Museology Cards

It's curious, how a project can consume your attention for a while, come to some sort of fruition, then drop out of your awareness. Something of the sort happened to a "museology cards" theme I was working on about four or five years ago. I've had an ongoing interest in photographing museum specimens for some while, and this was a particular offshoot of that longer-term project: a set of gilt-edged cartes de visite intended to foreground the expressiveness I could see, whether intentional or accidental, imbued into dead, empty skins by the intervention of a taxidermist or taxonomist. I put together quite a few of them, but then that confluence of approaches and techniques morphed into the "Guardians" series using life-like representations of humans, and I forgot about them.

Now, there is a concern with the nature – indeed, the existence – of non-human consciousness, a concern intimately connected with the assertion of animal rights, and it's an interest I share. No-one (other than a theologian) would surely deny the consciousness and agency of, say, a dog or a cat; as if any self-respecting cat would give a fuck as to whether you did or you didn't. This is not really a scientific question, determinable by anatomy or experiment, but a matter of fellow feeling: it's "obvious", in the way a lot of things that may or may not actually be true are obvious. But how far this sympathy should extend down the evolutionary chain (especially the edible parts of it) is a conundrum, as is the question of how this should affect human behaviour. Which is not an idle speculation, in the case of a species that at one extreme will joyfully torture an enemy to death, and at the other literally refrain from hurting a fly.

Coming across these cards again this week, I realised that these images display the other side of this "alternative consciousness" question. Despite their subject matter, none of the expressiveness on show here represents any actual non-human awareness, emotion, or intention. These "creatures" are long-dead, empty vessels, no more capable of feeling or motivation than a leather purse or a shoe: everything we can see and read here of pride, terror, contentment, and abjection has either been manipulated for effect by a taxidermist, or projected onto them by me. Which is what makes them fascinating to look at, and is also the source of their pathos. These once-conscious, living entities, that ought long ago to have returned to dust, float in formaldehyde or stand stuffed and wired into life-like postures for our education and entertainment. Why such grim simulacra should attract, rather than repel us (OK, me) is probably one of those unresolvable psychological questions, and one reason our species has developed this thing we call "art".

Older British readers may recall the Chimps' Tea Parties at various zoos, or the similar TV adverts for PG Tips tea. Like the Black and White Minstrel Show, it's a memory that may cause you to recoil in hilarity or shock (probably both) in recognition of a recent past we'd now choose to disown. But when it comes to misplaced, projected expression, I think of the wide, toothy grin of those chimpanzees, which we for so long mistook for a smile of pleasure, when it seems it was really a rictus of terror. Not an inappropriate emotion, really, having fallen captive into the hands of our pious, torturing, dissecting, all-consuming species.