DIORAMAS133At roughly the same time that Diane Fox began to focus on reflections
upon the glass of dioramas, Oleg Kulik, perhaps the most controversial
Russian artist of all time, embarked on a project in which the reflection
on glass is not accidental or serendipitous, as it is in Fox’s work, but care-
fully staged. In the many images from the series The Museum of Nature,
or the New Paradise (2000–2001), the overall effect is that of an uncanny
double exposure. Instead of making the glass overt, Kulik deliberately
uses it as a supplementary screen. The overall effect is similar to that of
nineteenth-century magic lantern shows, in which transparencies and
overlaps constituted visual narrative strategies.
All images in the series propose the view of a classic natural history
diorama, upon which a translucent image of a naked man and woman
appears superimposed. Kulik, who is featured in every image, crafted the
photographs using a polarizing lens, which controls the intensity and
clarity of reflections upon the glass surface. The glass separating humans
from the Garden of Eden constructed by natural history dioramas thus
disappears, producing the effect of a “pre–original sin” apparition—sup-
posedly a distant memory or a retinal trace of it. Biblical narratives are
hard to ignore when a naked man and naked woman appear immersed
in a lush natural setting. Yet, Kulik’s scenes are far from complying with
the iconographical decorum of the classical representations of Adam and
Eve. In some images, the couple simply hold hands, staring at the over-
whelming beauty of creation of which they implicitly are the only benefi-
ciaries (fig. 3.9). But in the vast majority of the shots the couple is engaged
in sexually explicit contact. And more often than not, human and ani-
mal bodies are deliberately made to overlap in allusive or ambiguous con-
tinuities, challenging the viewer’s expectations while slowly unraveling
through the instigation of an undeniably voyeuristic appeal. Leveraging
upon the aesthetics of kitsch that have characterized much of postmod-
ernist sensibilities, but pushing the envelope further than most artists
would ever dare, Kulik collapses religious and pornographic imagery in
the production of an aesthetic that critically questions the value of real-
ism in representation (plate 5).
Nature is evidenced as an impossible construct, a rhetorical place in
which the animality of the human can be recovered only through a sex-
ual engagement that alludes to prelinguistic primordiality: the broken
link between humans and animals, from which the glass separates us and