G133: What Have We Done (7 page)

T
he first piece of taxidermy I ever bought was an overstuffed toad. It cost twenty-five cents and it was somewhat broken; wires protruded where its hands should have been. I bought it on a whim, at a garage sale. Thirty years later, I still have it sitting on my desk, staring at me with its dull fake eyes.

The room where I write is full of taxidermy and books. They inhabit the shelves together: books on natural history, travel, antique medical textbooks and dictionaries make a habitat for a squirrel, a raccoon, a fox, various birds, a small rabbit, a rat from New York and a Chinese cat skeleton someone put together with a glue gun.

I feel sorry for each of these animals. They are banged up, dented, incompetently stuffed. They are not themselves.

I write at night, and the taxidermied animals ought to make eerie companions, but I hardly notice them. They have been here for years and each one has its place, incongruous but familiar. They only seem strange when someone new visits and sees them with fresh eyes.

In May 2015, Helge Skodvin took photographs of the World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships in Springfield, Missouri, a trade show for taxidermists. There are prizes, including a Lifetime Achievement Award. It is an event that offers many
opportunities to see strangeness even in its most accomplished presentations, but Skodvin has turned his camera toward the casual awkwardness and unintentional surrealism that surround even the slickest showmanship. These photographs have the deadpan vibe of suburbia, nothing violent or unpleasant is happening and yet each photograph radiates melancholy. Helge Skodvin has caught the absurd menace and pity of the whole shebang. He confronts us with our hubris and our appetite for kitsch. Taxidermy is worrisome. Each kindly deer head, snarling leopard and elephant-foot umbrella stand is a place where our human contradictions converge. A piece of taxidermy was once an animal and that animal had memories and preferences. Once it has become a piece of taxidermy, it has nothing. The former animal is now an object. But this object causes us pain, because we know that stuffing it is profoundly incorrect. Even the most artful taxidermy is uncanny because the animal is out of context. Whether it is in a convention center or my bookcase, it looks wrong. We are thrilled and embarrassed to see the animal captured so far from its natural state.

Humans often don’t want to let go of things and so we have developed techniques for keeping them always with us. Pickled specimens in jars, flowers pressed between the pages of books, snippets of hair in lockets, bronzed baby shoes, high-school yearbooks, cryonically preserved heads, vinyl records, frozen peas in the back of the freezer – we imagine that we might need these things later, in a week, a month, a century; we take comfort in the knowledge that we have preserved the past, it is not lost to us.

Taxidermy and photography share certain powers: they can stop time, simulate nature, grant us proximity to beings that want nothing to do with us. We can gaze at Helge Skodvin’s photographs for as long as we like. He brings us to the edges of the action, where the illusion is thinnest, where the banal and the sublime are thrown together for a moment that extends into forever on the page.

Nature has secrets. We imagine that we can discover them if we look carefully enough, if we can take nature apart and reassemble it. We want to be close to nature and yet we are becoming more
unnatural with every passing day. We are apart from nature and taxidermy is a reminder that time is passing and no matter how convincingly we reassemble the form, the ghost in the machine is gone for good. No matter how lifelike art might be, it cannot be alive. Taxidermy can be terribly moving, but mostly it is pathetic and even the pathetic fallacy is not enough to make it seem okay.

These are uncomfortable photographs. Helge Skodvin presents us to ourselves as destroyers and preservers, busily creating facsimiles of life from death. I suspect that the best thing to do might be to take all the taxidermy and burn it, sending the animals back to nature in the form of carbon and letting the past recede into the past. But for now these photographs preserve the indignities we visit upon nature, one elephant-foot umbrella stand at a time.