor in the laboratory, the choice of specimens, and the designation of what is unsavory that specifies whose voice will be heard as the legitimate voice of science” (258-259).
Crappy Taxidermy
In being viewed increasingly as a hobby, and a weird, quirky one at that, taxidermy lends itself to kitsch and humor, including Crappy Taxidermy. Started by Kat Su in 2009, Crappy Taxidermy proudly proclaims that it is “the Internet's largest image depository of crappy and awesome taxidermy” (Crappy Taxidermy). Kat Su started Crappy Taxidermy to keep track “of every bug-eyed, misshapen, bizarre, awkward, or just-plain-wrong piece of taxidermy that [she] was able to find online. As the site grew, readers started submitting photographs of their own taxidermy, and sightings of crappy taxidermy that they had found in museums, roadside attractions, stores, art galleries, or people’s homes” (2).
The collection of images on the website ranges from anthropomorphic taxidermy and weird taxidermy creations using various animal bodies to sincere, but failed, attempts at naturalistic taxidermy.
In discussing the use of taxidermy in contemporary art, Helen Gregory and Anthony Purdy argue that “the biological material of an animal [is treated] as an expressive substance”: “Once an animal is dead, its flesh becomes raw material in the hands of the artist-taxidermist and, although it is still an animal, it can also be classed as an object. It is, however, a very particular type of object, one that gives rise to an array of semiotic possibilities” (61-62).
However, this move towards using an animal’s biological material as expressive substance is not restricted to contemporary art, as one of the posts to Crappy Taxidermy makes plain. Along with the myriad present-day photographs of crappy taxidermy, the website features a carte de visite of a grizzly-bear chair created by the hunter Seth Kinman and presented to Andrew Johnson in 1865. The grizzly-bear chair attests to humans’ long-standing use of animal bodies as material for aesthetic purposes. Yet the chair’s inclusion as a digital image shows how such profoundly material and embodied creations become disembodied through digitization.
See William Fitzgerald’s 1896 article “Animal Furniture” from Strand Magazine, which catalogues several examples of furniture created from animals including a tiger chair and lamps made from swans and emus.
The emphasis in Crappy Taxidermy is on the distanced viewing of the taxidermied animal body. Viewers of the website do not come into direct contact with these animals nor are they occupying the same physical space as would be the case in viewing taxidermied animals in person at a museum. The animal bodies of Crappy Taxidermy have been photographed and digitized, further removing them from their original embodiment as living creatures.
Digitized animal bodies can circulate more freely and widely than the original animal specimens ever could, and are capable of being viewed by anyone with an internet connection. Physical decay and decomposition no longer pose a threat to the animal body, now preserved as a digital presence. Such freedom and accessibility of the digitized animal body occurs alongside increasing threats to real animals out in the world.