122DIORAMASor less accomplished appropriations from the canon of classical paint-
ing.^46 Photography’s ability to allow nature to be copied with effortless
accuracy became indissolubly bound, in its aesthetic representational
strategies, to the art historical conception of realism. At the ideological
core of taxidermy, as an essential part of the dioramic experience, thus lay
an aesthetic modality shared by the media of sculpture, painting, and, lastly,
photography: stasis. Along with the mimetic verisimilitude upon which
realism relies, stasis constitutes the essential gateway to transcendental-
ism; it is the quality that indissolubly interlinks taxidermy to classical
representation. In classical art, sculptural stillness constitutes the repre-
sentational element signifying a moral dimension imbued with a medita-
tive sense, suggesting the solemnity of an event and the ethical elevation of
a subject matter.^47
In an essay titled “Acts of Stillness: Statues, Performativity, and Passive
Resistance,” art historian David Getsy upheld a statue’s refusal to move,
its resilient immobility, as a performative act that affects the viewer.^48
Through stasis, “the physical copresence of the statue initiates a cascade
of effects on the viewer in which she or he attempts to manage the incur-
sion into their space by a material object that is equivalent to the image
that it depicts three-dimensionally.”^49 This “still” confrontation, accord-
ing to Getsy, takes the form of a desire to control, manifesting itself “in
fantasies of rape, in violence, in paternalism, in destruction, in mocking
indifference, and in violation.”^50 Similarly, stillness metaphorically objec-
tifies the animal body beyond the convenience of scientific observation.
It engages the viewer in a complex negotiation between a moving body,
one that now functions as a vehicle through which power relationships
can be performed and inscribed.
As seen, realism lacks a straightforward and unanimously agreed-
upon signification in the study of the visual arts.^51 Essentially intrinsic to
the illusive essence of mimesis within visual representation, realism can
be understood in classical terms as relentlessly engaging in the produc-
tion of a beauty immortal in its perfection, one proposing a transcenden-
tal experience.^52 This configuration suggests that the lifelike virtue of
scientific taxidermy, in its constrictive, corrective, and perfecting ap-
proaches, should be conceptualized more carefully than has previously
been done.