Speculative Taxidermy

112DIORAMAS

symbolically bridged distances between Europe and far continents that
most visitors would never experience in person. The intense cultural im-
pact of these new visual encounters on nineteenth-century city dwellers
of Paris, London, and other cities across Europe and in the United States
generated an unprecedented amatorial frenzy for practices like collecting,
cataloging, beachcombing, studying geology, gazing at exotic animals,
pinning butterflies, and growing ferns.^13 This new regime of visibility, vastly
purported by the display of taxidermy and other natural objects, simulta-
neously played a preponderant role in the configuration of the new optics
of the modern age in transdiscursive ways. Barbara T. Gates argues that
this new opticality transcended natural history, influencing art practices:

A reliance on observation rather than on theory was in fact one of the

things that set natural history apart from much of the science practiced

in universities. The aesthetic of particularity that we have become accus-

tomed to examining in the work of John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites,

and Gerard Manley Hopkins was trained through the Victorian fasci-

nation with scrutinizing nature. It was a legacy from romanticism

funneled through the lens of Victorian natural historians, who looked

with the naked eye, the hand lens, the microscope, and the telescope

until they had their fill.^14

As will be seen later in this chapter, this transdiscursive intermingling
between natural history and art will play a pivotal role in the recovery of
the discourses, practices, and power/knowledge relations at play in the
rise of taxidermy during the modern age.

DIORAMAS AND THE CONSTRUCTION

OF NATURE

The new epistemic modality that prescribed the faithful simulation of the
natural realm provided the context in which dioramas became the quint-
essential tool for constructing concepts of nature. In the United States
and northern Europe, dioramas emerged during a period of intense so-
cial and technological change. In 1875, Gustaf Kolthoff, a Swedish hunter-