When Sheryl Crow snarls her way through “If It Makes You Happy,” the music video for one of her most popular songs shows her trapped in the LA County Museum of Natural History diorama of a simple red room wedged between a pack of taxidermied wolves on a mountain on one side and polar bears on ice floes on the other side. Before we finish, we will see grizzly bears, moose, elephants, walruses, rhinos and more – an amalgam of more than 75 detailed habitat displays that are at the heart of the museum’s exhibits.
In the video, streamed more than 67 million times on YouTube and still popular decades after the song won the Grammy in 1997, the tableaus glowing in the dark diorama hall function as a metaphor of the fence, as well as transgression, escape and freedom.
A crow dressed as an animal and pawed hilariously at the camera. When visiting Boy Scouts stick their faces into the glass of a diorama as if they were trapped inside, a girl with braids that look like the horns of an Arabian oryx comes to mind, and a very lifelike elephant crosses from stage right, we might as well start. wonder which side of the glass holds the wild.
A walrus diorama in the NHM’s North American Mammal Hall, which played in an elaborate parody of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” in the Super Bowl extras.
(Natalja Kent/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
The music video is a testament to the continuing popularity of dioramas, and the way they are adapted to new contexts and meanings, a process that will get a boost this month as the Natural History Museum unveils three new diorama variations commissioned from artists for the citywide event PST ART: Art and Collide Science.
The boundary between reality and art is always uncertain in diorama. In the past, the creators of the diorama worried that the wild nature was disappearing. They want to preserve to inform, educate and improve humanity, even if they have to send hunting parties and specimen collectors to kill animals, destroy plants and put everything in front of painted backgrounds and behind glass to do it. Some, including the influential Smithsonian taxidermist William T. Hornaday, were also linked to racist ideologies concerned with preserving the “pure” white human race.
Artifice marks how the diorama is represented and understood. In the 1970s, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto became famous for his “Diorama” series, photos habitat groups, including some in the Natural History Museum, that leave evidence of fences or signage. At first glance it looks like genuine wildlife photography.
In addition, Honda’s 2012 Super Bowl commercial mashed up reality and fiction into fiction when Matthew Broderick parodied his role in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Probably playing hooky from the movie shoot, he visited the walrus diorama at the Natural History Museum. Broderick thinks of the walrus while the walrus watches him, leading to one of Bueller’s most quoted statements:
“Isms, in my opinion, are not good. People don’t have to believe in isms, they have to believe in themselves. I Quote John Lennon: ‘I don’t believe in the “Beatles,” I only believe in me.’ Good point there. After all, he was a Walrus. I could be a Walrus. I still have to ride people.”
Animals are “good to think about,” French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously wrote in his book on totemism. And the animals in the diorama can clearly disturb anyone’s mind.
The representation of nature in dioramas has been influenced by the tradition of landscape painting and film backgrounds, with the conventions of visual realism, compositional balance and creating a certain mood through dark forests, mountains, clear skies or threatening clouds. Interpretive labels seek to shape what people perceive in a scene, the connections they make as they move from one diorama to another. Changing interpretations have shaped what is included in each miniature habitat.
For today’s careful visitor, dioramas new and old raise endless questions.
NHM’s polar bear diorama isn’t designed to reflect climate change, but that’s what the animals on the ice are warning us about today.
(Mario de Lopez/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
In a 2012 episode of “Mad Men,” a girl visiting New York City’s American Museum of Natural History – filmed, in another twist on reality and representation, in LA – asked about a musk ox diorama, “How did they get all these animals?” His friend dryly replied that “Teddy Roosevelt killed him.” The girl wonders, his friend quips, “I hope. If not, what do they do? Walked in and said, ‘We just need a baby to finish this diorama’?”
Sometimes, a difficult but important engagement can begin by changing the wall labels that accompany the diorama. In 2018, for example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City altered a diorama depicting an imaginary meeting between 17th-century Dutch settlers and a group of Lenape Indians by adding layers to the glass that explained how the scene was inaccurate. . This layer preserves the integrity of the original diorama as an artifact and opens up conversations about political and racial history.
Sometimes dioramas can change meaning without any obvious intervention. A traditional diorama of a polar bear on an ice floe hardly needs a change in presentation or interpretation to take on a new meaning in our era of climate change. The scene, a version of which was first shown in the early decades of the museum’s 110-year history, now seems to have predated global warming.
New diorama designs can also open up new conversations. A diorama showing native and non-native urban wildlife in the background of Los Angeles – a coyote with a cat in its mouth, a bird at the feeder, a mouse scurrying away, the downtown skyline in the distance of the fog – illustrates the relationship between humans, domestic animals. and wild animals, all living together nearby. These are what ecologists call “novel ecosystems,” habitats shaped by humans and nature.
But these examples also show the limitations of the diorama, and not only in terms of content but as an art form like painting, sculpture or film.
Formally, a diorama is a single scene in a narrative or story, like a still in a movie or a single panel in a graphic novel. It often evokes what scholars call a masterplot, a type of story line that dominates the way people think about things. A diorama of a pride of lions can stand in for hunting, or for hierarchy, reinforcing the idea of the lion king. But while it is easy to call up the masterplot with just one scene, it is much harder to disturb or question the limited view. This sticky effect can defeat labels, overlays and counter programs.
So creating new meanings may require a form of experimental and even disturbing diorama. That is why NHM invites outside artists to experiment with new forms in the hall. Some museums have decided to do away with dioramas because their problematic meaning can be difficult to change. But dioramas continue to attract many visitors, and their frequent appearances in various forms of popular culture attest to their continued ability to entertain and communicate in surprising ways.
Perhaps we can learn from some of the ways dioramas are used outside museums to inspire innovation inside. For starters, future diorama designers can experiment with more human-altered landscapes, such as LA’s backyard scenery. They can try virtual backgrounds, sounds, smells, animations or holographs. These techniques can expand the narrative beyond a single scene.
In any case, the diorama should remind us that nature, even and especially the most original, will not come to us as an unalloyed reality. It is always filtered through layers of worldviews, social practices, historical memories and anticipation of the future.
What Lévi-Strauss concluded about totems can also be applied to dioramas. He thinks about nature through totems – that is, humans compare themselves to non-humans, make metaphors with animals and plants, speculate about differences and similarities, classify individuals and species – in the origins of human reason, language and culture.
“There is nothing ancient or remote about it,” Lévi-Strauss said of totemism. And we would say the same about dioramas.
Jon Christensen and Ursula K. Heise are co-founders of the Environmental Narrative Strategy Laboratory at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Fabricating Wilderness: The Habitat Diorama of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.”
