Dead on Arrival


'Thomas Grünfeld Thomas Grünfeld

Why taxidermy? The idea of illegitimacy, of something that does not belong jammed into a place it has no right to enter, is a source of repulsion, the state which, Freud explained, was inevitable at moments when the unconscious penetrates the conscious mind. (3) Perhaps confusion of categories is the ultimate heresy: inside and out, fur and feathers, edible and inedible, tame and wild, inextricably jumbled, as a way of positing what freedom might be, an absence of those antitheses by which language ensnares the brain. One opposition in particular governs our perception of what a person is: the preference for "depth" over "breadth" as human virtues, with the accompanying ideal of knowing people better by penetrating their outer shell, in order to mine treasures which multiply as the mining process continues. What if people are solid all the way through, or below the outer casing only stuffing can be found? (A religious variation is the sense that the body is worthless and only the spirit matters.) Why do we stuff animals but not human beings? Why do we eat animals but not human beings? At the core of Western culture is a dualism we cannot bear to examine, a set of oppositions we live by but which are painful to consider for more than a moment. Perhaps they can be shown, however. Grünfeld has always been interested in the issue of display, to the point of making a work consisting of a frame containing three differently sized fake wood pieces, illuminated by lamps around the frame, one shining on each. The preoccupation continues, but the object of attention is now a pseudo-scientific collection assembled in order to illustrate some form of backbreeding. From "display" to "monster" is a shorter step than it seems. As Michel Foucault once pointed out, the words lead back to the Latin monstrare, to put on show - not, it might be added, for reasons of debate but as a form of spectacle. If freaks are despised and venerated in equal measure, one reason could be their power to defy analysis. They are guaranteed to block any ongoing discussion, whether of genetic engineering or developments in art. The suggestion is that art and science equally – for the overtones are those of a museum – have lost touch with genuine, difficult issues, which can be seen, but not solved.

Neither historically accurate nor a restoration of anything that ever existed, Grünfeld's new trophies are assembled by combining parts from different animals, made to look as plausible as possible – as plausible, at least, as a narwhal, a stick-insect or a platypus. Numbered, not titled, the misfits look lost and vulnerable in their cabinets of German oak – "lost" because the cases are obviously too big, "vulnerable" because of the neon lights and glass on three sides. Their sole function is to be displayed like specimens, and their disturbing air of self-consciousness may derive from this fact. Admittedly, they differ. While parts of a rabbit and a pheasant and the teeth of a fox give III a classical air, IV and V seem humorous and visually appealing, for example. In his Croquis Parisiens of 1880, J.-K. Huysmans, a favourite author of Grünfeld, described a bar with vitrines full of clumsily stuffed animals, many with fixed, idiotic stares because their orange and black eyes are exactly the same, swans with beaks made from yellow wood, with unevenly filled necks and stuffing protruding from their bellies or an old toothless crocodile patched with shoeleather. Huysmans' descriptions rely on two familiar reactions: recognizing human characteristics in the animals and a sense that though amateur taxidermy has resurrected them artificially their second life is all the more vivid because of clumsy workmanship. Grünfeld's misfits related to the Southern German Wolpertinger tradition, tall tales about improbable beasts lurking unsuspected in the wild. Neither drawings and descriptions of these animals nor concocted specimens serve to increase their credibility. Instead, they further the mythology surrounding them, a phenomenon which even moves into print with popular books such as Heim and Reiser's Mit dem Wolpertinger leben or Alphons Schweigert's Und es gibt sie doch!

In biological terms, if seems, the specimens in the cases are the born losers of the animal world, one-offs doomed to failure like the experiments of Wells's Doctor Moreau or the monster of Frankenstein. From the viewer's point of view, their survival seems in doubt precisely because their mixed parentage gives them no advantage whatsoever. The way we perceive them is by a process of spotting a single, dominant beast and relegating variations to a subordinate status. In other words, the way we view them is biased in favour of what we already know, and what we know about breeding. Only the strong survive, and they are uppermost in our minds even in the apparently unbiased act of vision. Despite this, if it is human nature to invent monsters: the grotesque offers a permanent means of testing and confirming our own limits. What the Gorgon has in common with E.T. is that both remind us of what being human means. Famous monsters of history are ways of posing and partially solving problems of beauty, evil, power and seduction. But only the famous ones; monsters too have a success ratio.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of dragons as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon's image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas. (4)

Jorge Luis Borges argued that monsters should be subject to the same tests as other imaginative constructs. In his terms, Grünfeld's misfits would be the result of tampering rather than fullscale anatomical overhaul. Just as "necessary" monsters are survivors of the imagination, their ephemeral counterparts pay tribute to the species which perished so that history could be written. Their very existence seems a tribute to our own justice and mercy. Or perhaps not. The M.C.C. Club's sparrow might give the impression that it has been stuffed and mounted out of good manners to the bird, but the whole exercise was really about the game of cricket. Like the interminable lists of batsmen and bowlers quoted by experts, it becomes history, a continuation of tradition. But forget crickets. The context of these misfits is double, like every context in Grünfeld's work. These are trophies for the home but also items which gallery-goers examine.

And the gallery could as easily be in a museum as in a place where contemporary art is sold.

In recent years the two have merged; the very idea of a Kunsthalle is to take art straight from the studio and install it in what was traditionally a context which only time could ensure. Bypassing vicissitudes of taste or critical outlook, sanctified instead by immediate decision-making, art has become instant history while what was once thought of as the gradual progress of culture has dwindled to mere fashion. Exhibiting developed from a willingness on the part of the nobility to open their homes to the public. At the time museums seemed a good idea. Twentieth-century commentators have not always been so sure.

The German term museal [museum-like] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the viewer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchres of works of art.

In 1980 Douglas Crimp used these words by Theodor Adomo to open an attack on museums in an essay called "On the Museum's Ruins". (5) As Adorno saw it, and Crimp agreed, the museum murders objects by robbing them of their vitality. Nine years later, in an essay called "The Museum Without Walls Reconsidered", Crimp moved a stage further. In the case of a contemporary art museum, he argued, objects would be killed without ever being allowed a chance to live. Nowadays, he adds, because objects are intended for the museum, to be interpreted within its discursive practice, "they are already dead when they're made". (6) in Grünfeld's thinking, opposition to art as a train of thought within fixed perimeters is possible only by subversive activity within those perimeters, not by gestures from outside. Yet this means an acknowledgement that the myth of the avantgarde must be prolonged artificially in order to demonstrate that it no longer has force or significance. Perhaps only a manoeuvre as paradoxical as misfits can do justice to the illogical situation of contemporary art.

Stuart Morgan


Courtesy Tanja Grunert und Michael Janssen, Köln

(1)
A. Lejeune and M. Lewis The Gentlemen's Clubs of London London 1979, 186.

(2)
Quoted in Cornelia Lauf "Thomas Locher, Thomas Grünfeld" Artscribe 71, September–October 1988, 87.

(3)
Sigmund Freud "A Note on the Unconscious in Psycholanalysis" in J. Strachey ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works of Sigmund Freud London 1958, vol. 12, 264. back

(4)
J.L. Borges The Book of Imaginary Beings, Harmondsworth 1974, 14. back

(5)
Thomas Locher in Thomas Grunfeld Vienna 1988, n. p. back

(6)
Douglas Crimp "On the Museum's Ruins" in Half Foster ed. The Anti-Aesthetic Part Townsend 1983, 43. back

(7)
Douglas Crimp "The Museum Without Walls Reconsidered" in R. de Leeuw & E. Beer ed, L'exposition imaginaires Gravenhage 1989, 272.