Bezan, Sarah (Author)
McHugh, Susan (Author)
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 27
Issue: 2
Pages: 131-138
Stretched, stitched, and stuffed, taxidermy hides themselves hide, conceal, and secret away their stories. It is this play on authenticity, particularly on the materiality of taxidermy and its illusion of reality, that has served as a focal point of analysis for scholars examining taxidermy across the arts, social sciences, and humanities for the last several decades. Critical engagements with taxidermy, mainly in the contemporary art world, have led to robust analyses of “botched” taxidermy, “rogue” taxidermy, “re-purposed” taxidermy, and more recently, “speculative” taxidermy. In a contribution to a previous issue of Configurations, Helen Gregory and Anthony Purdy advocate for taxidermy’s “indexical authenticity,” understood through the lens of Roland Barthes’s critique of photographic practice as the trace of the living thing that has in turn been shaped by the conditions of its represented medium. Similarly, Giovanni Aloi’s Speculative Taxidermy pursues a reading of the “indexical relationship between animal presence and the medium of representation itself.”
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