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Indepth Arts News:
"Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art"
2000-01-23 until 2000-04-30
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
La Jolla, CA,
USA United States of America
Small World presents works by a group of artists
who use the language of dioramas-small- or
full-scale models of real or imaginary
environments-as a vehicle for artistic expression.
The traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue
feature works by artists Michael Ashkin, Helen
Cohen, Liz Craft, Mark Dion, Bridget and Tina
Marrin, Tony Matelli, Alexis Rockman, Clara
Williams (USA); Thomas Demand (Germany); Mat
Collishaw, Nils Norman (England); and Hiroshi
Sugimoto (Japan). Inspired by a variety of sources
including museum displays, stage sets, and
miniature models, these artists work in both two and
three dimensions. They create and analyze dioramas, exploring the ways we know
and understand the world.
The diorama is, like its relative the panorama, an eighteenth-century innovation, a
pre-cinematic form of entertainment and education intended to provide views of
significant places and events. First used in 1821 by L.J.M. Daguerre and Charles
Bouton to describe large, hyperrealistic scenes painted on two sides of
translucent fabric that produced changing imagery when illuminated, the word
“diorama” stems from the Greek dia (through) and horama (to see). Since this
early use, three-dimensional models have become a means for different
fields-artistic and otherwise-to convey knowledge and give form to ideas. The urge
to create small worlds, however, is primordial. Humans seem genetically
engineered to want to simulate the terrain of life and to see the world in miniature,
or preserved as if in a time capsule. In dioramas, the concrete and the imaginary,
the authentic and the artificial become magically intertwined. Writing about
miniaturization in her book On Longing (Duke University Press, 1993), critic
Susan Stewart notes that the atmosphere in a diorama is charged; mood and time
are crystallized, and the viewer is given the extraordinary opportunity to step
outside of his or her time and place to view life.
In the exhibition catalogue, exhibition curator Toby Kamps and Los Angeles and
London-based critic Ralph Rugoff discuss the history and influence of the diorama
in twentieth-century art. The catalogue contains color illustrations of the
represented works as well as entries on each of the artists.
In MCA’s exhibition, four of the artists produce small-scale
dioramas as a means to create imaginary views of the world.
Michael Ashkin uses model-railroading supplies-miniature
buildings, vehicles, and plants to create barren, neglected
landscapes where some toxic or illicit event may have
transpired. Nils Norman uses two-dimensional diagrams
along with three-dimensional modeling materials to give form
to his ideas for utopian community structures and events:
solar-powered kiosks where citizens can trade information
and labor; strikes by radical bicyclists; and anarchist
tree-houses, complete with walkways to escape police
attacks. Clara Williams installs an unspoiled, verdant
landscape, complete with picturesque waterfall, on a desk in
an office cubicle, contrasting an ideal vision of nature with the
characterless reality of the urban work environment.
For another artist in the exhibition, architectural dioramas
serve as a means to represent interior states. Helen Cohen
builds tiny, scrupulously realistic rooms inside a variety of objects including
portable record players, ammunition boxes, and old-fashioned hair dryers.
Relating closely to the function and era of their containers, Cohen’s tiny,
uninhabited spaces, many of which are accompanied by soundtracks, evoke
powerful sense memories of private and public spaces. British artist Mat
Collishaw uses projected video to juxtapose expectations and reality. Onto a
model of a quaint English town, Collishaw projects images of marauding
hooligans who brawl outside a pub, torch a car, and stagger off into the night
singing drunkenly. Liz Craft builds large-scale sculpture that represents her own
experience of the terrain of her home city of Los Angeles. Using forms abstracted
from nature, she captures the experience of driving through L.A. and looking
through hedges and over walls into private realms.
Natural history museum displays serve as inspirations for two other artists in the
exhibition. Using real objects, artifacts, and taxidermied animals, Mark Dion
creates elaborate life-size scenes of the despoilment of nature, such as a
beached fishing boat surrounded by a morass of man-made flotsam and jetsam
or a row of garbage cans being scavenged by urban creatures. A student of the
history of museums and the study of nature, Dion skillfully exploits the spectacular
and the didactic aspects of dioramas to illuminate the interface between the
human and natural environments. For Small World, Dion will create a new
diorama based on dump ecology using taxidermied animals and a painted
backdrop that explores the not-always-harmonious relationship between the
human and animal worlds. Working in near life-size painted epoxy resin figures,
Tony Matelli creates tragically absurd tableaux: a troop of lost Boy Scouts vomiting
after eating something poisonous or two early hominids trying to reattach their lost
tails. Suggesting both the Museum of Natural History in New York and Madame
Tussaud’s in London, Matelli’s work uses black humor to exploit the power of
dioramas to shock and amuse.
Three other artists use museum dioramas as the basis for two-dimensional work.
Hiroshi Sugimoto makes carefully crafted black-and-white photographs of natural
history and wax museum displays. In their straightforward presentation of artificial
people and settings, the images test the power of art and science to capture life’s
animate forces. Thomas Demand creates elaborate cardboard scale models of
historically and personally important spaces-Hitler’s office after an unsuccessful
assassination attempt, the desk where Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote
the book Dianetics, the entrance to his apartment building-and then lights and
photographs them. Stripped of most surface detail and texture, the works present
chilling, diagrammatic views of psychically charged environments. New
York-based artist Alexis Rockman creates hybrid assemblage-paintings
combining real objects and painted and digitized images in transparent resin that
function as radically foreshortened dioramas. Filling his lush, trompe l’oeil land-
and seascapes with modern and prehistoric creatures as well as evidence of
contemporary pollution, Rockman creates comical and disturbing images of
ecosystems run amok.
In addition, Bridget and Tina Marrin, curators at the Museum of Jurassic
Technology in Los Angeles-an institution which uses dioramas to blur the lines
between fact and fiction-are collaborating with an L.A. based high-tech firm to
fabricate new, mechanized dioramas involving miniature moving sprinklers and
flags. These works investigate the ways the perception of time can change in a
miniature environment.
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