108DIORAMASdrags us down from the pedestal of classical rhetoric to the dystopian
realism of the final stages of consumerist disavowal.
Second, Landfill bears at its core the lives of scavengers. Unheroic ani-
mals often considered pests, scavengers have been substantially underval-
ued in natural history as well as in art. The tradition of classical art has
substantially capitalized on heraldic animals, those that lent themselves
well to the ventriloquization of the values and attributes that humans as-
pire to possess. Rapacious birds of prey, regal African felines, dangerous
wolves—these are the animals in which we have historically inscribed our
narratives of power over others. In classical painting and sculpture, animals
have predominantly functioned as symbols of human virtues or vices, but
in either paradigm, the animals were represented with decorum—they
were lifted from the raw realism of their everyday lives and were elevated
to a rhetorical register of universal truth. Thus a taxidermy seagull would
evoke poetic feelings of freedom echoing the novel Jonathan Livingston
Seagull if situated in a diorama constructing a wild marine scene, whereas
it immediately loses all its poetic charm if situated on top of a garbage pile.^3
Scavengers feed on remains. In our minds, at least, they are contented with
what they find in their path. They don’t have to develop refined hunting
skills to survive, and ultimately tend to display opportunistic behavior. It is
easy to see that within the rhetoric of natural history, these animals do not
work well as vehicles through which human ambitions, values, and morals
can be ventriloquized.^4
THE EMERGENCE OF NEW REALISMSThe recent ontological turn in philosophy has placed particular empha-
sis on the reappraisal of images and their ability to index a “real” that
exceeds the limitations of language. The relationship between images
and language, central to the semiotics discourses of the last century, is in
constant evolution, continually problematized by new modalities of im-
age production and cycles of dissemination and consumption. Yet, there
exists a fairly stable and durable link between realism and language in
figurative representation that taxidermy, among other media, pushes to
the fore of artistic discourses. The presence of taxidermy in contemporary