DIORAMAS135from the Garden of Eden. Kulik might not directly propose practical
answers to how a different “becoming worldly” might emerge from this
realization, but his images gesture insistently enough to a number of
pressing questions.
What is realism in Kulik’s dioramas? Within the mythical, atemporal
dimension constructed by the constructed deep nature visible in the di-
oramas and the nudity of the human figures, Kulik’s paradise appears
timeless. Does Kulik’s work gesture toward a critique of the dimension
in which humans find themselves today? Because we are simultaneously
animals and excluded from nature, our presence in this picture can only be
a superimposition. Have we become a pale reflection relegated to a super-
ficial relationship with nature? As animals appear utterly indifferent to
us, our impossibility of communicating with them, in turn, alienates us
from the environments we share. Are there any productive points of
contact that could be recovered? And is this dimension one in which sex
constitutes the only instance in which we can momentarily glimpse a
point of contact between us and other animals? In opposition to the use
of the term natural in popular culture, and the association with animal-
ity usually drawn in relation to sexual acts, sexuality, like nature, can no
longer occupy a prelinguistic dimension in which the power of represen-
tation hasn’t already codified even the most seemingly primordial human
drives and instincts. It is in this sense that Kulik’s series extends the met-
aphorical value of the diorama to its anthropogenic conclusion: the dark
loop in which we are simultaneously in and out, human and animal, in-
terconnected with everything but ultimately irreparably alienated.