Skin Thievery
When I pick up Lee Marchalonis’ book The Mystery of the Musty Hide – Tales of Skin Thievery, my first sense is that the cover feels dry and dusty. As I open it, my fingers cradle the skinned spine and the first signature bursts forth with scarlet red. Her clues build with a politely folded and squarely reined in flax elephant skin sample, descriptions of events in dense 8-point type bound by wild legs of red letter linoleum cuts – the ink running thin right up against the last traces of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker printed on downy translucent paper. This immersive treasure reveals lines of evidence that playfully poke our acquisition and museumification of animals.
At the turn of the 20th century, Carl Akeley, a famed naturalist and collector, specialized in mammals from Africa. He was also the founder of the American Museum of Natural History Exhibitions Lab - an interdisciplinary department that fuses scientific research with site-specific design. In homage, a photogravure of one of Akeley’s mounts is the first image in the book. Without knowing who Akeley was, Marchalonis “saw the zebra and was beset. The underlying musculature and complex facial textures seem to me who has never seen a zebra so closely, as real as life…”
The Mystery of the Musty Hide is composed of diverse narratives around the collection of animals. In a Chicago display, she notes “a perplexing number of stuffed zebras… more than a representative sample... reveal a legacy of bloodlust from a time when the world was so big and full that nothing we could do was a threat.” These striped skins were amassed at the turn of the last century when our human population was under two billion.
Framed within the hand-carved text describing Akeley’s harvest of an elephant hide is a delightful mystery entitled The Holy Grail Bird. Written by A. Kendra Greene, she reveals the details of a seemingly petty crime. In 1976, a visitor to the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History took (Visitor X in the Hall with a Phillips-head screwdriver) one of three remaining examples of the extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker. In this act, an exemplar of extinction has itself disappeared.
Around the time of this taking, when world population was 3.5 billion, Garrett Hardin published the Tragedy of the Commons. He writes “the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.” Marchalonis’ carefully constructed and sensitive artists book is a reflection on care and caretaking for winnowing populations of species. Leafing through this eclectic survey of human stewardship, we imagine a plethora of animals in a by-gone landscape, accept the agenda to harvest individual specimens for social awareness in public museums, and observe a loving individual claiming the last specimen for private pleasure.
I am grateful for my trips to museums but I must admit, this truly playful book terrifies me; the carefully stitched seams of our cultural legacy are brittle and splitting. There are now 7.5 billion human beings and these exhibits just get dustier; the real –capable of shaking off the dust– is disappearing. What was meant to teach us now is a relic indicating we did not learn. Animal extinction falls in a class of human problems that Hardin calls “no technical solution problems”. Open this book and poach these stories; realize that knowledge is perishable, too.
Jenifer Wightman, Bronx, NY 2018*
COLOPHON of The Tales of the Musty Hide
‘The Holy Grail Bird’ was written by A. Kendra Greene for this project, and is excerpted from a longer essay. The frontispiece, photographed by Jill Kambs, was printed from a copper photogravure plate onto Somerset Velvet paper. The ‘elephant skin’ paper is made from flax, formed and treated by the artist. The ivory-billed woodpecker skins are located at the University of Iowa’s Museum of Natural History and were photographed by the artist. The types are hand-set metal: 8-point New Century Schoolbook from the Whitman College collection, 6-point Grotesque and Lydian from the Center for Book Arts. The handwritten text and other imagery is printed from linoleum.
*this review was written between 2014 and 2018. For some context:
In 1909 our 26th president Teddy Roosevelt went on safari with a team and killed 5 then-rare white rhinos; Combined they killed thousands of animals, including one of the elephants in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals in the AMNH (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/nyregion/theodore-roosevelts-elephant.html).
In 2018, the world lost its last male white rhino (of natural causes).
In 2017, our 45th president lifted the ban for importing elephant hunting trophies to the US (His sons are trophy hunters). Two days later he decried this decision; 3 months later, in 2018, it was made legal.
Today, elephants are considered Endangered with only 1% of their original population.
In 2019, Botswana lifted its ban on elephant hunting.
In 2023, I’m not clear on the US status, but here is a 2022 link.
