Speculative Taxidermy

DIORAMAS131

audiences’ imagination.”^86 Subsequent exhibitions that took place in 1871,
1886, and 1887 also contributed to the strong interest in taxidermy among
Victorian audiences.^87 The 1886 exhibition was particularly responsible
for the coming into fashion of large, exotic taxidermy trophies from the
Cooch Behar district in East India, while the mounted heads of buffalo,
antelope, elk, and caribou from Canada also enthralled audiences.^88
Notably, the American Trophy Exhibition, which took place in 1887 in
London, displayed more than two hundred trophies of large mammals
and provided the format for a number of similar exhibitions that fol-
lowed in Europe between the end of the nineteenth century and the first
thirty years of the twentieth century. At this point in history, taxidermy
came more and more to be defined by imperialist discourses and hunt-
ing practices that substantially led to the irreparable unbalancing of eco-
systems on a global scale.

OLEG KULIK: THE MUSEUM OF NATURE,

OR THE NEW PARADISE

Much of the recent critical revisionism on the subject of taxidermy and
dioramas has been played out in photographic terms. In the next chapter
I will explore more in depth why this is the case, but for the time being it
should suffice to say that the photographic idiom has played an essential
critical role in relation to issues of realism, truth, and constructedness.
Dioramas simultaneously are three-dimensional structures and two-
dimensional images. They unstably situate themselves at the crux of the
sculptural, the painterly, and, because of their intrinsic indexicality, the
photographic. Thus dioramas provide ample opportunities to engage with
a criticality that not only addresses the representational tropes presented
by the image but also reaches deeper into important issues of an idiom-
atic and epistemological nature.
Among the many contemporary artists who have engaged in photo-
graphing natural history dioramas for the purpose of addressing or decon-
structing specific aspects of the rhetoric underlying them, Iroshi Sugimoto
has been “reanimating the animals” through an ambiguous play of
idiomatic specificities. In the series Dioramas (1974–1994), t he tension