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Competing Ideas, Competing Institutions: Decorative versus Scientific Taxidermy at the Carnegie and Field Museums

Mary Anne Andrei

in Nature's Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America's Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species

In the 1890s, the United States experienced a boom in the establishment of new museums, but no two were more important than the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of ... More

In the 1890s, the United States experienced a boom in the establishment of new museums, but no two were more important than the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Each was founded with money from a single philanthropist—Marshall Field in Chicago, Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh—who wished to build for his city a crown jewel of enlightenment. To fill their grand exhibit halls, the Field hired Carl E. Akeley, and the Carnegie hired Frederic S. Webster. Both were former foremen of the taxidermy department at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, but they espoused competing ideas about taxidermy. Akeley believed that successful museum taxidermy should seamlessly join art and science, while Webster believed that taxidermy was a decorative art and that the museum’s emphasis on science confined the taxidermist’s artistic expression. Akeley’s vision would soon win out. His desire to merge scientific and decorative taxidermy coincided not only with the rise of natural history museums, but also with a growing wildlife conservation movement in the United States. This confluence promised museum displays that combined all the advanced techniques of taxidermy with the latest scientific information, informing and influencing the public.Less

I Am Collecting Beautiful Objects: Michel Gondry’s Taxidermy of Emotions

Jenny Pyke

in ReFocus: The Films of Michel Gondry

Continuing both the examination of the materiality of objects and the employment of frameworks from contemporary art, this chapter by Jenny Pyke uses a comparison with taxidermy as an art form to ... More

Continuing both the examination of the materiality of objects and the employment of frameworks from contemporary art, this chapter by Jenny Pyke uses a comparison with taxidermy as an art form to explore the way that Gondry creates objects infused with affect, not because of what they represent but because of how they are constructed. Like examples of taxidermy, these objects both contain a material history and generate sensation through their feeling of hapticity. This chapter explains how objects in The Science of Sleep function not only as containers of emotion but also as points of connection between the lovers Stéphane and Stéphanie, who communicate and share their way of seeing and imagining the world through objects and build relationships in tandem with their construction.Less

“Breathing New Life into Stuffed Animals”: The Society of American Taxidermists

Mary Anne Andrei

in Nature's Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America's Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species

The Society of American Taxidermists (1880-1885), founded by William T. Hornaday and Frederic A. Lucas, promoted in the United States Sir William Henry Flower’s new museum idea, by encouraging ... More

The Society of American Taxidermists (1880-1885), founded by William T. Hornaday and Frederic A. Lucas, promoted in the United States Sir William Henry Flower’s new museum idea, by encouraging museums to mount public displays with an educational purpose. The society’s mission was to have naturalistic taxidermy serve a dual purpose as both an object of fine art and as a museum specimen valued as an educational object that could be used in habitat dioramas to inform the public about the natural world. In less than five years, its founders created the new American taxidermy movement and successfully forced a dramatic paradigm shift in museum display, which has not been challenged for more than a century. With the successful public reception of the new taxidermy, American natural history museum directors could no longer afford to display synoptic rows of single mounted specimens, as visitors expected to see more lifelike, artistically prepared taxidermy mounts presented in appropriate habitat settings. Because the society had effected such a fundamental change in museum display, American natural history museums evolved into educational institutions that influenced the way the American public came to view animals and their habitats.Less

Introduction: Passionate Encounters with Animals in Everyday Life—Beyond the Mainstream

Jane C. Desmond

in Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life

In the book’s introduction, Desmond explains the terminology she will use to describe relations involving humans and animals and provides an overview of the book’s tripartite structure. She discusses ... More

In the book’s introduction, Desmond explains the terminology she will use to describe relations involving humans and animals and provides an overview of the book’s tripartite structure. She discusses the challenges and particularities of the academic and scientific field of “animal studies”, as well as the functionality of experience and her own anxieties about what “animals” are actually involved in animal studies. Desmond wraps up the introduction with a general statement about the book’s purpose, and her hopes that it will help us understand how so many arenas of everyday life unfold in an embodied concert with animals.Less

Postmortem Exhibitions: Taxidermied Animals and Plastinated Corpses in the Theaters of the Dead

Jane C. Desmond

in Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life

In this chapter, Desmond compares the phemomena of dead human and dead animal body displays and explores which aspects of the conventions of taxidermy are carried over into Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s ... More

In this chapter, Desmond compares the phemomena of dead human and dead animal body displays and explores which aspects of the conventions of taxidermy are carried over into Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibitions of plastinated human cadavers. She suggests that even though both display bodies in aesthetically framed ways, the Body Worlds exhibit is a form of “antitaxidermy” and this distinction is key to the exhibit’s success. Through her analysis, Desmond shows how notions of human specificity, universality, and social differentiation are inscribed in or on the body in ways that are fundamentally different from those of nonhuman animals. She also discusses taxidermy, which she argues is a distinctive way of human relating with dead animals that melds uniqueness and genericism.Less

Inside “Animal” and Outside “Culture”: The Limits to “Sameness” and Rhetorics of Salvation in von Hagens’s Animal Inside Out Body Worlds Exhibition

Jane C. Desmond

in Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life

In this chapter, Desmond analyses the Body Worlds exhibit and the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in terms of the arguments they present and their potential ... More

In this chapter, Desmond analyses the Body Worlds exhibit and the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in terms of the arguments they present and their potential effects on viewers. She asks what is different between displays featuring human cadavers and those featuring dead animal bodies. Desmond argues that just as the human Body Worlds exhibits were, the animal exhibit is built on a series of omissions that construct its ultimate argument, but that these omissions differ from those that were essential to the human shows. Additionally, she discusses how the materialization of this newest exhibit takes place under a set of specific conditions of possibility, and those conditions are different for the human and the animal exhibits.Less

Bringing Life to Natural History

in Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

This chapter describes taxidermy and museum collections in relation to natural history. Philipp Leopold Martin's aim was to raise the profile of practice within natural history and simultaneously to ... More

This chapter describes taxidermy and museum collections in relation to natural history. Philipp Leopold Martin's aim was to raise the profile of practice within natural history and simultaneously to make living nature more accessible. A picture of the political economy of natural history in the German states is presented. A central theme of Martin's Praxis of Natural History was a reformist impulse to reconstruct dead animals in a way that was both “natural” and “lively.” Martin knew of both Herrmann Ploucquet's and Franz Leven's work and may have been inspired by them to pursue his own path to a private museum of animal reconstructions in the mid-1860s. The museums of Martin, Ploucquet, and Leven might be viewed as “public” in the sense of seeking a general audience, but they differed from the museums run by states, cities, and voluntary organizations.Less

Still/Moving: Bestiaire’s Lives in Limbo

Laura McMahon

in Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time

This chapter explores Côté’s Bestiaire, an experimental documentary about a zoo that initially seems in thrall to Bazin’s idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Exploring the ... More

This chapter explores Côté’s Bestiaire, an experimental documentary about a zoo that initially seems in thrall to Bazin’s idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Exploring the exhibition of animals both living and dead, still and moving, Côté’s film invokes two key metaphorical positionings (cinema as zoo/taxidermy), privileging a self-reflexive form of ontological investigation. This chapter traces these ontological investments by drawing on accounts such as Lippit on the ‘electric’ animal, Bellour on hypnotic animal images and Haraway on taxidermy. Folded into Bestiaire’s set of somewhat essentialising, ontologising reflections, however, is an implicit questioning of the politics of the zoo and its links to biopower, neocolonialism, captivity and suffering. Structured by these tensions between the ontological, the aesthetic and the political, Bestiaire reflects on the zoo both as a metaphor for cinematic ‘animality’ qua cinematic specificity and as a set of lived, material conditions. While Bestiaire’s distension of ‘dead time’ keeps the focus above all on questions of captivity – its durational aesthetic bearing witness to lives left in limbo – its Deleuzian time-images invite attentiveness to animal worlds of embodiment, perception and meaning-making that reach beyond the biopolitical grid of imprisoned life.Less

Introduction

Mary Anne Andrei

in Nature's Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America's Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species

The taxidermists who trained at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, in the 1870s and 1880s, formed a uniquely important cohort of “museum men” and early conservationists. ... More

The taxidermists who trained at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, in the 1870s and 1880s, formed a uniquely important cohort of “museum men” and early conservationists. William Hornaday, Carl Akeley, along with their lesser known colleagues Frederic Lucas, Charles Townsend, and Frederic Webster revolutionized the world of museum display and permanently reshaped the public’s understanding of the natural world. Their work led to the creation of America’s major zoos and laid the foundations of the modern wildlife conservation movement. The new taxidermy of the nineteenth century owed a debt to the taxidermists and preservationists who came before them. It wasn’t until the 1800s that methods had progressed enough to set a lasting standard for the preservation of natural history collections. It was on this foundation that taxidermists of Ward’s were able to innovate methods of public display that emphasized accurate anatomy and aesthetic design that portrayed life and action. Their wildlife exhibits were meant to capture the interest and attention of the public to educate them about species and their habitats, and in many instances raise awareness of the devastating effects of careless human interaction with the natural world.Less

“A Gathering Place for Amateur Naturalists”: Ward’s and the Birth of the Habitat Group

Mary Anne Andrei

in Nature's Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America's Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species

Ward’s Natural Science Establishment played a foundational role in America’s new taxidermy movement. In 1862, Henry A. Ward founded the establishment in Rochester, New York, to serve as a natural ... More

Ward’s Natural Science Establishment played a foundational role in America’s new taxidermy movement. In 1862, Henry A. Ward founded the establishment in Rochester, New York, to serve as a natural history specimen supply house for universities and museums. Ward hired European taxidermists and osteologists to train and develop new techniques with Americans naturalists, including Frederic Lucas, William Hornaday, Frederic Webster, Charles Townsend, and Carl Akeley. Although Ward did not consider the establishment an educational institution, word continued to spread that it was a training ground for this wholly American school of taxidermy—where the best preparators in the country gathered, practicing a new scientific discipline that was producing mounted specimens superior to any seen in natural history museums throughout Europe. Ward’s taxidermists, eager to transform American taxidermy into a more rigorous, scientifically accurate, and artistic pursuit founded in 1880 the Society of American Taxidermists. After serving as Ward’s primary field collector for most of the 1870s, collecting specimens the world over, William Hornaday was the first of Ward’s taxidermist-naturalists to mount a habitat group, and he was offered positions at the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History.Less

“Brightest Africa”: Carl Akeley and the American Museum’s Race to Bring Africa to America

Mary Anne Andrei

in Nature's Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America's Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species

In 1911, Carl Akeley assumed his new position as chief taxidermist of the American Museum of Natural History, where he hoped to bring together his improved method of taxidermy and his idea of ... More

In 1911, Carl Akeley assumed his new position as chief taxidermist of the American Museum of Natural History, where he hoped to bring together his improved method of taxidermy and his idea of curved-back dioramas to make a record of Africa’s fast-disappearing fauna. Akeley’s plan for a hall of African wildlife was ambitious and unlike anything previously attempted in a natural history museum. The overall design would represent the range of the continent’s ecosystems, complete with flora and fauna. Through a collaborative effort between Akeley and the scientists who were gathering new data about the animals’ habitats and behavior, the museum would have the most scientifically accurate exhibit of African wildlife anywhere in the world. Akeley’s development of a new concept of museum display that successfully merged scientific and decorative taxidermy coincided not only with the rise of public exhibition space in natural history museums, but also with a growing wildlife conservation movement in the United States. This confluence promised museum displays that combined all the advanced techniques of taxidermy with the latest scientific information—presented in an accessible language meant to inform, and in some instances influence, museum visitors to embrace an environmental ethic.Less

Epilogue

Mary Anne Andrei

in Nature's Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America's Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species

In the brief history of American museum taxidermy, the natural history museum shifted its focus from pure research to include dissemination of knowledge through exhibits and public education. The ... More

In the brief history of American museum taxidermy, the natural history museum shifted its focus from pure research to include dissemination of knowledge through exhibits and public education. The taxidermists of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment—William T. Hornaday, Frederic A. Lucas, Charles H. Townsend, Frederic S. Webster, and Carl E. Akeley—shaped and defined the public side of American natural history museums, zoos, and aquaria through their technical advances in taxidermy, innovative exhibit design, and distinctive educational content. As they transformed the work of taxidermy from a trade to a museum profession, they revolutionized methods of animal display, transforming exhibits from rows of stuffed specimens with scientific labels to lifelike mounts arranged in family groups, supplemented with photographs and descriptive labels. At the same time, they conceived of an educational directive that would not only teach museum visitors about the natural world, but would instill in them an appreciation for the human role in nature—specifically, the responsibility of humans in preventing the extinction of species.Less

The Black and White

Sara Crosby

in When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers

This chapter recounts how the author found a dead black-and-white warbler many years ago. It details the author's first visit to a taxidermy studio. Even though the idea of having the warbler mounted ... More

This chapter recounts how the author found a dead black-and-white warbler many years ago. It details the author's first visit to a taxidermy studio. Even though the idea of having the warbler mounted and displayed on the author's mantle was irresistible, they knew it was also illegal. In 1918, Congress passed the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or the MBTA. The MBTA saved hundreds of species from the destruction, and sometimes extinction, brought on by the effects of commercial bird trade. It essentially bans any human contact with migratory birds. One may not kill, capture, or pursue them; one may not collect their eggs or nests or even their feathers; and one may not pick them up if they are dead. Taxidermists know all this, and so — with the exception of the permitted, but regulated game birds from hunting — they will not get near a migratory bird. The author then joined a team of local Audubon Society volunteers in order to get a salvage permit, which lets people temporarily possess a migratory bird.Less

Introduction

Scott MacDonald

in The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2)

The introduction creates a context for a wide range of avant-doc films (that is, films that work in the zone between conventional documentary and what has usually been called “avant-garde” ... More

The introduction creates a context for a wide range of avant-doc films (that is, films that work in the zone between conventional documentary and what has usually been called “avant-garde” filmmaking), locating these films within the tradition established a century ago by the development of the habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The habitat diorama provides precise documentation of the specifics of animal life that is, insofar as possible, devoid of political argument. The aim of the habitat diorama, and of the films discussed throughout the book, is to be as purely educational as cinema can be: the creator of the habitat dioramas and the film documents discussed provide precise visions of what the makers believe we need to see, in order to understand more of the world around us.Less

Circulating Objects: Loss and Decay in the American Philosophical Society’s Cabinet

Reed Gochberg

in Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

The chapter explores how early American collections were consistently preoccupied with threats of loss and decay. It focuses on the American Philosophical Society’s cabinet, which was developed ... More

The chapter explores how early American collections were consistently preoccupied with threats of loss and decay. It focuses on the American Philosophical Society’s cabinet, which was developed through the society’s networks of members and correspondents and included specimens, antiquarian artifacts, models, maps, and books. This chapter examines writings by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Charles Willson Peale to show how the uncertainties of attempting to build museum collections informed ongoing conversations about preservation and potential loss. By narratively experimenting with the possibilities of lost or missing information in Letters from an American Farmer and other writings, Crèvecoeur reveals ongoing concern with the longevity and survival of fragile manuscripts and printed texts. Peale similarly takes up questions of preservation, using his skill at taxidermy to promote his relationship with the Society and to link public museums to national stability.Less

Specimen Collectors: Preservation and Classification at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology

Reed Gochberg

in Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

This chapter examines the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and broader conversations about the representation of the natural world as fixed and stable. While the museum’s ... More

This chapter examines the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and broader conversations about the representation of the natural world as fixed and stable. While the museum’s founder, Louis Agassiz, emphasized the value of preserved specimens to research and teaching, many collectors and writers questioned such practices. After donating turtles to the museum, Henry David Thoreau contemplated the ethical and scientific implications of freezing nature for extended study. In children’s fiction, Louisa May Alcott emphasized the relationship between collecting specimens and moral order, while highlighting the growing gendered divide between scientific practice in the museum and the parlor. And in philosophical writings, William James drew on classification to consider more flexible possibilities to fixed theories. These accounts show how writers sought to promote a deeper understanding of flux and change both within the museum and beyond.Less