Presentation and Representation The Dior

Presentation & Representation.
The Diorama at the Natural History Museum.
KEY CONCEPTS
WHAT KIND OF TOPOS IS THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM?
The Natural History Museum is a place where nature, i.e.
reality is reconfigured and realigned according to prevailing
cultural and social constructs. It is thus a mediating process
which continuously produces and reproduces; presents and
represents reality as it is constantly culturally redefined.
WHAT IS THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OBJECT / SPECIMEN?
A sign, a sparkle of nature that can be, and is in fact, perceived as the whole of the natural science
contents it represents.
“PARS PRO TOTO”
This specific process of comprehension of a system of simulacra is a complex linguistic process that
overcomes the materiality of each specimen; even as this understanding happens we never take
representation for reality; there is an analogical process between actual presence of a specimen and its
simultaneous substitution of a whole.
WHAT IS THE DIORAMA?
The diorama is a very specific cultural construct; a cultural reproduction set on the modern visual
paradigm of understanding and analyzing the world visually; these were display structures that produced
and reproduced meanings and agendas both cultural and social.
The diorama as a visual structure transcends the boundaries of representation itself, consolidating a three-
dimensional arrangement with its pictorial setting, which extends the viewer's point of view stressing the
mise en scène of the Real.
THE DIORAMA TIME MACHINE
The Natural History Museum and nineteenth century's Science epistemological history is withhold in
such displays as the diorama. These are mediating structures designed to organize knowledge, scientific
knowledge, inside the walls of the Museum; signifying a specific composition of realistic and naturalistic
values.
METAMUSEUM
Dioramas used to be display structures, but may nowadays be more clearly perceived as historical
evidences of the developments on the history of science and of scientific literacy in the last century. As
well as other dated museographical features, it may be used today as a device to revise the meanings of
the Natural History Museum.
Catarina Madruga, 2007 «Nature Behind Glass» Manchester University

Diorama describes the act of seeing through. It is a device that simultaneously
displays nature and its representations according to symbolic values. The diorama is
examined here as a prevailing visual display and a specific museological device of a
classical Natural History Museum. It is both a presentation and a representation of
scientific contents. It is part of the history of the natural history museum as well as it is
part of the history of knowledge in natural sciences.
Each field of knowledge builds a specific vocabulary for producing and
presenting its finds and concepts. The modern museum, along with the modern
paradigm, was above all a visual construct. As such, what are the ways through which
the natural history museum presents itself nowadays? As the diorama loses its power
and influence in the modes of display available, how should the museums relate to it
and to classic taxidermy techniques?
THE MODERN EPISTÉME
As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries foundation of knowledge unfolds, the
modern concept of the Museum develops as a visual display of cultural enlightenment.
The Natural History Museum is thus the expected result of a reorganization of the
Curiosities Cabinet displaying the new ideas about the natural world, and the new
classificatory science.
Reconfigurating scientific knowledge, this new place of literacy the natural
history museum presents a very specific view on realistic representation of nature. The
illusionist appeal allowed by the late eighteenth century devices and technology
produces a development of such structures as those of the Panorama and the Diorama,

as a means of presenting and representing environments and sensory experiences to the
bourgeois masses.
Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, inventor of the Daguerreotype, physicist and
landscape painter; and Charles-Marie Bouton, open to the Parisian public in 1822 an
exhibition entitled “Diorama”, where both wish to present «un monument d'exposition
d'effets de peinture» [Wood, 1993]. Through the following twenty years they presented
more than twenty different vistas and scenarios of monuments and landscapes in this
fashion. It is supposed to have drawn ca. 80.000 visitors, only between 1822 and 1830
[Wood, 1997]. Later on some of these monumental paintings were to be sold and
exhibited also in London's Regent's Park, this becoming then a tale of two cities. In both
cases the diorama presentations included paintings of massive scale opaque and
translucent, where the scenic effects are played through an ingenious light design,
whilst the spectators are kept in the darkness.
This being the origin of this specific illusionist display, the diorama may be
defined as a three-dimensional representation, or scale model of a landscape designed to
visually present an historic event, an urban scenario or the natural world settings for
educational and entertainment purposes we find in the Natural History Museum.
The presentation and re-presentation of nature and the real inside the museum has
had different designs related with the epistemological history of scientific knowledge. A
museum, or an exhibition, incorporates in itself the paradigm of a prevailing visual
knowledge of the world in the western society. The visible, the view and the viewed are
of utmost importance in the display devices in the museum.
Museological structures such as the diorama show an impressive knowledge about
design, physics and the visual and light phenomena. Nevertheless, underlying is also an
illusionist driving force possibly rooted in the baroque fantasy paintings and 'trompe
l'oeil' theatre settings whose canvases were also made curvy in order to achieve a
pictorial perspective apparition; and the extraordinary development of taxidermy
techniques derived from a concept of realistic depiction of nature.
NATURALISM AND TAXIDERMY
The natural history museum is dedicated to scientific research and the consequent
popularization of scientific knowledge through exhibits which may cause curiosity and
awe in the visitorspectator. In the twentieth century, unlike the previous displays of
«unicorn horns» or such objects, it is intended an empathy and understanding on the
natural world which is presumably objective and more scientifically informed. Which is

to say that the scope of analysis of these museum structures and displays should be
aware of all the proposals for a new educated and culturally improved society that the
mediating structure that is the Museum as an institution represents. Or, as Haraway
[Haraway, 1984] reads the work of Carl Akeley in the American Museum of Natural
History of New York, this specific representation of the diorama as 'pure' nature as
being a prophylactic dosage of Nature for the twentieth century citizen museum visitor.
So, the visual scenic effect of the diorama is a symbolic shrine to nature inside the
museum walls achieved through the improved taxidermy techniques. Carl Akeley's
dioramas are a privileged glance, a revelation, a vision of the knowledgeable world.
Much as the renaissance notion of pictorial space as an “opening of a window to the
world”. To the visitor of the Akeley's African Hall, a diorama gallery, the experience is
of a travel in space and time. The diorama transcends the boundaries of representation
allying the three-dimensional scene along with its pictorial mise en scène, prolonging
the visual illusion of being there without being there. The ability of re-presenting of
these displays is clearly reinforced via the use of the taxidermy specimens. For the
taxidermist, the choice of each specific specimen and each specific pose is of paramount
importance. It implies a selective process of denominating characteristics that may
function as synecdoche, as a representation of a taxon.
PARS PRO TOTO
What we find in the natural history museum are always simulacra, always
representations of a given idea about natural classification and organization. Although
the museum table never refers to the idiosyncrasies of a specimen and always to a
generalization of a species, we as visitors perceived this complicated linguistic process
as a part of the underlying structure and performance the natural history museum
implies and demands, i. e. if we are observing a Ginkgo biloba L. specimen in the
museum and we state that it was around even when dinosaurs ruled the earth; we are not
really referring to the specificities of the specimen before us but to a whole species.
This, we believe, is a complex sign-signifier relationship that is part of our producing
and reading natural history museums.
ANALOGICAL IDEAS
Two francophone authors Schiele and Montpetit also read the diorama as a
culturally specific and relative construct, a reproduction of a preconceived cultural order
rooted in the western society visual dependency for obtaining and perpetuating

knowledge. Schiele [1996] supports a definition of the diorama as semiotic system that
allows all these linguistic processes of simultaneously presenting and representing; of
coincident presence and substitution of scientific ideas.
Montpetit [in Schiele, 1996: 55-100] reads the diorama as part of a structure of an
analogical take on museum displays and museography. A device that presents the
viewer with original objects or its reproductions disposed in a specific context in a
design in which the whole produces an image, i.e. refers by means of analogy, to a
specific place and state of the Real outside the museum; this situation is identified by
the viewer which situates him or herself in the origin of what he or she sees. This author
analyses in detail all the cognitive and perceptive details of this analogical reading of
visual displays. The force of this analogical relation comes from the synchronized
presence of the artefact and its substitution; the production of a representation of an idea
with aide from certain material presences.
META MUSEUM
As a mediating process of reproducing social and cultural relations, museology
and exhibition production is a transversal field of knowledge. To manage museum
contents or to design museographical structures are both revealing of a certain
predominant paradigm. The diorama as a museum display was once representation of a
certain presentation of scientific knowledge. What may it mean today?
In the most recent state of the art science exhibitions the stress is again on the
authenticity of each specimen presented, and the more real is the presentation, more
effective results it produces in the visiting crowds of the museum. The hands-on model
of scientific exhibits and the use of real muscle tissue in anatomic presentations only
appears to be a shift in the representation / presentation model addressed here. In fact,
the appeal of the naturalistic representation though not only visual, but increasingly
more and more sensorial is a success factor for a scientific or natural history exhibition
The taxidermy based diorama is a dated display, being substituted by its 3d
animations and videographical equivalent. Nonetheless, what it represents for the
history of epistemological scientific knowledge is valid even in today’s natural history
museum.

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Presentation & Representation.

The Diorama at the Natural History Museum.

Catarina Madruga, 2007 «Nature Behind Glass» Manchester University

Catarina Madruga, 2007 «Nature Behind Glass» Manchester University

Catarina Madruga, 2007 «Nature Behind Glass» Manchester University

Catarina Madruga, 2007 «Nature Behind Glass» Manchester University

Catarina Madruga, 2007 «Nature Behind Glass» Manchester University

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