Paper short abstract:

In taxidermy, boundaries between art and craft are explored and challenged as skill and expertise meet with creative tension. Triumph of craft or appropriation by art, taxidermy’s recent revival calls for an ethnographic inquiry into an imitative skill and its relation to aesthetics and creativity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an ethnographic take on taxidermy, a practice that brings together craftsmen and artists, where boundaries between art and craft are explored and challenged as skill and expertise meet with creative tension. Taxidermy, long associated with big game hunting and Victorian kitsch, is experiencing an intriguing revival and a reversal of its fate in terms of aesthetic and artistic appreciation. In contemporary art, taxidermy is decidedly in vogue. Artists are increasingly invited to intervene in museum collections of trophies burdened with colonial history. They rummage the stores to fill present-day cabinets of curiosities or arrange mounts in surprising juxtapositions, seeking to revive a spirit of play that was lost with the rise of scientific classification. Others mount their own specimens, with mixed results according to professional taxidermists, or have them made to order to feature in trendy installations. Taxidermy in contemporary art, and its revival in the museum space, has also led to a keen scholarly interest. Art historian Steve Baker, for one, has argued that in postmodern art, creativity is considered to be at odds with expertise, calling for 'botched taxidermy'. In my paper, I will explore the links between expertise and creativity and question their alleged opposition in craft-versus-art terms by engaging the audience in dialectics between craftsmen and artists at several workshops organized by the UK Guild of taxidermists and between trophies and artworks as they emerge on the premises of a Dutch taxidermy firm.