Thought Exercise #6: Due 10/15/13

"Taxidermy was made into the servant of the "real." Artifactual children, better than life, were birthed from dead matter....Taxidermy was about the single story, about nature's unity, the unblemished type of specimen. Taxidermy became the art most suited to the epistemological and aesthetic stance of realism. The power of this stance is in its magical effects: what is so painfully constructed appears effortlessly, spontaneously found, discovered, simply there if one will only look....Small wonder that artistic realism and biological science were twin brothers in the founding of the civic order of nature at the American Museum of Natural History. It is also natural that taxidermy and biology depend fundamentally upon vision in a hierarchy of the senses; they are tools for the construction, discovery of form."
--"Teddy Bear Patriarchy Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden."

I find it strange to think of taxidermy as the servant of the "real." It's like saying that death serves life. But as I ponder upon what it means to serve the "real," the author seems to mean that objects, devoid of what constitutes living beings as alive, exist to serve and be subjected to whatever living beings wish to do with them. By nature, all living beings seek out for the best for themselves, as it is the law of Darwinism and the survival of the fittest. Sometimes, some of us will even seek out perfection, even if perfection never truly exists. To taxidermize a living being is to appreciate its aesthetic beauty, its decorative usage, but never entering the realm of substance. It's as if the desired parts of the living being is picked out, and the rest, its proclivities, are simply discarded.

An interesting excuse it is, to say that the bodies of living beings are taxidermized for the purpose of biological sciences, the better it is to study what was once living flesh. It is also an interesting dichotomy to state that artistic realism and biological science were twin brothers at the American Museum of Natural History, and that taxidermy and biology depend fundamentally upon vision in a hierarchy of the senses. It could be said that taxidermy serves as a gateway to the study of biological life, leading to the study of beings in their natural habitats and in zoos, and lab experiments honing in on life on a molecular level. Thus, taxidermy is a state of being, paralyzed in limbo between life and death, opening gates to questions of the state of living.