Articles by Miranda Niittynen
Curator: The Museum Journal, 2023
Lions Attacking a Dromedary created at Maison Verreaux brings up a larger discussion about repres... more Lions Attacking a Dromedary created at Maison Verreaux brings up a larger discussion about representations of racialized bodies (real and synthetic) in the history of museum display. Looking to the history of racialized bodies on display, I outline how taxidermied animals and racialized mannequins oscillate to reinforce continual colonial projects of the present. I show my reader how the construction of a ‘specimen’ is used in the dehumanizing processes that shapes who and what is human: a recognizable being that is (borrowing from Judith Butler) grievable upon death. Since the discovery of real human remains inside the racialized mannequin, the group is now redisplayed at the Carnegie Museum alongside educational insights that seek to ethically interrupt the colonial violence that the display narrates. In order to push this discussion further, I seek direction from decolonial artists and scholars on the best approaches to take in response to postmortem human rights abuses (past and present) and to show the ways that art can be both a destructive and reparative exchange.
Green Letters, 2022
In this article, I complicate the ways that scientists and artists stage unique taxidermied anima... more In this article, I complicate the ways that scientists and artists stage unique taxidermied animals. I look to what present-day taxidermy sculpture examples can teach us about human fears of extinction. Taxidermy has been repurposed in art galleries and is used to commemorate famous animals, such as ‘Dolly’, a cloned Finn Dorset sheep. I explore how taxidermy art can be used to theorize and think through anthropocentric apocalyptic time. In order to challenge artificial human notions of origins and ends, I place Dolly’s taxidermied remains in dialogue with Robert Marbury’s ‘vegan’ taxidermy sculpture of a woolly mammoth, made from discarded plush toys. Taxidermied Dolly (an animal that transcends ‘natural’ origins) and Marbury’s mammoth (a faux taxidermy piece that does not use real animal skin) blur boundaries – the real from the fake, the authentic from the gaff – and help us think through the temporal limits of human knowledge.
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2020
This paper analyzes the contemporary art practice of rogue taxidermy. Specifically, I look at the... more This paper analyzes the contemporary art practice of rogue taxidermy. Specifically, I look at the rogue taxidermy of Sarina Brewer, an artist who utilizes sensationalist aesthetics and representations found in historical sideshows alongside unconventional forms of taxidermy to critique historical and contemporary forms of body display. I discuss the material histories that informed and shaped the practice of taxidermy and how taxidermy was (and continues to be) bound up with a complex history of human and nonhuman animal exploitation. I analyze the interconnections between nonhuman animal taxidermy display and the historical preservation, study, and exhibition of postmortem human bodies in museums. The ethical implications of using nonhuman animal bodies as objects for political art entangle rogue taxidermy artists within the domination of nonhuman animals (alive and dead). The act of using postmortem nonhuman animal materials in artistic sculpture makes rogue taxidermy artists complicit in the history of modernity that used various bodies to outline “undesirable” racial and physiological variances. Furthermore, I analyze the subversive potential of Brewer’s sculptures to differently reconstruct sculptures of lusus naturae – from past representations – but, also, address the risky complexity of staging “monstrosity” in contemporary rogue taxidermy art. I conclude that the access and permission to place nonhuman animal bodies on display – from the outset – shows a normalization of human domination over nonhuman animal bodies, but argue that Sarina Brewer’s art, in various instances, critiques exploitation through multiple forms of body display.
Gender Forum, 2015
Rogue taxidermy is a form of pop-surrealist art that fuses elements of traditional taxidermy with... more Rogue taxidermy is a form of pop-surrealist art that fuses elements of traditional taxidermy with mixed media design. What differentiates this current pop-surrealist art movement from more traditional approaches to taxidermy are the ways in which these artists produce nonrealist and unconventional representations, while following an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the purposes of art. Analyzing Sarina Brewer’s sculpture “Something Up My Sleeve” (2012) that displays a taxidermy monkey-bird hybrid pulling an artificial phallus from a magician’s hat while facing a rabbit, this article looks at the political potential of rogue taxidermy to playfully disrupt normative structures of sexuality, gender, race, and species. I analyze Brewer’s sculpture for its ability to queer our affective engagements with taxidermy and, in doing so, argue that rogue taxidermy has the potential to disrupt the colonial encounter between spectator and (animal) art object.
This paper interrogates the ways in which feminist ethnography reproduces positivist thinking thr... more This paper interrogates the ways in which feminist ethnography reproduces positivist thinking through the desire to create a ‘whole,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘true’ subject from the words/transcripts of research participants. Ethnographic transcription has shifted from the interpretative notes of the ethnographer to digitally recorded words from the tape recorder. Though the tape recorder appears at first glance to have ‘captured’ the authentic testimony of the research subject, such a practice still reproduces a third level of representational error. Specifically, this paper outlines possibilities of thinking differently about ‘failure,’ ‘accountability,’ and ‘selfhood’ when the ethnographic gaze is turned inward.
Exhibition Essay by Miranda Niittynen
Dissertation by Miranda Niittynen
Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxid... more Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the purposes of art and often display their sculptures in ways that are self-reflexive of speciesism and express criticisms of anthropocentrism.
Through an intersectional feminist lens and alongside critical insights from (and debates within) postcolonialism, deconstruction, and affect theory, I analyze the art pieces created by Sarina Brewer, Angela Singer, Polly Morgan, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury. In doing so, I explore the ethical ambiguities of using postmortem animal bodies in an art movement that is informed by animal rights, and also discuss the complexity of animal-human relationships in the face of human conceptualized impressions of life and death. Brushing up against the history of public autopsies and other forms of body preservation, I look to the ways in which bodies are made ‘taxidermic’ through violence, trauma, objectification, commodification, bio-engineered artificiality, extinction, and the discriminatory practices that represented certain (animal and human) bodies as ‘unruly.’ Tackling the frames that produce ‘taxidermic’ bodies (as exposable and exploitable skins), I challenge the anthropocentrism foundational to human thought and highlight the ways that humans produce and perpetuate hollowed out crypts of meaning as it applies to animality. Essentially, this project attempts to undermine anthropocentric worldviews that construct humans as separate and unique from what is understood and described as the ‘nonhuman,’ and, also, invites readers to confront and acknowledge how vulnerability and mortality are shared among humans (animals) and other nonhuman beings.
Book Reviews by Miranda Niittynen
Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, eds. Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. University of Michiga... more Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, eds. Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. University of Michigan Press, 2014. 246 pp.
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Articles by Miranda Niittynen
Exhibition Essay by Miranda Niittynen
Dissertation by Miranda Niittynen
Through an intersectional feminist lens and alongside critical insights from (and debates within) postcolonialism, deconstruction, and affect theory, I analyze the art pieces created by Sarina Brewer, Angela Singer, Polly Morgan, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury. In doing so, I explore the ethical ambiguities of using postmortem animal bodies in an art movement that is informed by animal rights, and also discuss the complexity of animal-human relationships in the face of human conceptualized impressions of life and death. Brushing up against the history of public autopsies and other forms of body preservation, I look to the ways in which bodies are made ‘taxidermic’ through violence, trauma, objectification, commodification, bio-engineered artificiality, extinction, and the discriminatory practices that represented certain (animal and human) bodies as ‘unruly.’ Tackling the frames that produce ‘taxidermic’ bodies (as exposable and exploitable skins), I challenge the anthropocentrism foundational to human thought and highlight the ways that humans produce and perpetuate hollowed out crypts of meaning as it applies to animality. Essentially, this project attempts to undermine anthropocentric worldviews that construct humans as separate and unique from what is understood and described as the ‘nonhuman,’ and, also, invites readers to confront and acknowledge how vulnerability and mortality are shared among humans (animals) and other nonhuman beings.
Book Reviews by Miranda Niittynen
Through an intersectional feminist lens and alongside critical insights from (and debates within) postcolonialism, deconstruction, and affect theory, I analyze the art pieces created by Sarina Brewer, Angela Singer, Polly Morgan, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury. In doing so, I explore the ethical ambiguities of using postmortem animal bodies in an art movement that is informed by animal rights, and also discuss the complexity of animal-human relationships in the face of human conceptualized impressions of life and death. Brushing up against the history of public autopsies and other forms of body preservation, I look to the ways in which bodies are made ‘taxidermic’ through violence, trauma, objectification, commodification, bio-engineered artificiality, extinction, and the discriminatory practices that represented certain (animal and human) bodies as ‘unruly.’ Tackling the frames that produce ‘taxidermic’ bodies (as exposable and exploitable skins), I challenge the anthropocentrism foundational to human thought and highlight the ways that humans produce and perpetuate hollowed out crypts of meaning as it applies to animality. Essentially, this project attempts to undermine anthropocentric worldviews that construct humans as separate and unique from what is understood and described as the ‘nonhuman,’ and, also, invites readers to confront and acknowledge how vulnerability and mortality are shared among humans (animals) and other nonhuman beings.