Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

used conventional taxidermy because the bear was too huge to erosion mold at that point in her career.) When Hirst went to Norfolk to inspect it, Mayer was expecting him to be "a right jumped-up little asshole that was really up himself." Instead, she found him to be "really straightforward, what you see is what you get kind of thing." While they were drinking beer in the garden, Hirst mentioned a concept similar to one he describes in his book On the Way to Work (2002). Mayer just happened to have a tiny plasticine cow on a cross that she had made, and she took it out to show him. Synchronicity! Hirst yelled, "Fucking hell! Fucking hell!"

For Mayer, beginning to work with Hirst was a turning point. The grizzly led to shark repairs, skeleton work, and eventually more cow heads for A Thousand Years (he changes them periodically). The pay was "phenomenal." Better yet, she got to live inside Hirst's mind during his meteoric rise to fame, when his controversial work was shaking up the art world in a way that may sound familiar today but was absolutely shocking then. One art critic described the Hirst phenomenon like this: "Each time he showed a new work it was as if some art-world Jack the Ripper had perpetrated one more outrageous crime." Mayer was stirred by the experience. She saw Hirst's work as a sophisticated version of what she had done as a child, and she saw him as a kindred spirit. "My heart went faster. My mind went Flip, flip, flip: My God, he's right! Oh, fuck! It's just about putting things together and not trying too hard to make them into a story. I've always been a maker of objects. Damien put them into a context. The pig cut in half—fantastic! You don't meet many people with that same fascination with dead things ... He made it permissible to use that kind of language. He's allowed me to experiment to get the results he wants, and it's been a steep learning curve—an armory of techniques. It's been brilliant for me."

She dug up the original work order for her first severed cow head. It said, "Notes on head: real skin, eyes to look fresh, alive; exposed flesh on base of neck molded. In the round; to be displayed on its side." At that time, erosion molding was still nasty, trial-and-error work. She explained the risks to Science, Hirst's company in Bloomsbury. The company said, "We need this head, please!" It turned out to be the most beautiful severed cow head with an exposed bloody spinal bone imaginable. Other taxidermists would have driven it straight to Science. Mayer entered it in the 1998 guild show. It caused a minor sensation but won not a single ribbon. Everyone agreed that it was clever—clever, that is, for something that had been molded. Nevertheless, the guild published a photo of it in its annual magazine Taxidermist with this comment: "You can see it as part of a Damien Hirst show a year from now." The magazine thought it was a joke.

The guild show started that afternoon. The three-day conference was being held at the University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, an agricultural college, and Mayer was giving the death mask demonstration with a taxidermist from the National Museum of Scotland.

While Mayer packed, I flipped through back issues of Taxidermist. Articles by zoologists, museum taxidermists, and curators filled its pages. I read about preserving Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoises, refurbishing antique giraffes, and casting lightweight rocks for dioramas. The guild members sounded serious, but they didn't seem to take themselves seriously. One contributor actually called taxidermists "pathetic."

The guild takes trips to fascinating places: museums and estates whose collections were amassed in the 1800s by wealthy enthusiasts, big-game hunters, and field naturalists who hunted on other continents for specimens to bring back to England. During the early 1800s, Britain dominated the race to acquire as many new species for its national collections as possible. Not only did the British collect specimens with imperial zeal, but they also formed brilliant theories about them. By contrast, their American counterparts were known mostly as specimen providers (hunters), with some important exceptions. England was also the place where artistic taxidermy advanced after London's Great Exhibition of 1851, the first world's fair. The guild members had giant shoes to fill if they ever hoped to live up to their forebears, the best of whom had been granted the royal warrant "Naturalist, by appointment to his Majesty the King."

That said, only England could produce such animal fanatics—and then turn them into enemies. You see, the early taxidermists who served science at the British Museum and the ones who prepared artistic mounts for public display were often bitter rivals. As a result, many private museums and stuffed menageries sprang up throughout England, each one as idiosyncratic as the person upon whose collection it was based. These are the places the guild likes to visit.

One year the guild visited the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring. It's now a branch of the Natural History Museum, but in 1892 it opened as the private collection of the ardent self-taught ornithologist Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, son of the banking magnate Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who gave him Tring for his twenty-first birthday. The baron used his vast fortune to hire hundreds of people to hunt for rare birds and butterflies throughout the world to add to his collection. He also liked to outbid the British Museum at auction. The baron was particularly fond of the most striking of feathered wonders, the bird of paradise, and he also loved tortoises. But he didn't just want to observe them; he wanted to own them—all of them. In the 1890s, he devised an unsuccessful plan to bring every turtle from the Galápagos Islands back to England, angering other naturalists who didn't believe his explanation that he was saving them for science. During the 1920s, his collection of 225,000 stuffed birds and