I have an innate aversion for taxidermy. It’s something that always scared me since I was a young girl and saw stuffed animals in museums, in a cabinet of someone’s living room or on a shelf in the school lab. My fear was generated by the firm belief that, if I had only stretched my arm towards a stuffed animal, it would have regained its life and would have probably tried to hurt me. As the years passed, my original fear of taxidermy turned into a general dislike of this art generated by the reflections on the dichotomy life-in-death/death-in-life. Indeed, taxidermy became for me a very disturbing art mainly for its implied message: "memento mori".
Taxidermy has been adopted by the world of fashion in the past with two main purposes: highlighting the domestication of nature and exploring the aesthetic connotations of the memento mori message. At least this was the aim of the popular Victorian birds’ heads brooches and such likes. A popular book from 1884 entitled Practical Taxidermy: A Manual of Instruction to the Amateur in Collecting, Preserving, and Setting up Natural History Specimens of All Kinds written by Montagu Browne also featured a section on jewellery.
The author highlighted how natural history shouldn’t have been relegated to museums, but should have been incorporated in brooches, earrings and even paperweights. Leopard claws became popular mounted as earrings; the heads of hummingbirds and the feet of different species of owls turned instead into scary brooches incorporating gold or silver details. Soon taxidermists struck an unlikely alliance with goldsmiths producing slightly disturbing but very popular pieces in which art and nature combined.
Fast-forward to our times: a few years ago Simon Costin employed taxidermy techniques for jewellery pieces that accompanied Alexander McQueen’s 1992 graduation show. Some of you might for instance remember his pins that featured fish heads and glass beads or tiaras with baby iguanas, thrushes’ wings and gold details. Costin used taxidermy to explore the memento mori image, turning it into a fashionable theme. In the same way, artist Julia deVille explores through her jewellery-meets-taxidermy collections that feature birds and mice brooches, the theme of death in a rather fashionable way.
But while in the case of Costin and deVille taxidermy is used to create fashionable accessories, if you carefully look at the work produced so far by Dutch artist duo Idiots, you realise the message is very different. Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker use indeed animals or parts of animals in a very specific way, combining them with rich and luxurious materials and transforming them into interior design pieces or jewels.
The eternal dichotomy between life and death is emphasised in their work, but a touch of surrealism is also added: a vulture rips the flesh of a bride represented by an iron construction covered in white pieces of fabric, but the flesh turns into a string of pearls that hangs from its beak; birds and peacocks develop surreal tails made of silk fabrics, as if they were wearing haute couture dresses; a lioness sleeps, her body partially dissolving and turning into gilded ceramic nuggets while a calf drowns in its own skin.
Idiots seem to have read Aesop’s fables and decided to reinterpret them in an alternative way, allowing fantasy to collide with reality and criticising through their surrealistic pieces the modern world we are living in through their own fantastically disturbing visions of life. Sometimes they work as if they were ragpickers, collecting dead animals and strange and different materials, putting them together and coming up with something amazingly bizarre.
Their most recent creations, a series of necklaces and brooches incorporating the heads and wings of parrots and crows, are a direct reference to Victorian jewellery, while also being a sumptuously disturbing view of our times. The necklaces have a strange cannibalistic feeling about them, as if the body of the birds had been eaten by cannibals who then decided to wear the remains of the animals as trophies. The materials used – the birds and the coloured beads and crystals – create an interesting contrast.
There is a certain degree of irreverent shock value and tactics in the pieces created by Idiots, but it’s the stories the design duo tries to tell through their three-dimensional pieces, that really count. It’s indeed the messages about nature, modern life and capitalism that represent the real core of their works.
Maybe I will overcome my fear of taxidermy one day, but, for the time being, I’ll just keep an eye on Idiots’ gloriously magical decadence and powerful visual energy. I’m sure one day their works will appear not only in museums and private collections, but also in theatre shows and films as they have a strange dramatic and theatrical quality about them.
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