Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

cagey, but no one is cagey like Mayer, whose favorite aphorism is "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say" (E. M. Forster). Fortunately, you can see just about everything Mayer has ever said, because she is a master archivist who has been documenting her own life since she was thirteen. Her JPEG files of her work for Hirst, for instance, are practically in real time. "I keep a record of my breathing," she said, exhaling smoke.

Then she led me into the kitchen, covered the table with scrapbooks and old photos, and launched into a show-and-tell that lasted for three days and nights, not unpleasantly, I might add, except that Mayer does not pause for food. According to her two assistants, David Spaul and Carl Church, she can survive on a diet of nicotine and coffee. That said, Mayer's kitchen is actually pretty normal, except for the wineglass shelf with the kangaroo head, the wall of cutting boards that also has a ferret leash (in its original package), and the flower vase with a beard of twelve white mice strung together. "I did that for Damien's Christmas party," she explained. "The theme was beards." She grabbed two beers out of the fridge and flicked a lighter she called "the Elephant Man" because it depicted a naked guy with super-enhanced masculinity.

When I flipped through one of her childhood scrapbooks, labeled "Twenty Years a-Growing," I could see that she's always seen the world from a slightly twisted perspective. An early Christmas wish list had "braces" (to look American), "Beano books" (a classic comic book series for kids), and "a real syringe." There was a self-portrait of her head wedged in a trap, and the transcription of a childhood dream in which she fatally conked a puppy on the head, then revived it with a saucer of milk. "My bible when I was eight," she said, handing me a musty copy of Pets, Usual and Unusual by Maxwell Knight. "It brings me back," she said, eyeing me to see if I was damaging the spine. Not only did she describe her pet squirrels, hooded rats, and ferrets—in some cases she could produce the actual items. With a magician's flourish, she lifted an aluminum Jell-O mold off the table, and there was the injured rabbit she had tried to save by suturing. "I'm not good at throwing things away," she said, cocking her head to the side.

Her mother, Irmelin Mayer, is from Berlin and was a theatrical milliner in London. Her father, Tomi, immigrated to London from Mauritius and worked as a scenic artist for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, painting backdrops for ballets and operas. "I've slept through more operas than you've been to in your entire life," she told me. Sometimes Tomi would bike home from work in his paint-splotched overalls carrying sugar cane he'd just picked up at a city market and say that he'd been to Mauritius. Other times, he'd bring home a finch that he had preserved in spirits at the scenic studios, and he and Emily would sit side by side in the kitchen sketching it. Both her grandfathers were physicians (one in Germany, the other in Mauritius). Her maternal grandmother was Lotte Pritzel, a well-known sculptor in 1920s Munich, whose erotically charged wax dolls inspired the Dadaists and the surrealist Hans Bellmer.Even the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that he was moved to write part of his favorite verse, Duineser Elegien, after seeing Pritzel's haunting figurines. Pritzel died in 1952, eight years before Mayer was born. Her flamboyance, however, was legendary. If broad-brimmed hats were in style, Pritzel wore a broader one. She smoked cigarettes in the subway, embarrassing her daughter, whom Pritzel called bourgeois. "The rebelliousness skipped my mother and hit me. I've just been a bit different. I don't like to conform to what's expected," Emily said, raising an eyebrow.

At twelve, Mayer yearned to dig her scalpel into something more exotic than city sparrows and pigeons, so she took a job at Amazon Pets in southeast London, cleaning cages and exercising dogs and sheep. The owner, a falconer and part-time amateur taxidermist, imported amazing creatures that Mayer found incredibly alluring. Soon he taught her how to train an owl to fly to a lure, and he gave her taxidermy lessons. With some convincing, he also gave her his "dead inventory," which she smuggled home and dissected for practice.

Around then, she and a boyfriend went ferreting (hunting) for rabbits at night. They'd trap them in a purse, kill them, and eat them or feed them to the dogs. Mayer is not opposed to hunting for the table, and she has killed marketplace pigeons and rabbits for taxidermy, but she refuses to kill an animal only for taxidermy. The Akeley concept of dispatching the perfect specimen in order to make the perfect mount and then try to resurrect it revolts her. "Just leave it alive!" she says with disgust. She disapproves of fur farms and believes that roadkill is the most ethical meat you can eat. Her own specimens come from veterinarians, zoos, other taxidermists, and a network of obscure specialists, including skeleton assemblers, ornithologists, and lepidopterists. The horse intestines she uses to repair Hirst's Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (a cow cut up and displayed in twelve separate glass cabinets; 1996) are from John Warman the knacker, whose family has been in the slaughtering business since the early 1800s. And her rats and mice are mostly cat fatalities.

She literally will not kill a fly. Once when I was at her house, she had just made a "blood run" (a resin blood puddle embedded with dead flies) for Hirst's landmark sculpture A Thousand Years (a rotting cow head on the floor of a giant glass case that is outfitted with a bug zapper and real flies, which eventually get sizzled; 1990). When I asked Mayer if she had killed the flies, she shot