Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Anthropomorphic Taxidermy. You heard me. Anthropomorphic taxidermy. Try saying it fast three times. Now try saying it with a mouthful of peanut butter. Why? Because it amuses me.
This is a real, dead squirrel Giddyapping on that there horse. Of course, that isn’t a real, dead horse. That would be ridiculous.
Anyway…I was working on a fundraiser. A tea party. Sounds innocent enough, right? So I googled “tea party.” I should’ve known better (especially after I found “infantilism” when looking for baby formula online). And yet, I still did it. The first thing that popped up was this:
This is a kitten tea party. And it’s a famous diorama from an “artist” who was a favorite of Queen Victoria which makes it, you guessed it, old, dead kittens.
That’s right. Someone thought it would be adorable to kill 15 kittens, stuff them, and force them into looking like they are having a tea party. This particular diorama was actually on exhibit at one of the World’s Fairs. And Queen Victoria was absolutely smitten with the idea. Suddenly, killing and stuffing animals into human situations was all the rage.
There are so many ways to look at this, and yet the whole idea kinda renders me speechless. Me. Speechless. I KNOW. Oh, it gets better. Check out this piece by the same artist:
A dead kitten wedding. How about that? Murdered kittens tying the knot. Go figure. It exceeds my imagination, and I make stuff up for a living.
If this isn’t proof that the truth is stranger than fiction, nothing is. Now, we all understand that taxidermy can be educational. Think of all the tigers and badgers we’ve seen in museums, their lips curled back as if they are ready to bite our heads off. Except the joke’s on them because they never, ever, will be able to actually kill us. Nope. We took care of that in a way that makes irony’s brain spin. Well, if irony had a brain. Oh, you know what I mean.
Somewhere around the turn of the century, this, um, fad faded into obscurity. Hell, the fact that they gave it a name like Anthropomorphic Taxidermy should have doomed it from the start. And once I stopped tormenting my co-workers with random images such as these e-mailed at all hours of the day and night (What?), I discovered that the art of taxidermy lives on, so to speak.
Rogue Taxidermy. I like that name. One aspect of this is when they take parts of real animals to create real, dead, fantasy animals. Like this one:
This is a gryffon! Head and front legs of an eagle, body of a lion! You have to admit, this is pretty cool. Better than that whole “Jackolope” thing (and you know – you really are sick of the postcards when friends go to Arizona). In fact there is a group called MART – the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists’es or whatever. They do some pretty creative things with carcases. But only check out their website on an empty stomach. You have been warned. You will believe that spending so much time indoors in cold weather is bad for you after you check them out.
Some other artists have done more creative work with taxidermy through the years. This is one of my favorites:
This impresses me because the movements are so boxer-like (although I am disturbed that their tails are missing). That and I always knew squirrels had these skills. My dogs tell me that every time one is in the yard, mocking them.
Whether it’s sick or weird or cute, maybe taxidermy is a way for us to force our behaviors onto animals. Why? Because they are smarter than us and it drives us crazy. It is the only explanation I have for my last image:
But I could be wrong. What do you think?
Yours in life and stuffed on a toy horse in death,
The Assassin