Caves are environments, not dioramas. People walked through them, and they were used for, you know, purposes. The Lascaux replicas are some sort of dioramas. A diorama usually has a distinct educational purpose, it tries to show us something we otherwise wouldn’t be able to see.
Caves are also very real. The caves themselves are not simulating other caves. The decorations, or interior design, do seem to simulate nature in a lot of cases, and can have an undeniable immersive effect. The big Lascaux hall with its ceiling of life-sized running animals might be a bit diorama-like, though it doesn’t represent a ‘real’ situation. Dioramas connecting to prehistoric natural architecture seems to lead to a conceptual dead end (or does it?).
Theatre decors, film sets, and elaborate altars
Caves are natural architecture, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the blueprint for all following human-made buildings. Altars, especially the baroque altars, but also stage design, and theatre and movie sets have a much more diorama-like presence. Altars are symbolic dioramas, representing not elements from reality, but visualize a way to get closer to god, or gods, or the afterlife, or enlightenment, or redemption. But they were also used, at least some parts of altars would get meddled with while performing rituals.
Decors and sets only really are dioramas when they’re not in use. Once a play is being carried out on the stage, a set looses its frozen-in-timeness, and becomes part of a time based narrative. Actors interact with the decor, and the diorama is lost. When abandoned, a theatre decor could very well be a diorama, albeit a handicapped one, since it’s missing its context of story and actors. Can a decor on a stage be a diorama in its own right?
The making of Lascaux IV, photo via The Guardian/Denis Nidos/Département 24, 2016.
Note: this text (in an extended version) was first published in April 2019 (with an edit in June) on my portfolio site.
Fiction dioramas: a rant on thema park Efteling
De Efteling is a well known fairy tale themed amusement park in the Netherlands, and according its own website it has only one diorama: an elaborate miniature set of mountains and villages through which miniature trains travel. In fact, Efteling has a staggering amount of dioramas, and most are more or less brought to life using animatronics.
The oldest part of the park is the fairy tale forest, which was built around 1950, where visitors can look at sleeping beauty in her coffin through glass windows, her breathing simulated by an air pump. A bit further is a haunted castle (Spookslot), where every fifteen minutes a show takes place: Saint-Saëns’s ‘Danse Macabre’ accompanies a choreography with animatronic red-eyed bats, skeletons and dancing tombstones, and a clever mirror and lighting illusion of holographic ghosts dancing in a cellar.
Efteling, Spookslot, photo via Wikipedia There are also video registrations of the show, for instance this one by YouTube user Eftelwesley.
I probably need to explain why I’m talking about theme park Efteling: in the Netherlands, the Efteling is a standard component of virtually anyone’s childhood. For an adult, it can simultaneously be incredibly annoying and eerily enchanting. The special effect rides are up to Hollywood standard, only with less bling. All over the park, (sickening) music is added to enhance the fairy tale atmosphere. On the other hand, the outdated technology of some of the attractions in the park, and the overall kitschiness are part of its charm. It does bring out the kid in an adult.
In 2015, the gallery I had been working with for years celebrated its tenth anniversary. The gallerists asked their artists what we preferred to do: go to the Efteling, or another option which I forgot. Without any exceptions, all artists opted for an Efteling visit. And so we went. We had a good time.
Photo by Lana Mesić. With Daan Paans, Marleen Sleeuwits, Pierre Dirks, Sarah Carlier, Geertje Muffels, Alexandra Crouwers, Christian Kryl, Rob Wetzer, Sjoerd Knibbeler,Karianne Bueno, and gallerists Geertje Muffels and Robert Jan Verhagen in front of Efteling’s Vogelrock (an indoor rollercoaster), 2015.
Due to the sometimes dated animatronics, a lot of the park is slightly uncanny, and in various cases straight out kitschy. There are some serious problems with the way many of the fairy tales are being pictured, and I once had a discussion with their costumer service about these issues. The park holds on to the depiction of the fairy tales as the original park designer – an illustrator – had visioned them in the 1940s and 50s, a vision that in itself was based on 19th century British romanticism. Because of this, some of the dioramas display extremely outdated ideas about gender equality, or terribly stereotyped notions on ethnicity.
Wikipedia: A dark ride or ghost train is an indoor amusement ride on which passengers aboard guided vehicles travel through specially lit scenes that typically contain animation, sound, music and special effects.
The problem with Droomvlucht
One of the attractions, the immersive ‘dark ride’ Droomvlucht, built in 1993, has several dioramas the visitor admires from the comfort of a cart following a route through a building (note: although the cart is moving, it’s not moving through the dioramas, but rather passes them by). The scenes are loosely based on Oberon, ‘the king of the fairies’ originating in 13th century Merovingian texts: an ‘elven-man of the forest’. Shakespeare’s Oberon from ‘A midsummer night’s dream’ is a trickster elven king, arguing with his wife, the elven queen, over the custody of a child.
Victor Jory as Oberon in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, 1935
Efteling has turned ‘Oberon’ and his elven kingdom into a segregated society: female fairies ‘live’ mostly in separate dioramas from the male trolls. Oberon seems to be the only male elf, which is weird in many ways. All (women) elves are blond or have light brown or pastel-colored hair – they’re all very white – have blue or green eyes and are dressed in pastel-coloured ballet-like dresses. They don’t really do anything but sit on branches or swings.
The trolls are a bit more engaged in activities (playing, bathing, risk-taking by swinging on one hand). They mostly wear loin cloths, and are a bit less white-skinned than the elven girls – consistent with the idea that men work outside and get tanned in the sun, while women are confined to an indoors golden cage life. At the start of the ride there’s a larger young and fresh looking woman in a pond – the elven queen, then? – and in one scene, there’s the elven king, old and crooked and surrounded by young, white women-elves, on a throne, waving. There also seems to be a ‘race’ of green people with pointy ears. No idea how they fit in, but there they are.
This is the so-called ‘onride’ of Droomvlucht, a registration by De Efteling. Warning: some may feel it’s hard to stomach, but it helps if you turn off the sound.
After visiting the park the last time, when I also went for the dark ride of Droomvlucht, I felt the need to write a comment to the Efteling, since the message that the dioramas conveyed were not of the sort that I would want to promote as a theme park in the 21th century. Although I do appreciate a certain traditionalism when it comes to fairy tales, sagas and myths, I’m convinced that with minor adjustments such tale can be transformed into something more inclusive, both concerning gender and ethnicity, culture or skin colour.
Suggestions: put a female fairy queen right next to the fairy king. Spray paint the fairies in various skin tones, replace their eyes and wigs, have them wear pants and boots and bows and arrows and dresses. Mix the trolls and the fairies in the dioramas more: trolls can be female too, and fairies can be male. Since most of the diorama’s appeal lies in the meticulously decorated nature scenes and its unearthly lights and colors – including even science fiction planet scenes – these are small changes, conveying a big message.
It’s really not that difficult.
Side note: my significant other’s argument that ‘children won’t notice it anyway’ is invalid. They might not actively notice it, but the ride reaffirms gender stereotypes in a really not so subtile way. Of course they won’t ‘notice’ it, but it’s definitely part of an overall framing. The Efteling welcomes over 5.000.000 visitors per year.
Dutch right wing nationalist politician Geert Wilders has a favorite Efteling ride, Droomvlucht. It led to these two journalists making their own rather hilarious – and interesting – Droomvlucht analysis, in which they’re talking about hyperrealities and a desire for the impossible, but appear to miss my points.
Geen gekleurde duiven meer De Efteling heeft in juni het sprookje ‘Het Bruidskleed van Genoveva’ in het Sprookjesbos aangepast. Sinds juni 2018 zie je geen gekleurde duiven meer rondom het Herauten Plein, alleen nog maar witte. Hoewel de duiven altijd met een diervriendelijke verf gekleurd werden, vindt de Efteling het niet meer van deze tijd. Dus is besloten te stoppen met het kleuren van de duiven. In het begin van het sprookje ‘Het Bruidskleed van Genoveva’ zijn de duiven nog wit. Dat fragment wordt nu uitgelicht in plaats van het eindfragment met de gekleurde duiven.
(In short: the theme park stopped dying its doves – using animal-friendly dye -, since they regard coloring doves an outdating practice)
If they can change the colors of the doves to ‘normal’, you can change skin-colors and outfits of characters to ‘normal’, too, right?
Originally meant to promote a game, this 2 hours and 40 minute real time simulation, based on the actual events and timeframe of the sinking of the Titanic, displays an eerie artistic quality of its own. Devoid of human figures, the story of the disaster is told through the character of the vessel itself, a few explanatory captions at key moments, and minimalist additional audio.
Titanic: Honor & Glory, 2016. Via Youtube. See also: www.titanichg.com
By the end of the video, even without any depiction of the desperation of the victims and in complete silence, the desolate demise of the Titanic becomes barely watchable.
(…) let us pay our two shillings in the vestibule of the exhibition, ascend the stairs, and submit ourselves to the guidance of the attendant waiting to receive and conduct us to a seat through the darkness-visible of the theatre, into which we enter; a precaution rendered necessary by the transition from light to gloom, which at first almost incapacitates us for the use of our own eyes.
In front opens, receding apparently like the stage of a theatre, a view of the beautiful basilica or church of St. Paul, with its range of delicate pillars and small Moorish-like connecting arches at the top, over which again the entire flat surface of the wall appears covered with beautiful paintings, now lit up by the radiance of the moon streaming in through the windows on the opposite side.
…
But as we gaze – the dark cedar roofs disappears, and we see nothing but the pure blue Italian sky, whilst below, some of the pillars have fallen – the floor is covered with wrecks; the whole, in short, has almost instantaneously changed to a perfect and mournful picture of the church after the desolation wrought by the fire.
A bell now rings, we find ourselves in motion; the whole theater in which we sit, moves round till its wall closes the aperture or stage, and we are in perfect darkness; the bell rings again, a curtain rises, and we are looking on the time-worn towers, transepts, and buttresses of Notre Dame, its rose window on the left, and the water around its base reflecting back the last beams of the setting sun.
Gradually these reflections disappear, the warm tints fade from the sky, and are succeeded by the cool grey hue of twilight, and that again by night – deepening by insensible degrees till the quay and the surrounding buildings and the water are no longer distinguishable, and Notre Dame itself scarcely reveals to us its outlines against the sky.
Before we have long gazed on this scene the moon brings to emerge slowly—very slowly, from the opposite quarter of the heavens, its first faint rays tempering apparently rather than dispersing the gloom; presently a slight radiance touches the top of one of the pinnacles of the cathedral—and glances as it were athwart the dark breast of the stream; now growing more powerful, the projections of Notre Dame throw their light and fantastic shadows over the left side of the building, until at last, bursting forth in serene unclouded majesty, the whole scene is lit up, except where the vast Cathedral interrupts its beams, on the quay here to the left, and where through the darkness the lamps are now seen, each illumining its allotted space.
Hark! The clock of Notre Dame strikes! and low and musical come the sounds – it is midnight – scarcely has the vibration of the last note ceased, before the organ is heard, and the solemn service of the Catholic church beings – beautiful, inexpressibly beautiful – one forgets creeds at such a time, and thinks only of prayer: we long to join them.
And yet all this is illusion (the sounds of course excepted) – a flat piece of canvas, with some colors distributed upon it, is all that is before us; though where that canvas can be, it seems, to one’s eyes at least, impossible to determine; they cannot by any mental processes be satisfied that buildings, distance, atmosphere are not before them – to such perfection has the Diorama been brought.
Note: the eye witness account is likely from before 1844, the publication date of this piece. In 1844, the original diorama phenomenon was in decline due to the subsequent rise of photography, including portable special effects devices such as the stereoscope. In 1839, Daguerre was working on his photographic invention, the Daguerreotype.
Charles Wilson Peale (1741 – 1827) was an American painter, scientist, naturalist and inventor. He’s most known for his portraits, and for setting up one the first museums in the United States.
Peale’s famous self portrait, ‘The Artist in His Museum’, was painted in 1822 – Peale was 83 – and has a distinct diorama’esque quality. The monumental painting depicts the artist full scale, as if he’s standing there in real life, while holding up a velvet curtain – usually part of the backdrop for studio portraits.
This provides us a view of one of the museum galleries of Peale’s natural history museum: part of an elephant skeleton is visible on the right, while paintings of wildlife are on display on the left. The whole scene is very theatrical: coulisses, perspective, atmospheric lighting; painting techniques that contribute to a real sense of depth.
Peale himself looks directly at us. Though he seems to look up at us – his head is slightly bowed down, giving him a bit of a mischievous look – the perspective of the museum hall suggests the viewer is sitting on a chair.
Peale’s hand invites us to his museum hall, or maybe his gesture just means: “See what I did?”
The painting palet is prominently visible on the table, reflecting Peale’s work on both art and science.
Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822. Self portrait, oil on canvas Height: 103.7 ″ (263.5 cm); Width: 79.8 ″ (202.8 cm). Image via Wikimedia.
Though Peale’s portraits are usually classic compositions of mostly army folk – and therefor a bit pompous – this is not the only devoid painting he did. Below is a trompe l’oeil of his two sons, ‘The Staircase Group’ from 1795. This painting is in fact part of an installation with a door frame and one steps of stairs, creating the illusion of a ‘real’ doorway (see the video at the bottom of this post for a clearer image).
C.W. Peale, ‘The Staircase Group’ (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale), 1795, oil on canvas. Height: 226 cm (88.9 ″); Width: 100.5 cm (39.5 ″).
Peale’s zoological museum didn’t make a distinction between the taxidermist specimens and sculptural qualities. He experimented with ‘habitat’ displays: cases with (small) mounted animals, of which the back was painted by Peale with skies or landscapes.
These cases might be the earliest example of the habitat diorama concept. (*)
He also developed new ways to mount skeletons, and paid special attention to composition in his ‘habitat’ scenes.
Peale’s museum was disassembled after his death, due to a lack of public funding. It would take decades before his groundbreaking work would become standard inventory for natural history museums.
Beth Harris and Steven Zucker talk about Peale’s paintings. Via smarthistory.
(*) Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas. Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1993. Page 28, 29.
Apart from humans, there’s at least one other species associated with the production of ‘art’: the Australian/New Guinea bowerbird builds elaborate architectural constructions to lure its mate to its lair.
These ‘nests’ are decorated with shells, leafs, flowers, pieces of plastic; anything the bird can find.
The constructions are so sophisticated, they make use of false perspective: a visual illusion that either optically enlarges or diminishes an object by contextual placement of other objects.
Baroque altars, for example, look taller because sculptures at the top are a bit smaller than our eye would expect, based on our default perspective situation. This illusion obviously is meant to increase the notion of the almighty power of either god or the church.
The bowerbirds, however, seem to use forced perspective to create more or less flat surfaces: objects further away are a bit bigger, contradicting default perspective. Consequently, the male bowerbird – who is of the building gender – seems smaller, when standing at the end of a bowerbuilding or bowerlane. This is an odd contradiction to what would be expected, because why would a male bower bird use special effects to make him look less impressive?
Maybe he wants the construction to look even bigger?
Maybe the flat surface illusion is part of the male bowerbird’s attractive features?
Thanks, Jan Verpooten, for pointing this out to me.
Sources:
Guardian, Bowerbird builds a house of illusions to improve his chances of mating, by Mo Constandi, 19 Jan 2012
Wired, Absurd Creature of the Week: Meet the Bird That Lies and Tricks Its Way Into Sex, by Matt Simon, 2 Dec 2016
Nature, Perspective of a Bird, by Casey Dunn, 26 Oct 2010
Sciencemag, Illusions Promote Mating Success in Great Bowerbirds, by Laura A. Kelley, John A. Endler, 20 Jan 2012
Powell Cotton Museum | Quex House & Gardens | Birchington, UK | quexmuseum.org | Visited June 2019 |
Himalaya at dawn (constructed in 1905) is considered to be ‘the oldest untouched diorama of its type in any museum around the world’ (1: PC Museum Souvenir Guide, page 6) All animals on display were collected by explorer major Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton (1866-1940), who holds the reputation for ‘potentially creating the largest collection of game ever shot by one man’. (2: Wikipedia)
At the same time, Powell-Cotton was an early and avid conservationist. His museum houses several natural history dioramas, the largest portion built only a couple of years before his death, and focusing on African wildlife. A special mention goes to the central diorama, a display of various primates: a highly aesthetic composition of trees, rocks, apes, and monkeys.
Powell Cotton Museum, Quex Park, Kent, UK. The oldest natural history diorama in its original state. Photo by Denkbaar/AC, june 2019.
Himalaya at dawn is in another gallery, unimaginatively named ‘Gallery 2’, and is separated from the rest of the space by angled walls, emphasizing its altaresque character. This V-shaped space with its dark-colored walls enclose the diorama pretty tightly, cutting the peripheral view off and making it impossible to have a good overview from a bit of a distance.
Light is dim, as with most dioramas. The scene is separated from the viewer with a glass wall, made up out of 6 large glass panels, encased in a metal frame.
Himalaya at dawn is a composited scene: there are much more animals, both individuals and species, present in a small surface then there would ever be in reality. Also, an unrealistic amount of drama is going on in this one scene, most notably the falling mountain goat in the central background.
The density of the three dimensional foreground – and the dimmed lighting – contrasts the painted background: a wide view on a luscious, green valley with snow covered mountain tops, in the two-dimensional distance, lit in painted morning light. It’s almost as if the complex taxidermist compilation functions as an elaborate frame for the background painting.
Where are we?
We’re enclosed in a rocky lair, a small but high ravine, scarcely overgrown, but well below the tree-line, judging by the presence and size of the deciduous tree.
The ravine is halfway dawn, and judging by the light in the background, we’re facing South. The foreground is still covered in a nocturnal veil: no light is coming from our direction, suggesting we’re with our backs against a rock face or close to high and dense vegetation.
We are obviously trapped.
Oddly, some of the biggest animals are more or less hidden: the buck doesn’t face us, and the relaxing bull merges with the overhanging rock. The Himalayan brown bear – the largest mammal in the region – is a suspiciously small specimen.
About half of the animals is directly looking at us. The other half is busy grazing, clawing for something, staring somewhere else, or just chilling, except for the falling goat.
The goat appears to have fallen from a great height, and it just hit and extended rock. It’s less than 2 meters from the ground, but there’s a real danger it’ll roll into the narrow opening separating the 3 dimensional sculptural space from the 2 dimensional painted space.
The opening gives the impression there’s a steep abyss between these dimensions, so who knows where the goat would end up if it all were a moment in a time-based reality.
This is, however, not a time-based reality. This is a frozen scene. The goat has never fallen, nor will it ever fall, these animals never saw each other, and this place does not exist.
Note: this is a repost of an April 2019 entry on my portfolio website.
Illusions behind glass
The screen has become omnipresent in our lives: starting with TVs entering our homes, then computer monitors, smartphones, tablets, VR sets. We’re all looking through glass walls at illusions.
The illusion is not confined to films, tv programs, and funny cat videos on YouTube, but also incorporates the way we use apps, the windows in our browser or text editing software, and the internet itself.
For instance, one of the largest sites – in terms of visitor traffic – is Wikipedia. Most people use only the top layer of this online encyclopedia, searching for information on a wide variety of topics. Many are aware of the fact that the site is maintained by a fluid community, which might include literally anyone. However, only a small number of people do contribute to the site, or know that often serious discussions take place before changes are made or a new page is set up. Wikipedia is extremely transparent about this: all the visitor has to do is hit the ‘talk’ button next to the top of the article.
This is layer two: the backstage of the published content, so to speak, opening up a whole new world of interactions. Here, we find ‘edit wars’, a whole range of abbreviations (WP:3D, WP:GF, WP:HA), absurd deviations – when editors are on a roll -, conspiracy theorists, fringe theories, crazy questions, arrogance, and added knowledge.
Digging deeper will get the visitor to guidelines, Wikipedia humor, games, pages that are up for deletion, or insolvable disputes and blockades. Somewhere in between move ‘bots’, crawling the site for lost links, or vandalism – these small programs are written by members of the community, and hover on the verge of the backstage and the mechanisms of the website itself.
Technical layers such as CSS – the language that defines a website’s design – and html code – which is responsible for hyperlinks and a website’s structure – are even further down, on top of the internet protocols themselves, which are in their turn part of the World Wide Web that now defines the internet.
The Google Doodle celebrating 30 years of internet (March 12, 2019)
This is very much an architecture, all made available through a flat screen. I’m proposing the screen as a diorama.
A screenshot of the ‘backstage’ of this very page, the left column showing the structure, the right showing the ‘cascading style sheet’ (CSS).
Dioramas
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Earliest Human Relatives, 1994.
When I first arrived in New York in 1974, I visited many of the city’s tourist sites, one of which was the the American Museum of Natural History. I made a curious discovery while looking at the exhibition of animal dioramas: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished,and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real. – Hiroshi Sugimoto
There are various definitions of a ‘diorama’. According the aforementioned Wikipedia a diorama “can either refer to a 19th-century mobile theatre device, or, in modern usage, a three-dimensional full-size or miniature model, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum.” Although both the theatre devices and the miniature models are interesting in their own right, I would like to focus on the full-size diorama, enclosed in a glass showcase.
The glass is important, because it prevents the onlooker from interfering with the scene. The most common diorama in that sense is the natural history diorama: the simulation of a scene from reality, reconstructed from a blend of real and artificial 3D and 2D components. It’s a frozen set, creating the illusion of it being a window to the world of a certain animal: it’s a spatial snapshot. This artificiality is in great contrast to the natural situation it depicts. Because of that, to me, a diorama is ‘moving’ in the emotional sense.
David Wojnarowicz gelatin silver print ‘Untitled (Buffaloes)’, 1988/1989 as the desktop background for my current laptop Han Solo III.
Some dioramas are literary moving. They might have day/night cycles with colour-changing lights or mechanical movement built into the models. I’ll come back to that later.
Since artificial intelligence has no idea of what we experience as reality, Machine Learning is based on understanding reality only from the various representations of reality that are being put on its plate: photographs, film, text.
Back to the screen.
The computer screen is similar to the glass front of a diorama. More so when working with 3D software, which enables me to build my own dioramas, to carefully construct a simulation of an ‘unreality’. It’s world building.
Here’s also a big difference between the (computer) screen and a diorama: large portions of the scenes behind the screen glass are interactive, meaning the viewer is able to interfere with the scene. Hypertext and links function as zappers or portals. Games provide the experience of an avatar moving around the supposed diorama.
AR
Reversely, the classic natural history diorama is very much a screen. It’s well lit. The space a diorama is set in is much darker, even in nocturnal animal scenes. A diorama has real depth, as opposed to the digital/virtual depth of a screen. But still, it’s impossible to walk through it, or to view it from another side. The set is carefully composed towards you, the viewer. It’s not entirely flat either. A diorama is more like a stereo image: the illusion of depth in a flat surface, with a limited 3D view.
Virtual Reality has been in the 3D picture for a while now, but it still requires some bulky headgear and a hoopla of technicalities. Augmented Reality might become much bigger: the tablet or phone screen is used as magic glasses, transforming the world in front of you as long as you keep looking at the screen. The illusion is the screen itself: it tricks you into the feeling of looking through it, but you’re in fact simply looking at it while it displays what the camera sees. At some point the device will probably be made entirely from glass, so you would actually see through it.
The first ever example of AR I saw years ago at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, where dinosaur skeletons turned into animals of flesh and blood when looking through a special viewer.
At the moment, my phone is still a bit too old for augmented reality apps, but it could be interesting to try something out, similar to www.poeziemuseum.amsterdam, an app that simulated pavilions with poetry on the Amsterdam museum square, between the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum. Pretty nifty.
Het Poëzie Museum is een initiatief van International Silence, gevormd door Twan Janssen en Johannes Verwoerd. Het project kwam tot stand met financiële ondersteuning van het Nederlands Letterenfonds en het Stimuleringsfonds voor de Creatieve Industrie, en met medewerking van I Amsterdam.
