Category: taxidermy

I’m working on an essay that’s mostly a revision and updating of my series of Taxidermy in Trouble posts from a while back. In doing some research on big-city taxidermy classes marketed to hipsters, I found this article on Atlantic.com. Here’s a bit from the second page:

The actual procedure of taxidermy varies from animal to animal, but it always starts the same: with a longitudinal incision down the animal’s midline — a great big cut from neck to nethers

A couple years back, I wrote a book on taxidermy. Here’s how it opens:

To skin an animal, you start with a single cut somewhere around the throat and draw the knife downward in a thin, straight line to the nethers. It’s a lot like unzipping a fly. The thrush. The tomcat. The tusker. The beginning is always the same: a single cut. After this beginning, every animal presents its own challenges, the idiosyncrasies of its own terrain.

So I had a taste for the florid. I had 75 thousand more words to write! At any rate, it’s not like the way to skin an animal is my idea, but reading the piece I saw a little piece of my work in it, which is the first time that’s happened.

Earlier in the article, the guy references “at least three full-length books [that] have documented the growing taxidermy subculture.” I wonder if I can get him to write a blurb: “The Authentic Animal is one of at least three full-length books I scanned the beginnings of to put an article together once.”

Kind words on the whole from the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Readers may find that Madden’s genre-blending approach to taxidermy makes for an uneven book. Some of his personal digressions are tedious, while other side trips are fascinating. Generally, though, Madden’s prose is a joy to read; some passages strike me as poetry: “Every animal dies. Taxidermy is what comes next.”

And Madden’s claims about taxidermy are almost always thought-provoking. Most memorably, he argues that taxidermists are among our most fervent animal lovers: “A taxidermized animal is a remembered animal, a memorialized animal, and something memorialized is something loved.”

It’s been a common critique: rambling, digressive, uneven. I wouldn’t know how else to write a book. Or, well, that’s not true. Like: what book on taxidermy needs chitchat on the Dave Coulier-co-hosted America’s Funniest People or 250+ words on Camper Van Beethoven CD longboxes?

Mine did, turns out. This stuff is easy enough to identify and cut out of any manuscript. I never really gave it much thought as to why it got there in the first draft and stayed in through the end, but if I had to defend it today (and I know I don’t), I’d point to how the nonfiction I want to write reflects the writer’s thinking process so’s to induce such a process in his reader.

Digressively is how I think. Here’s something else I’d argue: same as everyone.

I.
A moral conviction, in taxidermy or other matters, leads more often to orthodoxy than clarity.

From that Cleveland Plain Dealer article on one boutique’s taxidermy class, mentioned in Part 1:

“Having a young designer doing taxidermy made me think of the cute mice in the movie ‘Dinner for Schmucks’ and not animals hunted for the purpose of stuffing them,” [shop owner] Squire said. “That does not appeal to me in any way.”

Squire’s giving voice to a recurrent bit of sanctimony among new, urban taxidermists: that one’s material come from “ethically sourced” animals (i.e., roadkill, deceased pets, pets killed at the vet’s, pets frozen into food for other pets). It’s like buying meat at Whole Foods, and it’s about reassurance. Taxidermy isn’t about dominion necessarily, but it’s a display of our dominion over the animal kingdom. Like it or not, animals have yet to find a way to skin us and pose us in zoomorphic tableaux. It’s icky and gross, this realization, but not half as gross as working rhetorically hard to convince yourself otherwise.

From that Jezebel article also mentioned:

If you ever taxidermized a thing before, you know where the “X-eyes” of death in cartoons come from, and you’re familiar with that feeling you have by time you actually get to them, when you poke around the socket and squeeze them out and replace them with a bead or pushpin or other tiny human-created nugget, which is that you actually feel like you’re doing the thing a favor because it looks approximately one thousand percent less dead, and then you realize you’ve just landed in the Venn Diagram overlap of funeral home embalmers and serial killers. Oops!

Cheers to her proper verbing. Jeers to “approximately one thousand percent.” And neither cheers nor jeers to her warmly embraced act of dominion here. It’s very hard to argue that any animal is done a favor by being skinned and posed for our visual pleasure. Trust me, I tried. But it’s an available lie to tell ourselves as a way to justify the work we do as taxidermists, and so let’s all repeat it: taxidermy is a way to honor a dead animal.
Continue reading Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 3

I.
AMC’s Immortalized is the competitive taxidermy show I’ve all been waiting for. Nothing reveals taxidermy’s artistry more clearly than watching four taxidermists with clipboards peer point blank into the eye of a wood duck. There’s as much pawing at the goods as at an AKC dog show. What I learned from spending three days at the World Taxidermy Championships is that, while I was drawn to the enormous displays of megafauna posed with backdrops and dioramic elements, to a taxidermy judge, size does not matter.

How peculiar, then, to find that the theme for the premiere episode of Immortalized was “Size Matters”.

The show’s Iron Chef with dead animals. Swap out Iron Chefs for “Immortalizers” (two of whom are rogue taxidermists, one of whom will not be mentioned by name in these posts), the “secret ingredient” for the “theme”, and rather than watch taxidermists do their work within an hour, “send” them home to do their work while a camera crew records it. There are three judges. One is Paul Rhymer, former (alas) head taxidermist at the Smithsonian, and a man so tall I had to lift my chin upward to look him in the eye. Another is Catherine “The Diva of Death” Coan, a non-founding member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists—an organization only nominally Minnesotan that helps promote the work of rogues around the world. The third is comedian Brian Posehn.

Why is it Brian Posehn? Why a comedian? The show’s host, Zach Selwyn, has released four comedy albums, the latest of which is titled Moose Knuckle. Comedian Blaine Capatch is listed as a “creative consultant”. I laughed exactly twice during the premiere. First was in surprise when Posehn was introduced. Second was during the judges’ critique, when Posehn lauded the work of the challenger—a man who poses insects in fancy tableaux (more on this in a bit)—by saying, “How crazy it is, having a guy being tied down by bugs. It reminds me of a party at Andy Dick’s house.”

This is the show’s only moment of intended humor. Taxidermy is too often a laughable enterprise (see yesterday’s array of crappy taxidermy blogs), and those of us interested in it sometimes need to work to make it appear as something interesting and honorable. Immortalized does this with a deathful seriousness (Do low strings play furiously à la Survivor‘s tribal council before the judges’ verdict is spoken? Absolutely. Is that decision delayed by multiple quick closeups? Yes.) that becomes laughable and drains from taxidermy all of its fun and joy.
Continue reading Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 2

I.
You know taxidermy’s past whatever moment it had when a man who wrote a book about the subject no longer wants to pay close attention.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would never admit that taxidermy is in a bad way. After shows on Animal Planet and [the] History [Network], we’ve now got one on the Mad Men/Breaking Bad network (about which more to come), and Rachel Poliquin’s book on taxidermy and longing was part of the New York Times‘s 2012 Holiday Gift Guide. The Taxidermy Moment—which I’ll argue began around April 2007 (with articles in both New York and the New York Times on the rise of trophy-head decor) and hit its apex with Chuck Testa in fall 2011—we’re still, it seems, in the heat of.

The trouble is that shitwork has taken center stage, and nobody’s calling it out for the shitwork that it is.

II.
I got excited when I first discovered rogue taxidermy, from a supermarket tabloid article a grad-school friend handed me in the halls back in 2006. I was (as is my gift) able immediately to see the obvious: by calling attention to the very tools and techniques of taxidermic practice, rogue taxidermists were the modern painters to traditional taxidermists’ 19th-century academy-style representationalists. Why work so hard to make an animal look lifelike when everyone knew it wasn’t alive? Why dissolve your artistry into something naturalist and invisible?

Then I wrote the book and learned two things:

1. How to read the artistry in a traditional museum-style piece.
2. How taxidermy can honor—and dishonor—a dead animal.

I guess my interests got recalibrated. To use an apt metaphor for it, I’d need to be a far better writer. If I’d be allowed a clunky metaphor, it was that the push my brain got from rogue taxidermy was like being in a wagon on a snowy field. Whereas the push I got from traditional taxidermy was a set of skis on a steep, slick slope. Traditional taxidermy told me a lot about our relationship with animals and nature. Rogue taxidermy told me a lot about our relationship with taxidermy. I took the grander subject and I ran with it.
Continue reading Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 1

Please answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper and turn this sheet and your answers back in to the instructor when you have completed the quiz.

1. What was the name of the murderer and grave robber from Plainfield, Wisconsin who decorated his house with human body parts?
A. Norman Bates
B. Robert Bloch
C. Edward Gein
D. Buffalo Bill
E. Thomas Harris

2. Who is perhaps the most famous “victim” of human preservation? (Hint: he brought about the rise of communism in Russia).
A. Josef Stalin
B. Ed Gein
C. Karl Marx
D. Vladimir Lenin
E. Gunther von Hagens

3. What group of human beings was likely used in Bodies . . . The Exhibition?
A. Executed Chinese prisoners
B. Volunteers from around the world
C. Victims of cancer
D. Individuals who died in auto fatalities

4. Who is the author of Animal Liberation? (Hint: It is referred to in The Authentic Animal as the PETA bible).
A. Carl Ackeley [sic]
B. Peter Singer
C. John Harvey Kellogg
D. Mary Jobe Akeley

5. What name did Carl Akeley give to the orphaned gorilla that one of his guides speared after he shot its mother?

Clarence.

[From my pal Cody Lumpkin’s fall 2011 1st-year writing class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.]

[Thanks to anyone who’s been reading these outtakes the past eight weeks. I thought I’d finish this series by posting the very first thing I wrote about taxidermy, way back in the spring of 2004. This was the beginning of an essay for a nature writing class taught by the biologist and writer John Janovy. It’s hard, exactly, to say how this became the seed of a book, but instead of going into it I thought I’d just give you the seed itself.

Again, thanks for reading and everyone’s excitement and support. If you haven’t yet done so, you can still pre-order The Authentic Animal on Amazon.com. Those of you who’ve got a copy coming already, thank you. I hope you like it.]

The east end of the fifth floor of Nebraska Hall on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s campus is maybe half-den, half-museum. It’s here that the tens of thousands of specimens that the university owns are kept in storage for study by students and scientists. But it’s also here that much of the Elgin Gates Collection hangs, lining the halls with animal heads in a way you may have experienced in certain nightmares. Dr. John Janovy, professor of biology, lets me in through the security door, and a bison head looms immediately to our left. Ahead of us is a row of oryxes, with their tall, ribbed horns and long, sad faces. There’s something peculiar about these animals, a kind of deadness that extends beyond the obvious. It’s another moment or two of staring and note-taking before I realize it’s the eyes. Instead of plastic or glass facsimiles, the eye sockets of these oryxes—all of them—have been filled with opaque, black spheres. They might be wooden, but I can’t be sure. I’m afraid to touch them. It’s like looking into a well, or a telescope with the lens cap on.
Continue reading The Authentic Animal: Final Outtake

[After the elephant, the gorilla was Carl Akeley’s greatest love. He went to Africa for the fourth time in 1921 to collect three for the American Museum of Natural History, and came back with those three, as well as a new resolve to help preserve the animal. In the mythos of Carl Akeley, this trip was a transformative one, the redemptive act in the narrative of his life.

What follows is a bit about the mountain gorilla that got cut from the book. Mostly to trim what is still, in the end, a perhaps exceedingly long final chapter. Maybe this is how it works. Maybe you get to what you know is your book’s final chapter and suddenly it’s Oh, damn, I have so much more to pack in here.

For more on Carl and gorillas, be sure to check out Jay Kirk’s biography of Carl Akeley that came out last year.]
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 7: Gorilla gorilla.

It’s hard to write a book on taxidermy and not write about hunting. It kept coming up. I would write about hunting, and then I would tell myself my book is about taxidermy and not about hunting. That hunting is, yes, often the process that begins a work of taxidermy, but not always. And then I’d think more about it and decide to write about hunting again.

The book’s final chapter eventually tries to reckon with the ethics surrounding taxidermy’s dead-animal prerequisite. What follows is a much clunkier way of writing about all this than what (I hope) I eventually got to in the final draft. And note, once again, how doggedly I tried to work Architectonica perspectiva into the book!

(Many thanks to Adam Peterson for his help and advice on this section of the book.)

===

[Anti-t]axidermy protests tend not to get covered in the media outside of online forums among taxidermists, and indeed it’s the Internet that has made whatever outrage ever existed toward taxidermy grow and spread among those who may never have thought they were against it until a URL was sent their way, or a search turned up something unwanted, or they got forwarded one of a million effectless online petitions. Like the one against Art by God, a Web site that sells “natures [sic] art of earth’s wonders”—essentially fossils and skins and other such animal products. The petition argues that “[t]he global awareness as to the sanctity of wildlife, and man’s duty to preserve same is an ethos which obviously does not fit in with [Art by God’s] trade,” and asks not that the company stop selling animal parts, but merely that it change its name.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 6: Ethical Reckonings

[The following outtake is very, very bad. You’ve been warned.

The life and work of Carl Akeley, considered by many to be the father of modern taxidermy owing to certain innovations in mounting he helped to develop in the late 19th century, forms a kind of spine for the book. I deployed him to hinge thereon much of what I wanted to write about: pet taxidermy, competitive taxidermy, taxidermy schools, etc.

Earlier drafts did a lot more fictive biographizing than does the final book, I think. Back then I believed more in Akeley’s heroism, and I trusted too fully the accounts that had been written about his life. Over time, this changed. One of the problems in the book is that I think the writing about Carl is inconsistent. At times I help to build the man, the myth. At times I tear it all down.

In the end, my aim was to convey my personal ambivalence toward this person I’d originally pegged as a hero—dramatic or otherwise. And so the following bits became too grossly manipulative, creating a forced, falsed-up persona to fit my narrative’s needs.]

About a year after Carl arrived in Rochester, looking for work, a man named Will Wheeler started at Ward’s [Natural Science Establishment, where Carl landed his first professional taxidermy gig] and immediately began intense, diligent work on the classification of invertebrates. Shells, mostly. On breaks, Carl would come across cases of seashells in certain corners of the compound, and as Carl’s was the indiscriminate eye of the sculptor, taking in everything and storing it for future use, he could never see any real difference between the specimens Will categorized and named in full. Conus kintoki. Conus virgo. Conus gloriamaris. Carl would read the names printed on little cards pinned to the back of these display cases and he’d pronounce them in with his untrained tongue over and over again until they sounded like a kind of music.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 5: Biographizing.

On vacation this week. My outtake’ll have to be brief. As brief as, say, this swimsuit?

The notion of Miss TASCO 2008—those words, in fact—do appear in the book, but not this image. It came folded up Playboy-style in the 2008 catalogue for the Taxidermy Arts Supply Co., owned and operated by Dan Rinehart.

Mr. Rinehart: I thank you once again for letting me hang out in your taxidermy school for a day and take notes and ask people questions. I did my best to honor your students and you and the work you’ve accomplished with your school and supply company. Please don’t sue me for posting this image here.

The rumor is that Ms. Rezendes was a former student of Rinehart’s School of Taxidermy. Even less surprising: there are no more planned Miss TASCOs for the future. The shame about this is that in 2009, TASCO launched its CAD Series of deerforms, which come no only with preset eyes, but also pre-sculpted and pre-painted nostrils.

It woulda made a splash draped by a model.

Pre-order The Authentic Animal on Amazon.com

[Last week, my outtakes got linked to on the taxidermy.net forums, where taxidermists go to help each other on such tricky items as painting an elk eye or tanning a snake skin. If you want to know a thing about taxidermists, you should know that every one I ever asked questions of answered them in a way that was friendly and quick (the one exception being a certain NYC-based “rogue taxidermist” so self-involved and rude I dropped him from the book and hope his career has ended and ended tragically. At taxidermy.net, there’s also a lot of arguing—it’s an Internet discussion board, so this is no surprise. They argue about the work of taxidermy, sure, but also about the taxidermy industry as a whole. They argue about competitions and judging and awards. They argue about current events. It’s what every subculture does online.

I bring it up only to state an ongoing concern: I didn’t write The Authentic Animal exclusively for taxidermists, but the book is so much of taxidermists and their work that I hope this subculture likes the book. I hope I did some justice.

In honor of my being linked to on taxidermy.net, I’ve chosen the following outtake. I think it got cut for two reasons. First, there’s this forced and confounding queer-history metaphor I try and fail to deploy. Second, it’s the bit where I try to get a handle on the history of taxidermists’ organizations. It’s a good history, and I think it’s an important one to get down in writing. It turned out, though, not to fit in with the chapter on taxidermy competition as well as I would have liked it to. It also turned out that I wasn’t the person to write this history.]

—
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 3: National Taxidermists’ Organizations

[Keeping the outtakes coming with the other outtake from my visit to the 2007 World Taxidermy Championships, which had taxidermists from more than 16 different countries in attendance. Even so, the ceremony (and this passage in the book proper) began with a singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and only “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Also, remember especially toward the end that this happened in the spring of 2007. The specificity of the references may be one reason this bit got cut out.]

—

Larry [Blomquist] introduces Mike Kirkhart, one of the fish judges who is here to give an “incovation.” I admit to being completely ignorant to what such a thing might be. Exactly what could posssibly be invoked at a taxidermy competition’s awards banquet? Kirkhart is a tall man with silver hair on his round, round face, and at the podium he tells some old yarn about a man named Bubba, who converts to Catholicism, being told by the priest that he was born a Baptist, he was raised a Baptist, but that now he’s a Catholic. Still, though, Bubba grills venison on Fridays, to the confusion of his Catholic neighbors. Eventually they investigate, and everyone comes to find out that just before putting the steaks on the grill, Bubba makes the sign of the cross over the meat and saying, “You were born a deer, you were raised a deer, but now you’re a catfish.”

Kirkhart knows his audience, and the joke fucking kills. Hoots and hollers fill the Expo Hall, and when it all finally settles down Kirkhart turns to matters more serious: God and taxidermy. “God has give us the beauty of nature,” he says, with the slow and even cadence of a preacher. “Let’s hear a round of applause, all of you, for loving the Creation so much to make it beautiful in His eyes.”

And before I know it Kirkhart leads the room in the saying of the Lord’s Prayer.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 2: The WTC Awards Ceremony

Despite being the World Taxidermy Championship, the World Taxidermy Championship is a decidedly American affair. It is invariably held in some U.S. city [ed. this is no longer true, in that the 2008 WTC was held way out in Austria], it is owned and operated by a magazine run out of Louisiana, and 90 percent of its competitors and judges are born-and-bred Americans. Europeans form the majority of the few non-Americans in attendance, and their influence at the WTC is compounded by the fact that 57 percent of the bird judges are European—a bit of a controversy given that bird taxidermy in the Europe is way different from bird taxidermy in the States. Much of the reason behind this is legal. Here, it’s illegal to mount any bird that it’s not legal to hunt. So: turkey, grouse, pheasants, ducks, etc. These birds are, pardon the pun, fair game for taxidermists. Your pet parakeet? Not fair game. The dead owl you find in the barn one morning? No, sir. No matter what the cause of death, if you come upon the carcass of a migratory or non-game bird, all you can do is call your local Game and Parks and they’ll come over and take the bird off your hands and find some way to dispose of it.

Europe, by comparison, is a bird taxidermist’s paradise. As long as the taxidermist is licensed, anything that dies of natural causes can be mounted—a falcon, a grackle, your budgie. European taxidermists deal with a vaster array of bird species than do Americans, and as such they’ve spent far more time studying the subtle physiological differences among those species.

Which brings us to the first-ever World Avian Challenge, a small side competition at the WTC in which competitors all mount the same bird in the exact same pose. Whoever most successfully captures the pose is declared winner. This year’s challenge is the Hungarian partridge—a brown-grey bird about the size of a volleyball, with an orange face and a bold black bead of an eye. Breakthrough [Magazine, corporate sponsor/host of the WTC] published back in January a photographic reference all contestants would use, showing a partridge stepping to the left with its head turned just to the right. This is all the contestants have. This and whatever experience they might claim with birds in general and the Hungarian partridge in specific.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 1: The World Avian Challenge

We’re just about eight weeks away from TAA‘s official release. (Not much more time to or on Barnes & Noble!) For those eager to find out what someone can say about taxidermy for 90,000 words, I’ve decided to launch each of those eight weeks with some outtakes.

Researching a nonfiction book is like shooting a documentary film. (I imagine?) You end up gathering way more material than you’re able to use. So at varying points in the writing and editing process, this and other stuff gets cut out. In the case of “the Animal” (can I try this, this nickname?), some of it made whatever chapter stray too far from its focus. Some of it was me indulging whims and interests no other person would ever care to follow. Some of it was just confusing and bad.

And now you’ll get to read it all!

I’ll start tomorrow, with a piece about the first-ever World Avian Challenge—a bizarre and tense side competition at the 2007 World Taxidermy Championships. Here’s, um…. Here’s sort of what it looked like:

That in the background there? That’s a griffin made from a stillborn lion cub, of course.

Remember when TLC was going to run a taxidermy special, which it then scheduled to air March 10 and then for whatever reason tabled for who knows when?

Well now the History Channel (which is weirdly trying to brand itself as, simply, “History”—as though the network were some sort of televised embodiment of all that’s come before us) has jumped on the taxidermy bandwagon with, wait for it, Mounted in Alaska (mountedinalaska.com was bought on Valentine’s Day this year, but nothing there as of yet). The network ordered 15 episodes, premiering April 7.

I don’t have cable. I’ll have to steal it from the Internet.

Russell Knight’s the central character of the show. I’ve never heard of him; not that I’m any sort of expert. Looking at his Web site’s pics it seems the guy does a lot of bears. Which may explain why taxidermy‘s Wikipedia page (an utter fucking wreck, pardon my French, which is a post for another time) claims the following:

Taxidermists seek to continually maintain their skills to ensure attractive, life-like results. Many taxidermists in the USA use bears, though some use creatures such as snakes, birds and fish.

Um, no. Really? No. Or well: fine, but now define many. That deer doesn’t appear anywhere on this page means the whole thing’s a dumb hilarious mess, like Michelle Bachman wanting to be U.S. president.

But Knight’s in Alaska, so natürlich he mounts bears. Ten bucks says there’s a moose in the premiere.