Dioramas as Constructs of Reality: Art, Photography, and the Discursive Space

Abstract

The Powell-Cotton dioramas range in size from compressed shallow spaces to large volumes of space that contain numerous taxidermy exhibits and various representations of a natural habitat. Built specifically to allude to the animals’ natural environment within the landscape, the aim of these dioramas was to contrive a natural habitat in a realistic illusion of the natural world and to enhance the perception of landscape as a sense of place. Critical to the life size diorama and the artistic illusion are the taxidermy specimens, multiple viewpoints, and a spatial sense of landscape. This study considers how the diorama’s illusional effects contribute to a sense of place where art and science occurs within the premise of a discursive space. This paper is abridged from a PhD in Art & Design and the doctoral thesis: The Powell-Cotton Dioramas and the Re-Interpretation of an Idyll.

Conclusion

Karen Wonder’s paper Habitat dioramas as ecological theatre (1993) drew upon the significant roles of the aesthetic, ecological, and scientific aspects of her thesis. In contrast a realistic perception of this research as photo-based inquiry is to develop an understanding of the Powell-Cotton dioramas as a negotiation of landscape—a concept considered by Mel Gooding in ‘Song of the Earth’ (Gooding 2002, p. 9), and one that then denotes the taxidermy object within the connotation of an illusory landscape. By stating these points optimistically it reflects a constructive proposition regarding the natural habitat diorama—and perceived constructively it then performs a working relationship of fact and fiction. However if art itself has purpose does the reality lie in the artifice and superficiality of the diorama? This superficiality edited out birth and death, the sick and the old, the need for food and shelter—it is a double fiction that was exposed in the illusory head of a baby elephant emerging from the reeds.

The destruction of natural habitats that could be alluded to was however made evident by the nature of change, and where a desire to understand change also develops as an awareness of the finite world. To re-interpret the idea of a diorama and focus on the concept of a natural habitat as an idyll is therefore to reflect upon the erosion of this ideology. Therefore it questions how the natural habitat diorama had a crucial part to play in this fiction, in the context of describing the sensuality of the natural world, in its vulnerability and its many fabrications.

This chapter discusses research that reconsiders Bal’s notion of the cognitive relationship of a diorama and the concept of a discursive space. In doing so it considered how the natural habitat diorama has a relationship to the three-dimensionality that draws on architectural space; the three dimensional representation of the landscape within the diorama itself; the two-dimensional illusion of a tromp l’œil landscape painting; and the exterior space occupied by the viewer (Bal 2001, p. 114–115). The research compared the diorama form to its historical and contextual background through Wonders, Quinn and Altick’s observations and then considered different aspects of the diorama form the innovative experiences that have been briefly demonstrated by Alticks’s analysis of Daguerre’s 1823 diorama following his work on the Paris stage, developed a further perspective for this research project with regard to the way Daguerre’s diorama created a sensory environment of light and colour. Therein the recollection of a sense of place was conducive to considering how landscape also recollected an affective response. Consideration was then given to the wider contextual background in order to consider the Powell-Cotton dioramas and the diorama form, from a twenty-first century understanding of landscape.

Where the research context explored the cognitive presence of the diorama form as perceived in the context of Guiliano Bruno’s concept of socio-cultural space and a shifting space-affect, it then considered how ‘site-seeing’ had created a relationship to film archaeology, film architecture, and architectural space (Bruno 2007, p. 137). On this basis the research context considered the diorama form with regard to architectural space, site-seeing and the mobile view. It would regard a potential aspect of the Powell-Cotton dioramas as having a shared history with theatre, film architecture, film archaeology, photography and the early moving image. In this regard the historical aspects of the museum’s collections developed a relationship to the ‘architectonics of embodiment’ where ‘the way in which the primary structure of architecture (architectonics) determines the structure of sculpture, painting, language, and eventually the structure of ideas’ (Vesely 2005, p. 41).

In moving through the large open spaces of the galleries containing these diorama landscapes, the viewer is moving through a low-lit environment designed to increase the effect of an illusion and a sense of place. As the dioramas in the Powell-Cotton Museum were not formally documented, these dioramas and their written, visual and architectural relationship to Louis Daguerre offer a contribution to knowledge.

While the Powell-Cotton dioramas had not been formally documented until now, their contribution to a sense of place would be reflected within the socio-cultural and cultural historical documentation that derived from this research. The relationships and associations that arose through the research regarding the dioramas, ­archives and collections within the Powell-Cotton Museum were therefore found to have had a lasting influence on the formation of the museum.