Art usually fills a different moral position than the real world. Whenever actual animals are involved, though, it is no longer purely artifical but also ‘real’. Here sculpture has always been ahead in the competition with painting. No matter if animals’ bodies are equipped with eyes or not, the fact by itself that the animal is present physically, the presence of the original matter that once belonged to a living creature has the effect that the beheld also beholds.
Just because of the well-calculated shock that the material initiates, hybrid taxidermic animals are able to unfold a power that can cause an alteration in a set of values that is solely made to a human measure.
The sculptures can be read as contemporary reflections of recent developments in biotechnology and of changing attitudes towards animals. With their postmodern sampling of scientific and historio-cultural traditions they also mirror the constructedness of our world.
Whereas Horace made a plea that the serious artist renounce every type of hybrid, for contemporary art there no longer exists the question as to whether an artist is under an obligation solely with regard to that which actually exists. All the artists I have presented are concerned with embodiment, with the hybrid animal body as an image. Their work is neither an appropriation of something already existant nor a mimetic imitation of nature, but rather a creation post naturam. They all present not normative situations, but instead fantastical abnormalities and barrier-breaking stagings of a new corporality. The goal of their oeuvre is the creation of compositional bodies that contradict unitary aesthetic systems of all sorts. Their bold artistic statements represent investigations of the concept of normality, heterogeneity, purity, hybrid nature and difference, and they aim at a reevaluation of norms and values that today continue to be assigned validity. With the expansion of the existing borders of what is considered to be doable and imaginable, their works make a plea for the unlimited freedom of autonomous world-creation and of the ars poetica.
Sengl uses animals’ bodies as metaphors for humans. She borrows from the literary form of the fable and works with humourous irritations. Schieferstein makes death and resurrection the subject of discussion by recruiting powerful images from art history. Her grotesque chimaeras usually make a strong impact on the beholder and provoke very emotional responses. Moessinger points to the constructedness of an omnipresent animal imagery by manipulating patterns from the toy industry that are turned from cute to monstrous. Grünfeld creates three-dimensional collages by drawing from folk art, medicine and biology. His hybrids captivate the viewer in their ornamental compositions.
In the artworks I have talked about, the animals whose organic material becomes part of sculpture are either substitutes for the human, the glamorous memento mori, symbols for nature destroyed beyond repair or manifestations of hybrid fantasies of power and control.
Taxidermic animals located beyond any ‘normality’ may perhaps even be understood better as the expression of a complete idea of subjectivity than as a representation of the rational modern subject. The principle of dismemberment and synthetisation by means of fragments coheres into an unmitigated expression of the loss of a unified picture of the world without interruptions and contradictions. This violent fragmentation and recombination into a utopian hybridity reflects the recognition that today it is no longer possible to represent any generally valid idea of an ‘authentic’ body or to generate definite concepts of reality.
Taxidermic hybrids show at the same time the trauma and the allure of bodily deformations. They transform violence, fear and insecurity into something new. The animals that are prepared to be chimaeras not only exhibit the irreparable battery of nature by human intervention but they are also an attempt to think out a new, and fantasy-filled way of approaching the natural world.