“Happy endings are stupid and they’re for stupid babies. Love is stupid and boys are stupid.” This is, at least, according to a ten-year old Julia and I met over the summer. There’s obviously an early wound there that needs soothing, and the immediate context is important (we were trying to figure out a suitable film to keep five children, aged between six-and-a-half and thirteen, entertained on a very hot Tuscan Sunday afternoon), but she had a point.

Most of us have, quite rightly, long since given up complaining about American cultural imperialism. But what our young friend was trying to say really holds up. Surely nobody—not kids, not adults, and by golly “Disney Adults” really are the worst—believes in Disneyfied fairy tales, where there are very few exceptions to the rigid rule that a “happy ending” is when a princess rides away with a prince on a horse, or something like that.

And while Julia Taschler isn’t really interested in the actual content of these films, she’s still protesting against them in a similar way to that child. Instead, though, at issue for Julia are two different but still related elements (neither of which are kid-friendly, for obvious reasons).

One is these films’ purely formal or structural dimension. A straightforwardly happy ending is, of course, ultimately a kind of economic story about consumption—the emotional investment we make in the story has a guaranteed payoff at the end. However, what Julia’s really into is that the way we get there (as in, the narrative form and structure) very clearly borrows from specifically Germanic fairy tales, even if they’re adapted to the needs of Hollywood studios and their market research.

The other element is sleazier: a “happy ending” is also the name for a certain, very special, kind of massage parlour endgame that some fun guys like to enjoy.

Juxtaposing the two versions of a happy ending isn’t just silly and vulgar and kinda gross. It’s also a way of imagining seduction as a kind of battle with advances and retreats, dodges and feints, that lasts throughout a relationship.

This is reflected in both the scenes Julia has created, the materials she has used, and their social and artistic connotations.

Each sculpture shows an animal that is undergoing violence, even though a whole series of other violent acts must have already taken place for them to get there. The rabbit is being strangled by a snake, which we can more or less accept because that’s nature’s way. The cat, however, is being strangled by disembodied, disfigured hands (presumably human, but we can’t really be sure) like you’d find in a grotesque comic book. Both say way more about what love is really like than any fairy tale romance.

Likewise, the snake isn’t a real animal, like the cat and rabbit. But the fact that Julia made it herself reflects the fact that taxidermy is an artform that uses the same kind of conventional illusionistic devices we find in other forms of art, this time giving the viewer the false sense that the animal they are looking at is still alive. The fox is an outlier because it’s a version of a hunting trophy, though one that becomes a valuable consumer good that fancy ladies used to wear (before animal rights activists rightly put a stop to that kind of thing) as opposed to a ghoulish kind of interior decoration, as in hunting lodges.

The very fact that Julia has used taxidermized animals (bought from Austrian eBay equivalent Willhaben, not ones she’s killed herself), raises an issue that Disney stories and real relationships both share: whoever owned these once-loved pets has put them through several different stages of transformation far more brutal, and far sadder, than in fairy stories—from wild animal (in the distant past) to domestic pet, to rigid object, to something that can be sold.

This is partly echoed in Julia’s use of pantyhose to make the disembodied hands and the kitchen tiles. It’s a fragile, seductive material used to conceal skin imperfections (veins, moles, pigmentation) that imitates skin while really being nothing like it, just as a dead cat can’t really sniff stuff or lie in the sun like a cutie or furtively bury its faeces like an arch criminal.

The point, ultimately, is this: Julia Taschler’s work explores the tragic mismatch between “nature” and “culture” in some of its most obscene dimensions: the grotesque irony that domestic life involves two kinds of slavery that we have so often treated as normal. On the one hand, we use animals as pets, onto whom we can project our inner feelings. On the other hand, women have long since been turned into hollow reflections of their husbands while also working for them without reward.

— Max L. Feldman