{"id":2091,"date":"2015-02-03T23:28:22","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T07:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.org\/weblog\/?p=2091"},"modified":"2015-02-03T23:34:24","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T07:34:24","slug":"die-orama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/?p=2091","title":{"rendered":"die-orama"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"IMG_3634\"<\/a><\/div>\n
\"IMG_3622\"<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

George? Who were<\/em> you George?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m standing beside a plexiglass vitrine at the American Museum of Natural History. In it are the taxidermied remains of George, the last Pinta Island Galapagos<\/a> tortoise, who died suddenly on June 24th 2012<\/a>, of so called \u2018natural causes.\u2019 At the time of his death, George was estimated to be about 100 years old – a spring chicken by tortoise standards, and sadly he passed away without carrying on his illustrious line. All other members of his\u00a0Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni<\/em> subspecies predeceased him, their once considerable numbers\u00a0decimated by passing\u00a0sailors who hunted them down as easy to catch and easy to store\u00a0meat\u00a0that could be kept\u00a0alive in the holds of their ships for months. \u00a0The few Pinta tortoises the sailors missed\u00a0mostly starved to death after goats got\u00a0introduced to Pinta in 1959, which then\u00a0stripped away the vegetation they needed for food and cover. How George survived alone, until he was discovered when he came out of\u00a0hiding in 1971, is still a bit of a mystery but he was soon shipped off to the Charles Darwin Research Station on nearby Santa Cruz in the hopes he might mate\u00a0with females of a related subspecies and perhaps sire hybrid offspring to make situation of his genetic extinguishment\u00a0a little less final. But it was not to be and George during the years of his\u00a0confinement\u00a0remained something of a sad curiosity, the embodiment of a \u2018zombie species,\u2019 still scrabbling around but already functionally extinct.<\/p>\n

When George died\u00a0in his enclosure, his head pointing poignantly\u00a0in the direction of his drinking pool, his remains were\u00a0promptly\u00a0frozen and shipped off to the AMNH where he was set upon by a crack team of embalmers, who (it has to be said) did an amazing job making\u00a0them look almost perky<\/em>. The AMNH produced\u00a0an informative video<\/a>\u00a0documenting the taxidermist\u2019s macabre prestidigitations;\u00a0the agonizing decision making of choosing\u00a0the appropriate pose, getting the correct drape of his wrinkly skin right, \u00a0the touchings up with paints and varnishes, the fastidious attention to detail neccessitating\u00a0even splotches of authentic Galapagos dust to be daubed onto George\u2019s eviscerated\u00a0carapace.<\/p>\n

\"Lenin<\/a>

Lenin<\/p><\/div>\n

In his temporary mausoleum in the museum’s Astor Turret, George draws quite a crowd and he rather gives\u00a0the impression of a reptilian Lenin, serene beneath\u00a0the glass of his\u00a0tomb, while crowds of supplicants stream by to pay their respects or merely snap a selfie or two while\u00a0standing next to what\u00a0was after all \u2018the last of his kind.\u2019 Other than a striking similarity in head shape, both lonesome George and Vladimir Ilyich shared the quality of becoming\u00a0even more iconic after death, more\u00a0laden with gravitas, their formaldehyde and wax-infused corpses the recipients\u00a0of both veneration and revisionist history\u00a0\u2013\u00a0George the last survivor of an imagined, prelapsarian, South Sea eden; Lenin the last \u2018authentic\u2019 Bolshevik.<\/p>\n

The preservation of corpses, whether\u00a0through\u00a0taxidermy, embalming, or ritual mummification, seeks to reframe the life of the deceased into an idealized, one could say fetishized state;\u00a0the gory circumstances of the death, the bleeding bullet holes torn\u00a0through the flanks of the game animal before its final agonized collapse, the sunken flesh of the terminally ill patient after a long confinement, all cleverly obscured to make them look as they were\u00a0in life<\/em>, or rather, as they\u00a0should have\u00a0been\u00a0<\/em>according to\u00a0the\u00a0aesthetic agendas\u00a0of their posthumous manipulators. Whether it be a valued hunting trophy or the body of a notable lying in state, what we are dealing with here is the grammar of propaganda and we should see\u00a0it for what it is.<\/p>\n

Lenin for instance appears as if he is rather beatifically following the whispers of his visitors from just under the lightest of naps, a fatherly figure enjoying a\u00a0well-earned rest after finally putting things right with the world. Our tortoise George is displayed with\u00a0an eagerly outstretched neck and custom-made eyes, beady\u00a0and\u00a0enthusiastic, as if he were about to embark on some pleasant chelonian journey, to a parallel universe perhaps where females of his kind still exist and the unpleasant finality of his extinction no longer needs to be contemplated. Though I won\u2019t get into specifics of Lenin\u2019s multifarious legacy,\u00a0I’m\u00a0not going out on a limb to say he\u2019d have more than a little to account for if he ever woke up from that satin lined coffin of his. As for George, his carefully posed death puppet of a body has been spun by the AMNH and the Galapagos Conservancy, not as a symbol of our abject failure to preserve threatened fauna (which by some estimates we are losing at a rate of 140,000 species per year)<\/a> but as an icon of high-minded wild life conservationism.<\/p>\n

While I am all for a\u00a0\u2018glass half full\u2019 outlook (and there have been some encouraging recent gains regarding\u00a0Galapagos tortoise breeding), the AMNH\u2019s attempt to transform poor dead George into a crowd-pleasing, feel good, \u00a0story is one\u00a0symptom of the museum’s larger initiative to revise their\u00a0\u00a0kill em\u2019 and stuff em\u2019<\/em> legacy into something more palatable to the contemporary metropolitan audience. It is of course laudable that the museum is now a \u2018force for the good\u2019 and active in world-wide efforts at conservation; a leader in the research of global biodiversity, but by papering over its extensive and enthusiastic record\u00a0of \u2019collecting,\u2019 that is to say, killing<\/em>\u00a0of scores\u00a0of rare animals\u00a0to create\u00a0its famous, crowd-pleasing displays, we are deprived of an opportunity to learn from the institution’s history and to celebrate how far attitudes\u00a0have generally come.<\/p>\n

Let us look at the history of one of the AMNH\u2019s iconic assets, the Akeley Hall of African Animals<\/a>, a veritable temple of\u00a0dioramas, each\u00a0representing a\u00a0major ecosystems of the continent. The\u00a0centrepiece is an entire herd of elephants, massacred specifically for the\u00a0display and arranged on a plinth what is described as an\u00a0‘alarm formation.’ \u00a0Among them are a mother and calf shot by none other than Theodore Roosevelt<\/a> and his son Kermit, who were actually over\u00a0in\u00a0Africa shooting elephants for AMNH’s rival, the Smithsonian\u00a0but they\u00a0generously bagged a couple of extra for their friends in New York, who after all needed a lot of them for their imposing composition and anyway, one gets the impression\u00a0they were kind of on a roll. Even by the standards of the early 20th century, there would have been little scientific justification for this carnage and the herd of elephants frozen in mid outrage had a lot more to do with creating\u00a0a\u00a0spectacle than advancing any frontiers of zoological knowledge. These days we might more rightly regard this abomination as a reminder of the cruelty, barbarism\u00a0and entitlement of the self-styled Great White Hunters\u00a0<\/em>of\u00a0times gone by,\u00a0a\u00a0regrettable monument\u00a0to what happens when colonialist privilege meets excess testosterone. And yet the AMNH makes no obvious\u00a0effort\u00a0to explicate or contextualize any of this. Their messaging\u00a0to museum-going children is still that: ‘dead elephants are cool!’<\/p>\n

The bulk \u00a0of the hall\u00a0is taken up by the dioramas proper, exquisitely painted tromp-l\u2019oeil<\/em>\u00a0backdrops of arid, acacia studded plains and\u00a0seething, hyper-vegetated rain forests in front of which naturalistic groupings of dead\u00a0animals have been placed\u00a0\u2013 rhinos wallowing in mud, apes clinging to jungly vines with adorable infants suckling at their breasts, antelopes of all shapes and sizes, big cats, giraffes, and just about\u00a0any other creature\u00a0one might\u00a0expect to be\u00a0found\u00a0prowling, galloping\u00a0\u00a0or climbing\u00a0through\u00a0the\u00a0idealized\u00a0environs of a\u00a0primeval Africa.<\/p>\n

\"Plains_Diorama\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What the museum consciously underplays here is\u00a0that these\u00a0beguiling displays celebrate not only\u00a0Africa\u2019s once manifold biodiversity, but an entirely different aesthetic\u2013a competitive materialism on the part of First World\u00a0collectors, who\u00a0in their fetishization of the exotic, spent considerable sums tracking\u00a0down and killing some of the rarest, most elusive creatures on the planet to bring back\u00a0as publicly exhibited trophies (let\u2019s call them what they are) and to not so subtly underscore\u00a0the power relationship between American empire and what was even then an increasingly subjugated global \u2019wild,’ a disappearing frontier of primeval ecosystems in the midst of\u00a0colonialist exploitation. \u00a0The dioramas, with their illusion of\u00a0intimacy exist within the dissonance of us\u00a0thinking that somewhere out there is still the possibility of an Eden while at the same time knowing\u00a0that\u00a0what is in front of us is an arrangement of\u00a0dead skins propped\u00a0up on armatures of wood wool and mothballs.<\/p>\n

The not so subtle message of the AMNH\u2019s dioramas is:<\/p>\n

\u2019 Nothing is beyond\u00a0the reach of our guns,\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

(or perhaps:)<\/p>\n

\u2018To the victor – the spoils!’<\/em><\/p>\n

\"sumatran_rhino\"<\/a>

Sumatran Rhinos<\/p><\/div>\n

By the time the museum\u2019s Hall of Asian Animals was being set up<\/a> by Colonel John Faunthorpe and Arthur Vernay, a wealthy, British-born, New York antiques dealer, some animals such as the Sumatran rhinoceros<\/a> and Asiatic lion were already going extinct in their native habitats and much was made of the lengths Vernay had to go through, the many appeals and entreaties he had to make to get the hunting permits needed to kill still more of them for\u00a0his displays.<\/p>\n

Was it all for a good cause, this science-minded collecting\u00a0of critically endangered animals such as the mother Sumatran rhinoceros, shot along with her little calf for the edification of Gotham\u2019s discerning, museum-going public? From a present day perspective, their dark little diorama seems particularly sad, a testament to a completionist\u00a0obsession, the\u00a0acquisition of rhinoceroses\u00a0as if they were hockey cards or Royal Doulton figurines, regardless of the precariousness of the animals’ status\u00a0in the wild; in fact spurred on by their tantalizing scarcity.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt that in the past the demand from museums seeking rarities hastened the extinction of more than a few species and it would be helpful for\u00a0our understanding of changing attitudes if the AMNH would take it upon themselves to highlight this dark side of their collection building. To be fair, this acquisitiveness was the norm for most natural history museums of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in both the public and private spheres. They weren\u2019t always the bastions of wildlife conservation they now\u00a0promote themselves as.\u00a0While valuable taxonomic understanding can indeed be gleaned from specimens killed in the field, the slaughter of whole herds of elephants and entire rookeries of seabirds \u2013 even the nestlings peeled from their delicate skins to be stuffed and varnished\u2013 \u00a0could never have\u00a0been justified as \u2018science\u2019 even by the standards of the day. These are circus sideshows we should rightly view them as archaic, even vulgar. Though the Halls of African and Asian animals can perhaps be reconsidered\u00a0as historic monuments to the quaint but also cruel attitudes of a bygone age, the museum\u2019s media\u00a0hoopla around their taxidermification of\u00a0poor, dead George, seems anachronistic to say the least. We learn very little from a dead Galapagos tortoise, no matter\u00a0how cleverly he is mounted. George now exists as an art-directed \u2018thing,\u2019 optimized to look the way we expect him to and no longer a\u00a0\u2018being,\u2019 with his own agency and life world. We screwed up and he went extinct. No amount of paint and fibreglass will change that tragic fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George? Who were you George? I\u2019m standing beside a plexiglass vitrine at the American Museum of Natural History. In it are the taxidermied remains of George, the last Pinta Island Galapagos tortoise, who died suddenly on June 24th 2012, of so called \u2018natural causes.\u2019 At the time of his death, George was estimated to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals","category-extinction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2091"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2123,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091\/revisions\/2123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}