Ruth Garde: An Arbitrary Taxonomy of Birds
An essay for the book: ‘Explaining Taxonomy to Birds‘, 2020

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As I settle down to write this introduction to Explaining Taxonomy to a Bird, which documents Simon Faithfull’s 2019 exhibition at the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, the setting is idyllic: I am seated at a table under a spotless blue sky in a London garden bathed in sun and grazed by a gentle breeze. The sounds of nature – the creaking of the rose boughs and a smattering of cheerful birdsong – blend with the urban intrusions of distant traffic, an occasional clink of cutlery, and the quiet voices of my neighbours going about their morning routine. All seems right with the world. And yet it is not.

I, along with more than half the world’s population, am living under lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19, which first emerged in Wuhan, China, is (like over 75% of new infectious diseases) zoonotic in origin: it has transferred to humans via animals (this strain is thought to be bat-derived, with pangolins as the intermediate host). This dire situation could not be more germane to the genesis and subject of An Arbitrary Taxonomy of Birds. The work was commissioned as part of Contagious Cities, an international cultural initiative developed by Wellcome, exploring the global challenges of epidemic preparedness in the centenary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Created in response to the natural history collections of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, An Arbitrary Taxonomy of Birds is a playful and personal intervention in the fabric of the museum, reflecting on the complex nature of humankind’s relationship to the animals with whom we co-exist, and the ways in which we have sought to understand, categorise, and dominate our fellow species.

When Faithfull first encountered the museum’s natural history collections, consisting of 30 million specimens, he was struck by what he has described as its “deranged and obsessive attempt to catalogue all life on Earth.” He became intrigued by the subject of taxonomy: derived from the Greek taxis, meaning ‘order’ or ‘arrangement’, it is the science of naming, identifying and classifying organisms. Pioneered by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), it proposed a system that objectively ordered and ranked the animal kingdom. Though undeniably useful as a framework to organise our knowledge of the natural world, the arbitrariness of this system struck Faithfull, reminding him of an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, in which Borges refers to a fictitious, vividly absurdist taxonomy of animals including such fanciful categories as “those that tremble as if they are mad” and “those that have just broken a flower vase”. This Borgesian motif inspired the eleven taxonomic categories structuring Faithfull’s installation, consisting of 120 taxidermy specimens divided into groupings of birds such as “Those that became red”, “Those that would fit on my palm”, and “Those that forgot to fly”.

The point of these mischievous, absurdist and wholly subjective categories is to reveal the arbitrary and constructed nature of taxonomic classification, to destabilize established scientific orders, and to challenge the way in which Homo sapiens is placed by the Linnaean system in the privileged position at the apex of the hierarchy, separated from and superior to all non-human species. By situating the installation within a natural history museum, where it appeared for all the world like a continuation of its permanent exhibits, with little in the way of signposting as a work of art, An Arbitrary Taxonomy of Birds both reveals and upends the traditions and cultures of display within natural history museums, which, like Linnaean taxonomy, have powerfully influenced the framing and shaping of humankind’s attitudes to and relationship with the animal kingdom.

Like its taxonomies, the 120 drawings that feature in the installation diverge conspicuously from canonical representations of birds within the natural history tradition. Rather than rendering precise, definitive illustrations of stuffed specimens, with exquisite detail and colour (like, for example, the seminal Birds of America by John James Audubon), Faithfull’s often partial, semi-finished sketches capture the fleeting, elusive moments when birds settle in urban settings. Their disarming simplicity and fugitive nature nonetheless capture the essential “birdness” of Faithfull’s subjects and reflect a deep personal fascination, 20 years in the making, with the animals that he has described as everyday and yet strange – a “parallel species” with whom we share our urban habitats.

Beyond his long-held avian fascination, An Arbitrary Taxonomy of Birds also connects more generally with Faithfull’s wider preoccupations with humankind’s relationship to its environment, and with the human folly of trying to control, measure, and dominate the natural world for our own ends. For Escape Vehicle no. 6 (2004), Faithfull launched a domestic chair into the atmosphere by attaching it to a weather balloon, which can be read as a meditation on human limitations, and on the foolhardy human urge to get ever further and ever higher in order to gain mastery over every space, however inhospitable. In his film ‘…Stromness…’ (2005) Faithfull records another inhospitable territory – the ruins of a former whaling factory on the now largely uninhabited island of South Georgia, abandoned but for the elephant seals that have taken up residence in its derelict sheds. Through its associations with whaling, as well as with Ernest Shackleton, the renowned Antarctic explorer who was rescued in 1916 after reaching Stromness, the work again reflects on humankind’s abortive attempts to exert control over (and exploit) the natural world. In ‘…Stromness…’, with its comical vision (and sound) of the elephant seals lurching around the dilapidated sheds, the animal kingdom appears to have the last laugh as the man-made is reclaimed by nature. In his film 0°00 Navigation Part I: A Journey across England (2009), human folly is taken to new heights when Faithfull attempts to walk the exact line of the Greenwich Meridian, irrespective of the obstacles in his path. We see the figure of a solitary walker, scaling hedges and fences, entering random homes, and wading through water – always from behind, as if we too are making this preposterous journey with him.

An Arbitrary Taxonomy of Birds shares its quirky quality with some of Faithfull’s earlier works, as well as its skewering of humankind’s anthropocentric attitudes to the natural world. And while not as overtly humorous as earlier works, the spectacle of a taxidermied chicken on a rotating pedestal (the sole exhibit in the “Those that transmit avian flu” vitrine) adds comedy to its connotation of zoonotic contagion, reminding us that it is domesticated birds, not their wild counterparts, that have hitherto spread disease to humans. (The category named “Those that hang upside down but are not birds”, which in fact contains bat specimens, is another, inadvertently prescient, link to zoonotic diseases like COVID-19). The installation seems to strike a more sober note with the category “Those that are unknown to science”, where the vitrine stands empty. As Faithfull observes, the Linnaean system is “scarily absolute”; the taxonomic aim to be all-encompassing is suggested by this empty vitrine, as if there is nothing left of the natural world that the omniscient discipline of science has not apprehended. Tragically, for the hundreds of thousands of victims of COVID-19, that is still very far from the truth.