Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  For Mayer, beginning to work with Hirst was a turning point. The grizzly led to shark repairs, skeleton work, and eventually more cow heads for A Thousand Years (he changes them periodically). The pay was "phenomenal." Better yet, she got to live inside Hirst's mind during his meteoric rise to fame, when his controversial work was shaking up the art world in a way that may sound familiar today but was absolutely shocking then. One art critic described the Hirst phenomenon like this: "Each time he showed a new work it was as if some art-world Jack the Ripper had perpetrated one more outrageous crime." Mayer was stirred by the experience. She saw Hirst's work as a sophisticated version of what she had done as a child, and she saw him as a kindred spirit. "My heart went faster. My mind went Flip, flip, flip: My God, he's right! Oh, fuck! It's just about putting things together and not trying too hard to make them into a story. I've always been a maker of objects. Damien put them into a context. The pig cut in half—fantastic! You don't meet many people with that same fascination with dead things ... He made it permissible to use that kind of language. He's allowed me to experiment to get the results he wants, and it's been a steep learning curve—an armory of techniques. It's been brilliant for me."

  She dug up the original work order for her first severed cow head. It said, "Notes on head: real skin, eyes to look fresh, alive; exposed flesh on base of neck molded. In the round; to be displayed on its side." At that time, erosion molding was still nasty, trial-and-error work. She explained the risks to Science, Hirst's company in Bloomsbury. The company said, "We need this head, please!" It turned out to be the most beautiful severed cow head with an exposed bloody spinal bone imaginable. Other taxidermists would have driven it straight to Science. Mayer entered it in the 1998 guild show. It caused a minor sensation but won not a single ribbon. Everyone agreed that it was clever—clever, that is, for something that had been molded. Nevertheless, the guild published a photo of it in its annual magazine Taxidermist with this comment: "You can see it as part of a Damien Hirst show a year from now." The magazine thought it was a joke.

  The guild show started that afternoon. The three-day conference was being held at the University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, an agricultural college, and Mayer was giving the death mask demonstration with a taxidermist from the National Museum of Scotland.

  While Mayer packed, I flipped through back issues of Taxidermist. Articles by zoologists, museum taxidermists, and curators filled its pages. I read about preserving Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoises, refurbishing antique giraffes, and casting lightweight rocks for dioramas. The guild members sounded serious, but they didn't seem to take themselves seriously. One contributor actually called taxidermists "pathetic."

  The guild takes trips to fascinating places: museums and estates whose collections were amassed in the 1800s by wealthy enthusiasts, big-game hunters, and field naturalists who hunted on other continents for specimens to bring back to England. During the early 1800s, Britain dominated the race to acquire as many new species for its national collections as possible. Not only did the British collect specimens with imperial zeal, but they also formed brilliant theories about them. By contrast, their American counterparts were known mostly as specimen providers (hunters), with some important exceptions. England was also the place where artistic taxidermy advanced after London's Great Exhibition of 1851, the first world's fair. The guild members had giant shoes to fill if they ever hoped to live up to their forebears, the best of whom had been granted the royal warrant "Naturalist, by appointment to his Majesty the King."

  That said, only England could produce such animal fanatics—and then turn them into enemies. You see, the early taxidermists who served science at the British Museum and the ones who prepared artistic mounts for public display were often bitter rivals. As a result, many private museums and stuffed menageries sprang up throughout England, each one as idiosyncratic as the person upon whose collection it was based. These are the places the guild likes to visit.

  One year the guild visited the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring. It's now a branch of the Natural History Museum, but in 1892 it opened as the private collection of the ardent self-taught ornithologist Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, son of the banking magnate Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who gave him Tring for his twenty-first birthday. The baron used his vast fortune to hire hundreds of people to hunt for rare birds and butterflies throughout the world to add to his collection. He also liked to outbid the British Museum at auction. The baron was particularly fond of the most striking of feathered wonders, the bird of paradise, and he also loved tortoises. But he didn't just want to observe them; he wanted to own them—all of them. In the 1890s, he devised an unsuccessful plan to bring every turtle from the Galápagos Islands back to England, angering other naturalists who didn't believe his explanation that he was saving them for science. During the 1920s, his collection of 225,000 stuffed birds and live menagerie drew people from near and far.

  In 1932, Rothschild, disinherited for eschewing banking in favor of birds, became embroiled in a museum acquisition that would make a gripping soap opera. Rothschild, who was being blackmailed by an ex-mistress, was forced to sell his beloved birds to the American Museum of Natural History for a dollar a bird, or $225,000. At the time of the sale, the baron broke down and wept; parting with the birds of paradise alone proved far more painful than parting with the mistress. The museum was unrelenting, but Rothschild got the last laugh. According to one account, when the AMNH ornithologist arrived at Tring to pack up the birds, he realized that none of them had been cataloged or labeled. There wasn't any need; the baron knew the Latin name of every bird by heart. When the crated birds arrived in New York, they filled an entire storeroom.

  Rothschild died in 1937. He bequeathed Tring to the British Museum, which owned it until it split with the Natural History Museum in 1963. Today Tring, the NHM's bird annex, contains the world's greatest collection of birds—nearly a million skins, including Charles Darwin's Galápagos finches (which he collected on his historic voyage on the Beagle), as well as 800,000 eggs and more than 2,000 nests. (It includes numerous stuffed dogs, too.) When the guild visits Tring, members get to go behind the scenes where all the scientific research takes place.

  The guild also has gone to the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent. Major Percy Powell-Cotton (1866–1940) was a rich hunter who survived a lion attack in Africa, then re-created other lion attacks at his home. Powell-Cotton hired the best British firms to preserve his kills, which he shipped home from Africa and Asia. He pioneered the diorama in England, eventually turning his house into a private museum where people could feast their eyes on the glorious scenes where he hunted.

  However, the guild trip I thought sounded most exciting was the one to Charles Waterton's estate, Walton Hall, in West Yorkshire. Waterton is known as taxidermy's "eccentric genius." In the 1820s, Walton Hall, built on an island in a lake, was his Xanadu—the antithesis of a museum, with its storerooms of lifeless skins. Here all the animals lived harmoniously with Waterton as a landlocked Noah who communed with nature as only a Victorian British taxidermist could. He built stables so that his horses could converse, kennels so that his hounds could look out on the land, and cozy pigpens that absorbed warm sunlight—all while he, an ascetic Catholic, slept on the floor with an oak block for a pillow. At Walton Hall, birds could have sex in a starling tower that was cleverly hidden by tall yew-hedges, then raise their young on the lake where rowing was forbidden. What was so eccentric about that? But how else would you describe someone who once tried to persuade vampire bats to suck his toes as a means of bloodletting? Or who built a three-mile-long brick wall around his property to keep out poachers and their deafening guns, thereby establishing the first nature preserve in England?

  Taxidermists knew Waterton as the fiery squire who pleaded with them to go outside and study animals in the wild. In this, he prefigured William Hornaday and Carl Akeley by nearly a century. Most other people knew him as the author of the Victorian bestseller W
anderings in South America, his remarkable, if discursive, account of his barefoot trek through Guiana, where he encountered the rarest, most colorful birds and beasts, which he killed and brought home. (The epilogue of the 1889 edition has a treatise on taxidermy.) Sometimes Waterton was an unreliable narrator, interchanging the names jaguar and tiger, chameleon and lizard, and puma and lion. But his vivid prose, painstaking mounts, and daring adventures—shooting deadly vipers, finding the curare used to poison arrow tips, and riding a thirty-foot caiman (perfectly safe if you avoid the teeth and tail)—provided Victorians with a glimpse of the marvelous unknown, a place they longed to see, if only from an armchair.

  About taxidermy, Waterton said, "You must possess Promethean boldness, and bring down fire and animation, as it were, into your preserved specimen. Repair to the haunts of birds on plains and mountains, forests, swamps, and lakes and give up your time to examine the economy of the different orders of birds."

  Waterton was antiestablishment in a way that is characteristic of all taxidermists—that is, he sided with animals over people, especially museum men, who tagged and labeled birds as if they were machine parts. Nothing depressed Waterton more than a beautiful bird badly mounted, something he called "a hideous spectacle of death in ragged plumage." His own birds blazed with vitality, as they did in the jungle. No one could get a hummingbird's gorget to sparkle quite like Waterton. Yet even he was capable of falsifying nature to make a point or stir up controversy. Take, for instance, his most famous mount—a "taxidermic frolic"—called the Nondescript.

  In the early 1800s, whenever new species were brought back to England, they were given two-part Latin names that typically incorporated the name of the discoverer or the person who had funded the expedition. Waterton despised binomial naming because it made the fascinating study of wildlife arcane and elitist. To him, nothing was less truthful (or more self-serving) than naming one of God's wonders after a person, especially if that person was a rich collector or a hunter who knew virtually nothing about the species. He called binomial naming "pseudo-classical phraseology." Once, while flipping through a book of bird plates with scientific names, he said, "I find that a hawk is called the 'Black Warrier,' and that the Latin name ... given it is 'Falco Harlani.' Pray, who or what is 'Harlani'? A man, a mountain, or a mud-flat? Is 'Black Warrier' a Negro of pugnacious propensities?" His own system, called complimentary nomenclature, used local names and characteristics to describe species. This was a perfectly logical approach, except that Waterton made it really confusing. Even his admirers had no idea what he meant by names such as Hannaquoi, Camoudi, Salempenta, or Coulacanara, each of which might refer to a bird, a plant, or a snake.

  The Nondescript was even more perplexing. It was a hairy little mannish ape that Waterton said he had procured in Guiana while hunting for specimens. The problem was that it was just a head. Waterton had discarded the body in the jungle (too heavy to carry), making it impossible to identify the riveting new species. Eventually, he admitted making the Nondescript out of two red howler monkeys that he had manipulated to resemble a particular customs official. In the meantime, however, he used a picture of the Nondescript as the frontispiece of Wanderings, creating a buzz that kept the book in print for fifty years.

  Waterton really liked only his own taxidermy, claiming that all other specimens were "wrong at every point." He refused to show any mount at his museum that he deemed inexact and unfaithful—which is another way of saying that he displayed only his own mounts. He snubbed every grand exposition.

  That said, he was a good taxidermist—perhaps too good, for his taxidermy innovations, as heartfelt as complimentary nomenclature, were too tedious to spawn any followers. For Waterton, every feather, every strand of hair needed tending, a monotony for which he alone had the patience. His method for preserving quadrupeds for natural history cabinets was torturous. First he removed every claw and bone. Then he peeled off the entire skin and pared it down with a knife until it was paper-thin. Even the ears had to be split (inner and outer parts), treated, and seamlessly reassembled. He dispensed with all internal wires when mounting birds and used the treated skin alone, instead of the rag-and-sawdust method. He renounced arsenic. To anyone who found these methods mind-numbing, Waterton quoted Horace: "By laboring to be brief you become obscure." He obviously knew what he was doing, because nearly all his mounts, including the Nondescript (now at the Wakefield Museum), have survived, unlike his wearisome methods. A person would have to be insanely obsessed to actually rebuild a bird feather by feather. Yet in this, Waterman reminds me a lot of Emily Mayer.

  Mayer is still racing around her house, putting clipboards, programs, and death masks and agendas into a box to take to the conference. I ask her what she is entering into the competition. "A dog in a suitcase," she says matter-of-factly.

  She isn't joking. She explains with a steely empathy how over the years, she's seen plenty of dogs in suitcases. Someone's dog dies, and the owner, who has a parental attachment to the animal, can't bear to part with it. So the dog gets enshrined in a suitcase and is dropped off at the vet's with Mayer's phone number on it. Mayer's entry is a tiny erosion-molded terrier with closed eyes, set snugly in a small suitcase—an open casket of sorts. She calls the piece Last Journey, Precious Cargo.

  Mayer joined the guild when she was nineteen and hardly misses a conference. This is her first one as chair, and I'm curious to see her in that role. A death-fixated anti-taxidermist who calls taxidermy "contrived" and "tedious" seems like the wrong person to lead the guild.

  Mayer being Mayer, she has no intention of letting anyone call her "chair." Right after she accepted the post, she had a letter published in the guild journal renouncing the term. "I am two-legged and warm-blooded not four-legged and wooden," she explained. She also rejected "Chair Person" ("I deplore this kind of P.C."), and "Madam Chair" ("smacks of grey hair and tweeds"). "We are all of mankind so chairman is fine thank you. Chairbitch is OK too." This was Mayer's acceptance speech.

  The two-hour drive from Mayer's house to Nottingham has innumerable roundabouts and T junctions; it's like driving a maze. Even so, Mayer can steer, smoke, and answer calls from Hirst's company, Science, simultaneously. Still, I keep thinking about an article I just read by a taxidermist who warned, "It is a known fact that when a taxidermist is driving a car at speeds of 50 mph-plus, the car often lurches to an abrupt and inexplicable halt. He then rushes from the car, sometimes running back 200 yards or more at high speed, and returns holding a dead bird." Luckily, we don't stop for roadkill and reach the Sutton Bonington campus at 4:30 P.M.

  We check into a dormitory, which is next to the lecture hall where the conference is being held. I haven't stayed in a dorm since college, and I'm surprised by the musty smell and the grim sparseness of my room, with its faded curtains and bedspread and its fluorescent lights. On the bed is the room's single amenity, a disposable paper bathmat I'm supposed to bring to and from the showers—the communal block of showers I'll be sharing with forty British taxidermists for the next three days. Watching the small bed sink under the weight of my carry-on bag makes me long for the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, with its sparkle and glitz, where the bathroom was mine alone and the closet could accommodate my evening gown.

  We unpack and cut through the ivy-covered brick campus to register for the conference. I glance around for people carting stuffed pumas or grizzly bears, or perhaps an alligator packed in fake water. There isn't a hedgehog, a rook, or a stoat in sight. I think we are in the wrong place. Then Mayer leads me inside, where a disheveled man with the gruff, boisterous voice of a pirate (and the broken teeth and scraggly red beard to match) sits in a quiet hallway registering a woman's "bits and pieces" (a hare and a buzzard) into the juried competition. The man's name is Kim McDonald, and he is the guild's legal expert, the person whom Mayer relies on when she needs to know the legal status of, say, a tawny owl on eBay mounted before 1947 (legal) or a tawny owl mounted last month (a punishable crime). Thi
s area of the law is very complicated, because protected species vary from country to country, as do the fines. Although guild members are mostly good blokes who comply with cites, some taxidermists do not. In fact, next to drug trafficking, animal smuggling is one of Britain's most persistent crimes.

  British taxidermists have always had a fair share of forgers and smugglers among them, and over the years London's Metropolitan Police Wildlife Crime Unit has seized tens of thousands of endangered species being sold illegally as taxidermy, Chinese medicine, and luxury fashion accessories. One of the worst taxidermy crimes in recent history occurred in 2000, when London's best-known taxidermist, Robert Sclare, who runs the shop Get Stuffed in Islington, was charged with illegal possession of endangered wildlife. Sixty specimens were seized, including a stuffed tiger cub (less than a week old); tiger, leopard, wolf, and chimp mounts; gorilla skulls; an elephant foot and tusks; and rare lemurs and birds of prey. Sclare was found guilty on twenty-nine counts of permit forgery and twelve counts of illegally displaying animals. He was sentenced to six months in prison. When I told Mayer I wanted to visit the shop, she forbade me to do so, because that incident has given taxidermy a bad name.