Ethics

We are experiencing a conflict between designers and curators in planning new natural history displays. The designers seem to want to dispense entirely with our mounted specimens in favour of high tech models and video. The curators would like to use a combination of both. I side with the curators. The whole point of museums, as I see it, is to display the real thing. Am I right?


There are problems not only around substituting high tech representations for real specimens but also in assuming that stuffed animals are necessarily a superior type of exhibit. The point of natural history museum display is to stimulate interest in and promote learning about the natural world.

Historically this has been achieved through displays of the collections: specimens variously mounted, stuffed, pinned, dried or preserved in spirit. Museum display in the latter part of the twentieth century began to question that orthodoxy, and the relegation - and virtual exclusion- of the real specimen from some of the displays of the Natural History Museum provoked a vigorous debate on the medium and role of the museum in communicating natural history.

The quality of presentation of the natural world provided by TV documentaries, of plants and animals in visibly dynamic ecosystems forced museums to reevaluate their own methods of presentation. The modern museum now needs to respond to the problem of taxidermy appearing static and decontextualised, and also to the criticisms, and misrepresentations, of those who believe that stuffed animals are inherently degrading and ethically unacceptable.

Specimens do, of course, have the advantage over models or film that they are, in one sense, material evidence. Museums should not lose touch with their collections, which is what makes them unique places of inspiration and learning. However, a full mount of a bird skin is a strange fusion of nature and human artifice.

The skin and feathers may be able to provide unchallengeable scientific data to the molecular biologist and to those mapping environmental change. But the pose and extent to which it is true to life owes quite as much to the skill of the taxidermist as it does to nature. A bad mount can mislead and misinform the viewer.

A faded and poorly conserved mount provides equally unreliable evidence. But a good mount presented in the right context can still be of great educational value.

Your designers and curators should engage in constructive dialogue since this is a conflict that, with a little more imagination, can be resolved. The Grande Galerie de l'Evolution in the Natural History Museum in Paris contains a stunning, sensitively presented display that gives a very good sense of the nature, the grandeur, of biodiversity - and the threat from man that it faces. It is a parade of dramatically lit stuffed animals.