Interview: Minnesota Association Of Rogue Taxidermists

by Christopher Bahn
October 26th, 2005

With Halloween looming, it's an appropriate time to think about what makes a monster. Few know the answer better than Sarina Brewer, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury, the three artists at the core of the Minnesota Association Of Rogue Taxidermists, a Twin Cities art collective specializing in gore-drenched, provocative, and defiantly postmodern takes on the hunting-lodge staple. The three share a mordant sense of humor and a strong desire to poke holes in the boundaries between life and death, monstrous and normal. Bibus has a day job making zombies for a company that sells props and equipment for haunted houses. His work, typified by a squirrel gnawing on a bloody human finger, is the most cheerfully gory of the trio's. Brewer's self-termed "carcass art" also has plenty of dark wit, and evokes a strong sense of the uncanny. And Marbury creates fabric animals that are like rabid, nightmare versions of Muppets. The three gained national attention (including a rave in the New York Times) for their first group show last year. Roguetaxidermy.com features galleries of their art as well as the popular Beast Blender. The A.V. Club sat down with Marbury and Bibus (Brewer's roof collapsed, forcing her to cancel). Note: Some of the images below are not for the squeamish.

The A.V. Club: How do people react when they see your art for the first time? Scott Bibus: We get a lot of people who are really upset initially, until you engage them. Part of our ethics charter says that one of our missions is to engage people who are offended about what we're doing and about the different issues that we're thinking about. AVC: Your work can be so disturbing, it's probably important to note that you really do have an ethics charter. SB: It's interesting. Me and Sarina, as the only two founding members who had to worry about ethics [because Marbury doesn't use taxidermy], our ethics charter is basically our practices from the beginning. We both are animal lovers. We don't want to hurt any animals. No animals that we use are killed for the purpose of mounting. That's like one of the biggest tenets: No animal must be killed because you want to make a piece of art. Like, "I want to make a possum. There's one! Bang! Now I got one!" The animals that are used in the art have to be procured through ethical means. Ethical for me includes buying them from a store, but that's only ethical because we as a society have decided to say this is a fine way to go about having an animal killed and then presented to you. AVC: You have no way of knowing how the animal was treated. SB: Well, you can almost guarantee yourself that it was treated very poorly.

AVC: Was your show at Creative Electric Studios last October your first one together as a group? Robert Marbury: Originally, Dave [Salmela], who runs Creative Electric, wanted to do an Urban Beast show [Marbury's solo project]. And I had just met [Scott and Sarina] and I said, "Hey, why don't we think about doing this larger piece with the whole Rogue Taxidermy group." Dave's a vegetarian, and I think he thought, "Well, I don't know how I feel about that." But then he saw the work and got that gleam in his eye, like "I think this is gonna be great!" SB: That was probably the busiest week of my life. RM: [Laughs.] It was crazy! AVC: Did you think the show would get such a large amount of attention, both positive and negative, as it did? RM: Do other people consider it art? I think that we can say comfortably that as a concept it's worked. But at the time, we really had no idea how people were going to respond. As far as we were concerned that week, although we were putting a lot of work into it, we were the only ones that were going to appreciate it.

AVC: How close-knit is the working relationship between the three of you? RM: Sarina has been the busiest of us all, and she's got a reputation independent of us—we all do in our own ways—and so it's been pretty cool also to come together and be very separate entities, but when it comes down to it, we all know we're trying to take care of each other. SB: I think of it as a trio of musicians, so it's like the Rogue Taxidermy Trio, and we all have our solo albums. Sarina is like the rock star—her solo albums sell the best, you know. But we all have our different roles when we play in the trio. RM: But as a group, and for what we created as a trio, [the national press coverage of the Creative Electric show] really was an enormous validation. There's no way around it. And then we just started getting these awesome responses. We started getting a lot of e-mails from people who were doing similar things and we came up with the idea of becoming a membership-based group. We still get ones—I got one this week—that say, "You're not artists. You're not talented, you're sick!" SB: I send myself those e-mails every day. [Laughs.] RM: One of the more fun things for us was people starting to offer up donations. A lot of them, we'd say, "No, thank you." Owls! We got a frozen owl! Totally illegal, please don't send that to us. This one guy who was in Texas or something, he wanted to send us some armadillos. But armadillos carry leprosy—they're the only other animals that do besides humans. So, no, thank you! Someone offered us human digits, and I turned them down. And my partners were like, "What? You turned them down?" SB: Maybe it was some guy with leprosy, and that's why he was giving them away. [Laughs.] Who else would have spare fingers?

RM: What else were we offered? SB: Well, I think the greatest thing is not the stuff we were offered, but the stuff we actually got. On the gallery doorsteps, somebody left a dead cat in a McDonald's bag. [Laughs.] And the gallery owner called me up, and I live right down the street, so I ran over there to get it. AVC: So this is sort of your version of fan mail? RM: [Laughs.] Yeah, total fan mail. We had an incredible network of eyes on the street, people on the street. This one woman called, and said, "I feel really bad, I just hit a squirrel on the corner of Hiawatha and 35! You've got to go get it." No, I'm doing something, I'm watching TV! Sarina at one point said, "If I get one more call telling me where there's a dead squirrel— what am I supposed to do? Drive around all day? My freezer is already full of stuff." AVC: Where did you get the idea for the squirrel game feed you did at the Creative Electric show? SB: The idea came from Pine City, where I went to taxidermy school. Three-quarters of the way through the year, they have a game feed. You take all the animals that you have taxidermied and have saved the meat from in preparation for this big day, and you cook it up and eat it. And you serve it to the public. They come in and you have a big buffet—elk stew, buffalo burgers, you know, all the animals in big crock pots. It's $8 a plate. People come in from the surrounding countryside and chow down and they're eating the animal and it's right there, looking at them, like, "