Looks like there’s a dead bird on the, in the display, presumably purposefully . . .
Well they’re all dead I guess.
– visitor to the South Australian Biodiversity Gallery, SA Museum
When it comes to animals in museum displays, it seems that some are more dead than others. There are those that are unapologetically and possibly even offensively dead – insects on pins, dismembered body parts, a beached dolphin in a coastal tableau. But in Natural History displays at least, most specimens are presented in lifelike poses; snapshots of nature scenes rendered in diorama form. It’s like we perceive the creatures to be in some form of suspended animation. Suspended animation or suspended disbelief – the displays don’t seem to trigger that visceral sense of disgust that looking at a ‘dead animal’ seems to do. It’s something I observed several times on my accompanied visits in the Biodiversity Gallery last year:
I like the little, mice doing different things other than just sort of sitting there looking dead.
. . .they’re looking like just dead birds really. Not like the ones in the cases . .
I don’t really like that display because it’s animal parts, like, y’know, having a case full of people’s arms or something . . .oh there’s a large, er Wedge Tailed Eagle, wing, which yeah, that’s all a bit sad really.
Well, I know the dead dolphin, happens every now and then, and it’s probably the best way to present um, marine animals, but it still looks a bit cruel. . .
I was reminded of this last week when I went on a preview tour of the newly refurbished Melrose Wing at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Among one of the recent acquisitions displayed in the wing is Berlinde De Bruyckere’s We are all flesh. The work is made of horse skins stretched over a cast of two intertwined horse bodies, suspended in the middle of the room.
The pending unveiling of the work caused a minor splash in the local media, and I saw at least one letter to the editor of the local paper saying something to the effect of: “If this sort of thing is what’s in the Art Gallery there is no way I’m going to let my grandson go there and be traumatised by it”. Irrespective of any debates about the artistic merit of the work, I doubt the letter writer would have expressed similar concerns about the towering red kangaroo on display in the Biodiversity gallery just next door.
Clearly there are different classes of ‘dead’ when it comes to what we display in our gallery spaces. Why probably matters too – is something that is acceptable when displayed in the name of scientific instruction suddenly scandalous when it’s art?
UPDATE (5/3/13): It looks like the controversy surrounding We are all flesh is prompting renewed interest in the Art Gallery of SA, and possibly reaching new audiences?
Part of it depends on the intentions of the exhibit originator (interpretive objectives, I’d have called them back in the day), I think – which visitors generally ‘get’ thanks to the context and to cultural norms. Diorama = pretty 3-D picture of nature; study skins/bird wings = science, forensics; ‘we are all flesh’/Damien Hirst = deliberate provocation. I acknowledge that some visitors find dioramas offensive but they are a minority (awkward squad, really). There’s nothing wrong with artists making people confront their fears or question their attitudes. Some grannies, of course, want to protect their grandkids from all of that ‘life’s gonna be grotty’ stuff – but let’s be fair, I doubt they were the audience Berlinde De Bruyckere had in mind.
Hi John,
Those cultural norms can be pretty fluid entities at times. I recently read Museums, Media and Cultural Theory by Michelle Henning. She goes into the history of museum dioramas, particularly in the American Museum of Natural History, and how this was related to the changing role of the Natural History Museum in education versus research. She suggests that in the days when amateur naturalists dominated the field (up to the early 19th century I guess), Natural History museums saw their research and educative roles as interchangeable – they were effectively repositories of specimens for people to use in their study, and that was their educative role. I suppose you consider it as analogous to the role that archives play with amateur historians and geneologists today. As Natural History became professionalised and the research functions moved into universities, this left the museums with less of a role in research. Public education became more significant and the diorama was born to be a key pedagogical tool in this regard – but one that presents nature as ‘fixed’ or ‘finished’ rather than the messier reality (I’m recalling this part of her argument badly and probably recounting it even worse). I guess my point is, the boundaries between the pedagogical / research / poke society in the eye intentions of museum displays aren’t always so cut and dried, or set in stone. Body Worlds is an interesting case in point there and I wonder if those sorts of displays actually stir up *more* debate now than they might have a few generations ago. In any case, I’m not convinced that artists really conceive of ‘audiences’ when they create their works – at least not in the same way I would as an interpretive planner.
Having said that, there is a fair bit of evidence that context matters, particularly on the art/science ‘divide’. It could be different audiences or different expectations (or indeed, a bit of both), but people have come expect a bit of provocation in an art museums, whereas science exhibitions are still expected to communicate ‘facts’ and anything slightly artistic or metaphorical is in severe danger of being taken literally.
I’ve thought about this for a bit, and I’m not necessarily convinced it is contextual. As in, it is not necessarily “scandalous when it is art”. In this case, the museum wouldn’t display horse skins in the way the gallery has. And if you took the towering red kangaroo from the museum and placed it in the gallery (and calling it “art”), I don’t think the letter to the editor would have been written. So maybe it comes down to the *treatment* of the dead animal (and I don’t mean the physical skinning/tanning etc. that needed to be done prior to display). Not sure I have expressed myself very clearly…! I agree with the first post that artists are often deliberately provocative – I think that is so in this case.
Yes I know what you’re getting at. Something that is dismembered fits into the ‘unapologetically dead’ category I described – we can’t assign a semblance life to it in the same way as our kangaroo (which on reflection may not have been the best example to use to illustrate my point). Actually, it might have been better to put it the other way round, and ask if the letter writer would have been horrified by a cross-section of a horse in an anatomical display in the museum?
At the Nature Center I work at we have quite a bit of taxidermy on display. I find it amusing to listen in as little children ask Mom and Dad, “Are those real animals?”. You can see the parents struggling to answer that, yes they are real, but not alive which means they are dead, but…. and the kid is slightly horrified about a bunch of dead animals on display. One kid turned to Mom and replied, “You mean they cut the skin off! Where is the rest of it? Thats gross!” in a loud voice; Mom was mortified. 🙂 Adults understand the concept of a well done taxidermy but kids are still trying to determine if that big buffalo there in the room is alive and dangerous or dead and disgusting or something else altogether. Some parents just say “No, it’s not real” dispelling some fear but leaving the kid to wonder about the fake animals on display.
Interesting insight Doug. I’ve overheard similar ‘is it real?’ discussions in the museum. I know that some of the creatures are actually casts (smaller reptiles, etc) but because I wasn’t involved in putting the gallery together I don’t necessarily know exactly which specimens are real and which aren’t. The conversations you describe actually refer back to John’s point about cultural norms – it is these conversations that will help reinforce and perpetuate what we consider to be ‘normal’ in an exhibition.
A related phenomenon is the “if it’s a skeleton it’s a dinosaur” rule. There are some exceptions to this, i.e. if the skeleton is of something that is clearly still alive today like a fish or a kangaroo, but any extinct animal is automatically a ‘dinosaur’ – and it’s usually adults/parents who say this.