THE BODY

the botched taxidermy of
angela singer

By Daniel López Fernández

Contemporary art involving live or dead animals, or even animals that are about to die, has provoked harsh critique and outrage from animal rights groups and the broader public. Consider Marco Evaristti’s much discussed installation Helena (2000), which shocked animal rights campaigners and the public like no other work previously had. It featured ten functional blenders containing live goldfish. The artist gave his audience the option of pressing a button on the blenders and obliterating the fish. Spectators thus became simultaneously passive voyeurs and potential killers, with Evaristti passing ethical and moral issues onto them. Of course, more than once gallery visitors pushed the button, leading to a scandal that eventuated in Evaristti being charged with and later acquitted of animal cruelty. It's easy to understand the backlash. Many critics accused Evaristti of turning animal death into a spectacle, while those present at the exhibition reportedly felt pressured to kill the fish in the presence of numerous media representatives. 

Helena is not an isolated case. For instance, Damien Hirst’s This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home (1996), which showed the two halves of a bisected pig stored in tanks of formaldehyde, was opposed by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on the grounds that it contributed to the slaughter of animals for no other reason than the artist’s own aggrandizement. In response to the work, the mayor of New York commented: “I thought that's what they did in biology laboratories, not in museums of art”. [1] In 2007, more than 350,000 signatures were collected worldwide to prevent Guillermo Vargas from representing Costa Rica at the Bienal Centroamericana in Honduras, to which he had been invited on the merits of his work Exposición Nº 1. In this exhibit, a captured street dog was tied to a wall and surrounded by 175 pieces of crack cocaine and an ounce of marijuana. Visitors were instructed not to feed or give water to the dog, which ultimately died of starvation. And in 2017, the controversy involving the exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World prompted an unprecedented 800,000 signatures demanding the removal of controversial works of art and a statement made by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which decided against showing Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (2003), Theatre of the World (1993), and A Case Study of Transference (1994). Particularly problematic was Huang Yong Ping’s Theatre of the World, a cage-like structure where thousands of live insects, lizards, snakes, and spiders were trapped to fight and consume each other. Animal-rights activists and spectators mostly agreed that placing living animals into an enclosure so that they can consume each other in front of a paying audience constituted animal cruelty.

Opposition to the use of animals in contemporary art has typically focused on such sensational exploitation of powerless creatures. But these controversies have left unquestioned the more common, seemingly less outrageous, forms of artwork. Let’s be clear: the power of public opinion and the contribution of animal rights to contemporary art have been of paramount importance to prevent animal cruelty and killing from taking place in the name of art. However, I’m concerned about the limited efficacy of this approach. As Steve Baker states, criticism about contemporary art that incorporates living or dead animals at times amounts “to little more than a checklist of ethical shortcomings of all-too-familiar examples,” [2] obstructing new and more nuanced discussions. Moreover, the critique of these standardized examples focuses almost exclusively on the visuality of the animal body, that is, on those grotesque instances in which artists turn animal death and cruelty into a spectacle. Expanding the scope of criticism, I believe that any animal studies-oriented critique of works of art should also address the importance of materiality for the purpose of better understanding the nature of human-animal relations involved in artmaking.

Taking the materiality of art into account means acknowledging the concealed animal deaths which have made representation itself possible. Much of classical art, the majority of modern art, and even most works of contemporary art involve animal products, in which animal deaths have been rendered invisible but are nevertheless present. Red pigments derive from scale insects, which are culturally perceived as parasites and therefore their harvesting doesn’t pose ethical problems; thousands of bolinus mandaris (a type of mollusc indigenous in the Mediterranean) have been killed for centuries in order to produce minute quantities of purple dye; fish glue, beeswax, or eggs were and are common ingredients used to mix and preserve pigments (hence the term “egg tempera”); rabbit bones, tendons, and cartilage are often boiled down in order to produce glue which is applied to the canvas before painting; moreover, many mammals (e.g. rabbits, horses, boars, hogs, squirrels, or goats) have been killed for the purpose of making a wide range of paintbrushes in different degrees of softness and size. The list goes on and on.

A double process of “transubstantiation” takes place here, as Giovanni Aloi points out. [3] First, materials are mimetically transformed into other materials in order to produce images; in this manner, blue dye becomes water, pink pigments become human skin and so forth. The second process of transubstantiation involves animal death, and it transforms animal products into representations of other things and beings or even of the very same animals from which the materials derive. It is important to acknowledge these animal killings, even though the animal bodies have been made invisible. Western artistic production has historically involved the killing of animals and their subsequent concealment or, in other words, the use of what Nicole Shukin calls “animal capital”,[4] which makes it hard to solely condemn the use of animals in contemporary art without expressing an underlying hypocrisy. Classical art, for instance, doesn’t receive much negative criticism outside or inside animal studies circles. Most scholarly critique of the representation of animals in this period focuses on form, style, and composition, and pays attention to the positive or negative portrayal of animals. But, again, animals are not only involved in the representational plane, but also embedded in the very materials of which the painting itself is made. 

This tension between materiality and visuality, materials and representation, practice and discourse is perhaps most notable in taxidermy. Taxidermy has usually been rejected on the grounds that the visible animal skin constitutes a gesture of objectification and human supremacy over animals. Contrary to other forms of art, in taxidermy animal death is essential, if one indeed wants to produce a taxidermy piece. The pure materiality of animal skin is what makes taxidermy what it is. Animal remains are necessary to produce it, but they are exposed, not hidden. The skin functions as an irrepressible index of deadness. At the same time, the constitutive irony of traditional taxidermy is that the death of the animal is required to present that same animal in a “lifelike” state as realistically as possible, which makes taxidermy a culturally and experientially complex phenomenon. This uncanny quality of taxidermy, its constant switch between life and death, is one of its defining features.

The history of traditional taxidermy is generally understood as a narrative of progress, in which less “realistic” configurations of animal matter are replaced by more “realistic” renderings of the living through manipulation of the dead. Early arrested motion stances, which captured the lost capacity of the once living animal to move, paved the way for later mounts that sought to impose a more lifelike sense of movement on the stiff animals. Taxidermists often placed their creations in habitat dioramas that implied a narrative of struggle, peace, or beauty, which the viewer emotionally completed. Similarly, the first taxidermy technique of stuffing animal skins with straw and sawdust has evolved to the state-of-the-art technology of freeze-drying that is available to this day. Conventional taxidermy, therefore, is informed by a constant attempt to hide death while never completely achieving it. Rachel Poliquin aptly describes taxidermy mounts as something that is “at once lifelike yet dead”. [5] The animal’s “authenticity” requires its complete dismemberment and reconfiguration, a process of death and resurrection in which the materiality of the animal’s skin, the dermis of taxidermy, functions as the authenticating index.

In contrast to traditional forms of taxidermy, some contemporary artists have begun to produce works that can be aptly characterized as forms of “botched taxidermy”, to use a phrase coined by Steve Baker in The Postmodern Animal. Such work overtly embraces animal death by making the craft of preservation too noticeable to inspire an emotive spectacle. Unlike traditional taxidermy, which places the spectator in an uncritical position from which to contemplate nature, in “botched taxidermy” things appear to have “gone wrong” with the animal. These artworks not only “botch” the animal body, or “get it wrong”, as opposed to the illusion of life pursued by traditional taxidermy; in doing so, they also turn the animal bodies they employ into questioning entities. 

New Zealand-based animal-rights activist Angela Singer is one of most notable contemporary artists working in this vein today. Though her work makes use of animal material, Singer refuses to have any animals killed or harmed for her art. Instead, she relies exclusively on donated or discarded animal materials to create work that sharply critiques our complicity in the death and suffering of other species. Singer herself has been accused more than once of “objectifying” animals and of “turning gallery walls into open graves”, and she acknowledges the paradox of handling animal matter in a sometimes rough manner in order to comment on our violent treatment of animals. But there is a fundamental difference between artists who kill animals for the sake of art and artists who recycle animal matter to send a message about animal mistreatment. 

Many of the taxidermy pieces she recycles are trophy kills, which were intended to demonstrate a feat of superiority over nature. Singer describes her subversive working procedure as a process of “de-taxidermy”, a stripping back layer by layer of the animal and the taxidermist’s previous work. Instead of mimicking the taxidermist’s effort to make the animal look alive, she often does the reverse. She removes fur, feathers, stuffing, and contorts the serene poses of the slain animals. In stripping back the taxidermy, she undoes the sentimentalization of nature, exposing bullet wounds and scars that make conspicuous the aggression inflicted on their bodies.

This kind of “bad taxidermy”, in which the fiction of life and liveness is subverted, is not an attempt to escape reality but to embrace it. By seizing the spectator’s attention with art that is discomforting, un-beautiful, or even grotesque, the work forces the spectator to confront animals that look “wrong”—lifelike but decidedly dead—and to question how and why the animal died. The aim of Singer’s recycled taxidermy is to create botched works that shock the viewer into a new way of seeing and thinking about our relations with other animals. As long as people don’t want to question how humans treat animals, they will be shocked by this type of art because what they see is too real. Despite the skinning, the layering back, and the misshaping, the animal materiality exposes a violent truth that cannot be ignored.

Consequently, Angela Singer conceives her taxidermy pieces as “memorial works” in which the animals, having no grave site or no bodily burial, become their own memorial. Her aim is to honor the animal’s “life” and to make the viewer consider the morality of our willingness to use animals for our own purposes. With art of this kind, she says, “the animal body speaks to the viewer’s human body. Lines of body communication are opened up. In our gut we know human and animal are interdependent.”

Sore (2002-2003) is perhaps the most extreme piece of botched taxidermy Singer has created. In sore, which was also the name for a fallow deer during the Victorian era (a period of great interest in taxidermy), Singer removed the skin of an old deer trophy head, replacing it with a new “flesh” made by coating and carving red wax, iron oxide pigments, and varnishes. The result is a deer head completely covered in what seems to be its own blood. As in many of her works, the appearance and materiality of the piece relate to the animal’s history. As the hunter who shot the trophy explained to Singer, after having sawn off the antlers, both he and the deer had been drenched in blood, because the antlers act as a blood reservoir. With sore, Singer wanted to achieve an animal form evocative of the deer’s particular death. 

While taxidermy shrinks the physicality of the animal, botched taxidermy gives the animal back its presence, making it too big to ignore. Particularly striking in sore are the stag’s eyes, whose nakedness and vulnerability strike out against the blood-red surface. In Killing Animals, Steve Baker describes three experiences of looking that relate to the killing of animals. The first one corresponds to the human prerogative to look at animals as passive objects, which are expected to be there to be seen and to not look back. This appropriative human gaze can be considered analogous to killing, as epitomized in Damien Hirst’s statement about his working philosophy: “I like ideas of trying to understand the world by taking things out of the world. You kill things to look at them.” The second experience follows the same pattern, but in this case humans cannot but look at the killed animal, whose presence constitutes a very powerful and intense reality; therefore, some of the power in this relationship resides in the looked-at thing, dead as it is. The third experience derives from the recognition of the importance of the animal gaze, the look of an animal’s eyes. [10] It is this third experience, in which the troubling and even accusatory animal gaze comes to the fore, that Angela Singer pursues in her subversion of traditional taxidermy practices such as the hunting trophies. Singer’s works turn the supposedly lifeless gaze of the killed animal back to confront that of the often complacent or even complicit human viewer.

In sore, the bulging, wide-open eyes constitute a deliberate dismissal of proper taxidermy conventions. Caught somewhere between life and death, the eyes are undoubtedly staring at us, thus reversing the direction of looking and the direction of power embedded in trophy kills. Singer explains: “The emphasis of the taxidermy trophy is on the size of the animal head. With sore I wanted to bring the attention away from the head size because that is about the viewer looking at the animal. I wanted to emphasize the animal looking at the viewer. With the skin stripped away the eye is prominent.” [11] Again, it is not only a question of what materials are being used (the deer head is recycled, after all), but of how these materials are used—how animal materiality can pose questions such as: Who is the subject watching and who is the object? Is it the artist who speaks or the animal involved? Can taxidermy mounts protest against us in any other way than by an accusatory gaze?

In deer-atize (2002), Singer expresses the same idea but from the opposite direction. In this installation, the recycled trophy-kill bodies of a doe and a fawn are placed in a claustrophobic space in front of a trophy shield painted with deer and goat skulls. This time, Singer has removed the heads of the animals. Since the deer cannot look back, as in sore, emphasis falls on the viewer’s own gaze. Similarly, the sculptural series Spurts (2006-2018) depicts decapitated deer with seemingly cartoonish but still gruesome blood spurts stemming from their necks. The meaning of the killed animal is once again turned. The dead animal of botched taxidermy is not the dead animal of the hunting trophy, although the materiality of the artwork, the animal matter, is for the most part the same. In contrast to the celebratory rhetoric of taxidermy trophy kills, works such as Spurts leave the spectator feeling disconcerted. Challenging a culture in which hunting trophies have been “so prevalent, so accepted, and so ignored, like some kind of cosy furniture for the wall”, [12] these pieces make visible a violence against animals that is normally repressed. Gary Francione coined the term “moral schizophrenia” [13] to describe a cognitive dissonance in our treatment and consideration of animals as a social/moral matter; it is marked by conflicting and inconsistent ways to look at them: some animals are family members, others are dinner. I argue that a similar contradictory thinking process takes place with traditional taxidermy, specifically with trophy kills: first, the animal is killed, and its remains are proudly displayed on the wall; then, they are admired as beauty objects, an aesthetic quality is ascribed to them that hides the history of violence behind the piece.

Singer’s works unveil this history. By showing bullet wounds, sewing scars, or blood spurts, Singer inscribes a particular vulnerability to the materiality of the animal. The recycled and botched animal matter, its “ugliness” and instability provoke new ways of thinking about animals and our relations with them. Her piece Catch Caught (2007) is another good example of work that challenges our speciesism through the use of animal matter. Catch Caught consists of a vintage taxidermy rabbit whose stomach has been sliced open and ears cut off. Singer accentuates the damage done to the rabbit by adding red beads, buttons, and strings that represent organs and blood. While the massacres perpetrated by the meat industry are meant to remain invisible, the brutal openness of Singer’s recycled rabbit irrevocably points to violence coming from outside the creature but experienced in the innermost self. There is something terrible but profoundly alluring in this botched object’s flailing, wrecked, failing-to-be-an-animal.

The power of Singer’s use of materials resides precisely in the instability of the objects they form, in the inserting of that instability into our expectations of how the natural world should look and how it should be seen. These botched pieces are not what animal art is meant to be, they are not what the animal is meant to look like, and therefore they force the viewer to question why. Artworks are objects, and they have to work as such. How they do so will determine what they are able to communicate. In the form of the artwork resides the first layer of meaning. The message that is being communicated in Singer’s works cannot rely on words, but solely on the presence of these dead animals, their thereness, their literalism. Animal death, normally hidden from our view in art materials, appears in these works in all its prosaism; death is not hidden, rather it is the very condition of meaning. In contrast with art’s process of representation using animal products, or the more straightforwardly realistic, embellished, or sentimental depiction of animals that render them effectively invisible, these works of botched taxidermy have the value (whatever our consideration of them may be) of making the animals abrasively visible.

[1] In Barry, Dan and Carol Vogel: “Giuliani Vows To Cut Subsidy Over ‘Sick’ Art”. The New York Times, September 23, 1999. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/23/nyregion/giuliani-vows-to-cut-subsidy-over-sick-art.html

[2]  Baker, Steve: “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead”. In: Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh (ed.): Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies. London, New York 2014, pp. 290-304, here p. 296

[3] Aloi, Giovanni: “Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room.” In: Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture Special Editorial (2015), pp. 1-31.

[4] Shukin, Nicole: Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis, London 2009.

[5] Poliquin, Rachel: “The matter and meaning of museum taxidermy.” In: Museum & Society 6/2 (2008), pp. 123-134, here p. 127.

[6] Baker, Steve: The Postmodern Animal. London, 2008, p. 56. 

[7]  In Baker, Steve: Dead, dead, dead, p. 291.

[8] Ibid., p. 291.

[9] Hirst, Damien: I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. London 1997, p. 285.

[10]  Baker, Steve: “You Kill Things to Look at Them”: Animal Death in Contemporary Art. In: The Animal Studies Group (ed.): Killing Animals. Urbana, Chicago 2006, pp. 69-98, here p. 84.

 [11] Ibid., p. 86.

 [12] Ibid., p. 85.

[13] Francione, Gary: Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? Philadelphia 2000.

Daniel López Fernández, M.A. is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the University of Valencia's Department of German and English Literature in Spain. He has developed most of his research within the project Intercultural Relations Germany - Spain. In the past few years he has become increasingly interested in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism and ecocriticism, as his essay attests.