Akeley Carl Ethan - The authentic animal: inside the odd and obsessive world of taxidermy

For Jonis Agee

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

John Cheever

Contents

INTRODUCTION

To skin an animal, you start with a single cut somewhere around the throat and draw the knife downward in a thin, straight line to the nethers. Its a lot like unzipping a fly. The thrush. The tomcat. The tusker. The beginning is always the same: a single cut. After this beginning, every animal presents its own challenges, the idiosyncrasies of its own terrain. The wings. The antlers. The gills. The fatty haunches. The only way to get good is to practice, to skin animal after animal after animal, because what you want, ideally, is that skin not just intact, but flawlessly intact. A skin like the artful helix of an orange rind peeled off in one go. Thin, pliable, but strong. A skin clean and full of potential. Its hard at first to think about disembodied skins as nonetheless clean. Because were animals, too, and we have skins, the idea of the removal of which makes us rightfully uncomfortable. Skin is both our largest organ and our most erotictheres a whole line of mags promising nothing but the exposure thereof. It is also the oily soil out of which our hair grows, the place that seeps our sweats and sebums, the part that burns and wrinkles and flakes off from us like birch bark. Skin removed from our bodies becomes dust to be swept and tossed and forgotten. Skin removed from animals bodies becomes any number of things. Coats, shawls, stoles, and shrugs. Rugs and mats. Shoes, handbags, briefcases, and jackets. Footballs. Chew toys. Pork rinds.

And taxidermy. From the Greek taxis, meaning arrangement, and derma, meaning skin, taxidermy refers generally to any such arrangement (a bearskin rug, an expensive fur coat) and more specifically to the practice of re-creating the animal. In taxidermy, the empty becomes whole and what was dead becomes lifelike, and this is what interests me in the art form. For years now Ive been obsessed with taxidermy, with the public and private spaces it fills, with the processes by which animal skins get converted to lifelike sculpture, despite the fact that Ive never once in my life been on a hunt. Ive never had a relationship to an animal other than the everyday owner-pet relationship and have in some sense always understood animals as outside the world, not a part of it. Kept in some separate space from my own. In other words, Im not the typical person to fall in love with taxidermy, if such a person exists, and yet thats exactly whats happened. Ive fallen in a kind of obsessive, curious love with this thing, and as a result Ive begun to feel if not closer to animals then at least as though animals have begun at last to feel closer to me. How this all happened is what Ive written this book to find out.

All the same, Ive never personally wanted to go about mounting an animal. (And here we first arrive at the unfortunate middle-school pun that lies at the heart of taxidermy: mounting, har har . Its a goofball double-entendre this book will by needs be lousy with, a regrettable outcome of the otherwise not regrettable shift in taxidermy from stuffing hides to draping them over sculpted forms, about which much, much more to come.) Taxidermy can be a brutal endeavor, but this isnt what deters me. I dont get green around the gills. I could stomach the skinning of a hide from an animals carcass, the scraping of excess flesh from that hide, the chemical tans, the fitting over a bodyform, the sewing, the tucking in of eyelids. All of it. And its not for any ethical reasons, either. A practicing taxidermist need never do the actual killing of an animal. Even still, Im not interested. This obsession isnt so much participatory as spectatorial, much like an armchair quarterback or the theatergoer whod rather see a show than have to be in one. I like very much to look at a mounted animal. I like very much its stillness, and the fact that I can touch it. I appreciate the work that goes into creating the illusion that it is alive, and I like very much this illusion. But why? Why does this illusion produce in me the nerves and giddiness of some preteen about to land his first slowdance? Why am I drawn toward this thing that repels so many others? Its not, please believe, a goth thing. I have no other inclinations toward the morbidI collect yarn art, for Christs sake. In other words: it wasnt me. I didnt push myself toward taxidermy. Taxidermy, somehow, drew me to it.

But Im talking about more than the morbid dissection and reconstitution of animal parts. Im talking about taxidermy as you know it, the end product hanging on your uncles den wall. The family of brown bears youve seen behind glass in a museum. Taxidermy is a way to measure and characterize the relationship between humans and animals, a relationship that extends back to the beginning of time. It is an umbrella term covering a whole array of activities, from cataloging a bird skin for a scientific collection to dyeing a rabbits paw for sale at a tourist trap. Taxidermy is beautiful and horrible. It is something about which everyone has an opinion or at least a reactionusually negative. And taxidermy as a field includes a whole host of experts and scholars none of us has likely ever heard of. One of the first people I talked with about taxidermy was Dr. Trish Freeman, who works on the top floor of Nebraska Hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a floor with long fluorescent-lit hallways lined with dozens and dozens of game heads taken from Asia, from Africa, from all over the planet. These, Dr. Freeman explained, were part of the Elgin Gates Collection of the Nebraska State Museum on UNLs campus. Comprising more than 150 specimens, the taxidermy on all of them was done by a man in Denver who studied, Dr. Freeman explained, under the father of modern taxidermyCarl Akeley.

A distinction, I imagine, is being made here from classical taxidermy, when skins were stuffed so full of straw youd think wed meant to sleep on them. Modern taxidermyan era we might be at the tail end ofhas brought what once amounted to little more than spooky upholstery into the realm of sculpture; animal skins are now draped and glued to premade bodyforms sculpted to precise dimensions based on each specimens anatomy. Whatever lifelikeness we imagine we see in a taxidermized animal we owe to these modern developments. Whether we owe them specifically to Carl Akeley is unclear. Certainly were meant to; the moniker father of modern taxidermy implies no less. In truth, hes like all fathersthe father of modern science, the father of modern art, the father of modern youcreating something new not from a void but from certain inherited traits. Presculpted forms were in use well before Akeley ever skinned an animal, but without question he took these previous innovations and improved on them. What resulted was a technique that came, in the early twentieth century, to be known as the Akeley method. And thus the title, the implied siring of an entire art formif, that is, we can call taxidermy an art form, and thanks to Carl Akeley we can.

It helps with these things to be a bit of a character. Czanne, considered to be the father of modern art, was a depressive and a draft dodger. The father of modern science, Galileo Galileii pissed off the whole Roman Catholic Church. Freud, the father of modern psychology, was Sigmund Freud. Clarence Ethan Akeley had his share of idiosyncrasies that makes him fit for the title, father of modern taxidermy. He had a predilection for younger women, having met his first wife when he was twenty-six and she was just fifteenand already married to his good friend and hunting companion. They divorced after Carl met (and by some accounts was living with) his second wife: a mountain climber. In a dry creek bed in Somalia he choked an attacking leopard to death with his bare hands. He lived for a time with a monkey named J. T. Jr. He once sculpted a figure of a man bursting out of the skin of an ape and called it The Chrysalis . He had a dinner table made from an elephants ear and tusks and fell head over heels in a manly, platonic (but what seems mostly unrequited) love for Teddy Roosevelt. He died at the top of a mountain. That was in 1926. Carl Akeleys life interests me the way a classical heros might and for the story it can tell of a boy growing up on a farm in tiny Clarendon, New York, who through taxidermy ends up dying in the Belgian Congo. He interests me for the history his life represents, but taxidermy, let me be clear, isnt historic. Maybe because the age of the safari is over (though safaris still go on throughout Africa and are available to anyone with a couple thousand dollars and a tolerance for international hide-shipping regulations), or maybe because museum mammal collections go back sometimes to the wee morning hours of the nineteenth century, taxidermy has an otherworldly feel. It comes to us from some other lost time. But taxidermists live on, attending schools of taxidermy and shows of taxidermy, working for taxidermy-supply companies, entering taxidermy into taxidermy competitions, forming nonprofit organizations of taxidermists, sitting on boards of directors for taxidermy groups, opening their own taxidermy shops in small towns and haggling over the prices of a mounted squirrel or Dall sheep. Taxidermy lives. And its changing through technological developments and shifting attitudes toward animals. Whats useful about looking at Carl Akeleys life story is the way contemporary issues and questions facing taxidermy can find roots there. How and whether to preserve someones pet. How to learn the mechanics of mounting animals. The presentation of specimens in museums. Organizing taxidermists around the country and the assessment and judgment of their work. The need to collect animals, the defense of taxidermy as an art form, the ethics of murder and death. Carl had a handboth hands, reallyin all of it.