Antennae Issue 7
Contents
4 Something’s Gone Wrong Again
Adapted from a paper given at the Research Centre in Creativity, London Metropolitan University, ‘Something’s gone wrong again: art, animals, ethics and botched form’ explores the challenges and potential of the animal’s botched body.
Text by Steve Baker
10 Angela Singer: Animals Rights and Wrongs
Angela Singer’s work calls into question the unnecessary violence humans subject animals to, as well as the notion that people are inherently separate from and superior to other species. For years, her work has blurred the boundaries between decoration and death, altering by using a process she calls ‘de-taxidermy’, the meaning of the trophy and the Victorian diorama.
Questions and Text by Giovanni Aloi
18 The Taxidermy Hybrid
Jessica Ullrich, in a review of some key contemporary artists, discusses sculptural practice that integrates body parts of different animals in order to create a hybrid unity.
Text by Jessica Ullrich
22 Thomas Grünfeld: The Misfits
Thomas Grünfeld’s ‘Misfits’ is a series of taxidermy specimens of multiple species reconfigured according to the artist’s imagination. These creatures, raise issues of visual perception or the politics of style and make reference to a popular storytelling tradition from southern Germany. We met with the artists to discuss his creations
Text and Questions by Eric Frank
28 The Ethics of Botched Taxidermy
Christina Garcia explores the ethics and the aesthetics of botched taxidermy in the work of Michal Rovner.
Text by Christina Garcia
40 Idiots: The Alchemical Vision
Idiots is a collaborative project by Dutch artists Afke Golsteijn, Ruben Taneja and Floris Bakker. Combining their talents with glass, metal, embroidery, and taxidermy, the artists decorate and adorn real animals, transfiguring them from regular creatures – rabbits, hedgehogs, swans, birds, mice – into the tragic heroes of contemporary fairy tales.
Text by Rachel Poliquin
45 Rescuing What Had Become a Dying Art
Emily Mayer is the real pioneer of taxidermy contemporary art. Her work, owes more to the modern art gallery than it does to tatty birds posed in Victorian glass cases. Over the past year she has developed a revolutionary taxidermy technique and worked with Damien Hirst. Today, her innovative practice inspires the new wave of contemporary taxidermy in art.
Questions by Giovanni Aloi
52 Melancholic Taxidermy
Chloë Brown is a multimedia artist whose work has more recently explored the subject of melancholia through the use of taxidermy, sound and fake snow. An underlying menace is, however, scarcely concealed by the thin layers of the picturesque and the snow which covers the carefully posed taxidermy and the sounds of child and animal distress.
Questions by Eric Frank
59 Take Only Photographs
Matthew Brower examines the paradigmatic set presented by wildlife photography looking at the conventions of Victorian time in order to understand how we should look at animals rather than ‘why we should look at them’.
Text by Matthew Brower
69 Domesticated
Amy Stein’s images serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes, she explores our paradoxical relationship with the "wild" and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behaviour of both humans and animals.
Question by Giovanni Aloi
73 The Mounted Life
Daniëlle van Ark’s photographic exploration takes us to the depths of the Natural History Museum depot.
Text by
Interview by Shelly Stein
Front cover image: Angela Singer, My Dearest, Dearest Creatures, 2006 ©
Download a printable version of Antennae Issue 7 Summer 2008 by clicking on the front cover above. When printing Antennae, consider the environment : print on recycled paper and/or back to front.
|