Chloe
Chloe, 1994. Vitrine with taxidermy pet dog, pillow, towel, carpet, dimensions variable, as displayed in Linda Moore Gallery, San Diego.
A group of artists were invited to make sited works at the San Diego Natural History Museum as part of inSITE '94. I visited the museum several times and kept coming back to the animal dioramas as my primary point of interest. They were full of paradoxes: the animals were shown “in their natural habitat,” but the viewer always came unnaturally close to them; they were made of their real skins, but at the same time, they seemed dead and artificial. To me, pets have always presented interesting questions around the natural and the unnatural, and I found myself wondering if people ever preserved domestic animals this way.
It turned out that people did. I found a taxidermist in the San Diego area who stuffed people's pets on occasion. Chloe, a Papillon lap dog, was at the taxidermist for some cleaning and restoration. Chloe belonged to an older woman in Palm Springs, and the taxidermist offered to put me in touch with her.
I interviewed the owner on the phone about Chloe's natural habitat and learned that she had lived in a house with a cream-colored carpet, a special pillow, and a peach-colored towel that she slept on. I proposed setting up Chloe in the same manner as the other animals in the Natural History Museum: presented in a vitrine in her natural habitat, with signage indicating the genus and species name in Latin, and so on.
The museum refused to exhibit the piece, stating that it was offensive; also, that people would find the situation confusing and that children might get upset. I pointed out that Chloe was genetically very much like the coyote on display in a nearby diorama, and that the coyote didn't seem to upset or confuse anyone very much, but to no avail. The piece was excluded from the show. Instead, I was given permission to place the entire work, minus Chloe, in the museum with a sign on the pillow which directed people to a local gallery where Chloe was on display. I called this amended work Chloe’s Case. At the gallery, Chloe was accompanied by the story of how she came to be at there instead of and not in the museum.
Chloe, 1994. Detail of vitrine with taxidermy pet dog, pillow, towel, carpet, dimensions variable.
Chloe’s Case
Chloe’s Case, 1994. Detail of vitrine with pillow, towel, carpet, framed photograph with text, dimensions variable, as shown in San Diego Natural History Museum.
