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IMAGERY OF TAXIDERMY IN SCIENCE MUSEUMS: FROM SYSTEMATICS OF SPECIES TO SYSTEMATICITY OF VIOLENCE AND POSTHUMANIST NATURE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 2 (24). P. 91-130

The article is devoted to the transformations of the imagery of taxidermic objects in natural history museums. By examining several cases these transformations are linked to changes in a network of heterogeneous contexts - scientific theories and paradigms, the role of the museum, national politics, and public morals. While discussing the topic a taxidermic object is understood as an object of science with its own materiality and history and science museum is considered as a space for the representation of nature, scientific categories, and moral and political ideas, and as an instrument of collective empiricism. The history of taxidermy in a museum is the history of erasing its artistry and artificiality in favor of an objective representation of nature “itself". This naturalization makes it possible to turn the stuffed animal, now anonymous and standardized, into a taxon of Linnaean taxonomy, inseparable from considerations of public resource management. The consequences of such entry into the museum for the visual nature of taxidermy are written out. Next, we consider the change in taxonomy in the XIX century and the introduction of the idea of life in taxidermic exposition through dioramas and biological groups. A concrete example demonstrates the use of taxidermic dioramas as a tool for moral and political transformation of individuals through the aura-like experience of nature. In the middle of the XX century, the decline of taxidermy begins. Due to the withdrawal of up-to-date science from natural history museums, changes in politics, collective imagination, and the ethics of dealing with colonial heritage and nature, museums are losing funding and visitors and are gradually shifting to the periphery of culture. It is shown that they find themselves in a twice contradictory position between their own anti-historical and naturalizing scientific nature and the historicity of denaturalized exhibits, between the ambiguous aesthetics, history of taxidermy and the changed moral order. Museums tried to resolve these contradictions and return to the current culture by including in the communication about the environmental agenda and the environmental reinterpretation of taxidermy exposition with the help of occasional material and discursive interventions that turn stuffed animals into allegories of extinction. This move allows them to stay within the boundaries of the natural science discourse of preservation species diversity, while simultaneously appealing to the moral sense of the visitor and influencing the collective sensibility. At the same time, it reproduces the mythologem of the "golden age", based on the opposition between nature and culture, natural and artificial. Thus, these contradictions are not completely resolved. The first possible way further are artistic interventions on the territory of the museum, in which the Museum delegates to artists the right of critical reflection on scientific ideology and power. A number of examples of such interventions are provided and analyzed. The second way are new taxidermy collections, initially created not as a result of the objectifying approach of science, but as a manifestation of systematic violence and a new nature, indifferent to the above-mentioned oppositions. Such taxidermy can become a tool for understanding the new nature in an era so aptly called the anthropocene, and a working object of posthumanistic imagery.

Keywords: science museum, natural history museum, taxidermy, exposition, nature, visuality, contemporary art, posthumanism