According to Hoekstra, however, seemingly aesthetic components of taxidermy may in fact serve a scientific function. Apart from making a specimen look lifelike, taxidermists responsible for public museum displays also seek to emphasize an aspect of the animal’s biology. Therefore, carnivores bare their teeth not so they seem menacing, but rather because teeth are a distinguishing feature of this group of mammals.

“POSSESSION AND PRIZE”

Compared to taxidermy displayed in museums, commercial taxidermy—in the case of hunters who want models of the animals they have killed—reflects an intimacy between a taxidermied object and its owner. “Part of how people present taxidermy has a lot to do with how they view their relationship with the animal,” says Justin A. Rice ’99. In 1998, Rice and the nine other students in Visual and Environmental Studies 50: “Fundamentals of Filmmaking” shot a film titled “Instructions for Collectors.” The film explores the work of commercial, scientific, and artistic taxidermists. “A hunter is really proud he killed the animal, while a scientist is trying to make sure a dead animal didn’t waste its life,” Rice says.

For Amy Stein, a New York-based photographer whose series “Domesticated” ran in the HMNH in 2010, hunting was the gateway to taxidermy. While completing a series on women and guns, Stein came into contact with animals that had been killed in hunts and followed them to the taxidermist. She would later borrow specimens from a local taxidermist to construct “Domesticated,” which is based on encounters between animals and the citizens of Matamoras, Pa., a town that borders a state forest. “The original intent of the taxidermist and the client, the hunter, is to create a trophy for the client’s home. It represents the hunt and the hunter’s success,” Stein says.

“We have dominion over animals whether we like it or not, dead or alive,” she continues. “Taxidermy in a sense is that kind of possession and prize. But trophyism and art—maybe it’s all the same thing. People who have taxidermied animals usually have more than one; it’s the evidence of their successes. It is art collecting in a sense.” Yet while art collectors are almost never involved in the creation of the pieces they purchase, hunters who commission taxidermied specimens usually control some aspects of the artistic process itself. According to Stein, one of the obstacles she faced in shooting “Domesticated” was having to borrow animals that hunters had commissioned in specific and often aggressive poses, rather than dictating how she wanted the specimens to be displayed.

While the century-old mounts in museums such as the HMNH have outlived those who were personally involved in their acquisition, a sense of achievement with regard to a collection exists for institutions as it does for individual hunters. “It’s all about possession for the museum too—[being able to say] ‘we have a complete collection,’” Thompson says.

CONTEXT OVER CONTENT

For those who know little about taxidermy, however, the significance of a given object may lie outside that object itself. While the artistic value of a taxidermied specimen depends on its ultimate function, the meaning a viewer derives from a piece is influenced by its surroundings.

For Carlin E. Wing ’02, engaging the HMNH in a novel way provided the impetus for last year’s Bizarre Animals, an event that featured contemporary artists using the museum as a medium to display their works. According to Wing, Bizarre Animals was an attempt to encourage audiences to view the existing space of the HMNH and its collections in a different way. “When taxidermy is put up in homes, it may be read as decoration or trophy,” says Wing. “In the case of a museum like the HMNH, I’m not sure that people approach it the way they would an art museum.”

“That was why it was interesting to bring contemporary artists into the museum,” she continues, “because the space could be activated with contemporary art works. In this case artists could make people re-see the museum. People might come with assumptions and leave and say, ‘actually, the way I was looking at the color and form of the specimens, is not that different from how I look at art.’”

Similarly, one aspect of the “Tangible Things” exhibition involves introducing 16 ‘guest objects’ from various Harvard collections into existing displays. According to Gaskell, these guest objects are meant to effectively defamiliarize the original pieces. In the HMNH, the instructors placed a glass vase in the shape of a flower amidst the famous Blaschka Glass Flowers. Louis Tiffany fashioned the vase in the late 19th century, around the same time glass artisans Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka created lifelike models of flowers for the purpose of teaching botany. “The vase is made of the same material [as the glass flowers], but it’s an ‘artwork,’ a highly stylized flower,” Gaskell says. “Why is the vase an artwork and the glass flowers not? It was a similar way of working with the same material, and there’s the flora aspect for both, but one is highly stylized and the others are extremely realistic.”

Ultimately, the myriad priorities of taxidermists and their creations complicate how the form itself may be seen as art. However, this very ambiguity illustrates the extent to which the mindset and surroundings of a viewer influence the effect of a given object. For taxidermy, the relationship between a specimen’s intrinsic artistic qualities and its advertised purpose determine how it is perceived on an individual basis.

—Staff writer Denise J. Xu can be reached at dxu@fas.harvard.edu.