Tiny Worlds Create Grand Illusions

Curator Toby Kamps nods toward the view from his second-story office window at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, to make a point about the new exhibition “Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art.” The cars in the parking lot below “seem tiny, just that big,” he says, nearly pinching his fingers together. That phenomenon of being separate from a smaller-scale environment (or one that seems to be) but still being able to project yourself into it, he says, is just what makes the work in “Small World” exert such a visceral pull.

“It’s a sort of out-of-body experience,” Kamps says. “It’s probably the closest thing to being an angel that there is; you can hover over things.”

For the show, his most ambitious curatorial venture yet for the museum, where he’s worked since 1998, Kamps brought together the work of 13 artists who exercise what he calls the “dioramic impulse.”

The instinct to create self-contained, parallel worlds can be traced back to ancient, small-scale tomb statuary and early creches, Kamps says. The act of making “dioramas” long precedes the term, which originated in 1822.

Early dioramas were variants on the panorama, a painted scene that encircled viewers and sometimes incorporated attached sections of false terrain to finesse the transition from real to represented space. The diorama used fabric backdrops, like those in theater, but made of translucent material and painted on both sides. Shifts in the intensity or direction of the lighting altered the effect, simulating changes in season or time of day. (The diorama’s inventor, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, continuing his quest to reproduce the appearances of the real world, later devised one of the first methods of photography, the daguerreotype.)

The popularity of this public spectacle didn’t last long, but Kamps sees both the panorama and the diorama as momentous events in the history of visual perception.

“They are the first engulfing technologies. They’re the first technologies in which you completely immerse yourself in something,” he says. “The theater always served that role, but these were technologies, not theatrical events. They’re not enlivened. You’re not sympathizing or identifying with players. They’re the first versions of virtual reality that we know of.”

In the 1930s, the term “diorama” was revived to describe small model environments built for displays and commercial purposes. Museums then started applying the name to their habitat displays, those glass-walled mini-environments with once-live animals displayed against curved, illusionistically painted walls. Kamps uses the term even more elastically, grouping together a variety of works that spin off from the familiar museum diorama as well as from dollhouse and model railroad construction.

Helen Cohen, one of the exhibition’s artists, constructs tiny domestic environments inside familiar household objects--a 1940s kitchen inside a breadbox, a teenager’s room from the ‘60s inside a stereo. Michael Ashkin builds tabletop models of what Kamps calls “chemical badlands,” suggesting the aftereffects of industrialization on the landscape. In Bridget and Tina Marrin’s work, miniature sprinklers irrigate a field, and a tiny flag, activated by an electrically charged wire, twitches as if blown by the wind. Alexis Rockman, Tony Matelli, Thomas Demand, Mark Dion, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Clara Williams, Liz Craft, Mat Collishaw and Nils Norman round out the show with photographs, full-scale installations and exquisitely crafted models.

“Very few of these artists are working with dioramas full time,” Kamps says. “It’s an interesting stop for them, an experiment. It allows them to be great craftspeople, to really lavish all their technical skills on something.

“They get to be scientists and curators and miniature film directors all at once. I do suspect that a lot of artists are looking at film and saying it would be great to be a director, and control the lighting, the sound; to have that total control. That level of control is really appealing.”

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Another seductive feature of dioramas is their totalizing effect. “They are information condensers,” Kamps says. “That’s always been one of the functions of dioramas--to condense an entire ecology, to give you that world picture in one work.”

The makers of traditional natural-history museum dioramas tended to present that world picture in idealized, sanitized form. Not so with their contemporary counterparts, who often create alternate worlds that distill the social and environmental problems of the larger world. Their works envision dystopia, rather than utopia.

“Small World” opens with a diorama by Dion, a Pennsylvania-based artist known internationally for work that examines our relationship to the natural world. Clues as to how we represent nature and where we position ourselves within it--or above it--are readily found in museums of natural history, ethnography, zoos and botanical parks, institutions that tell society’s “official story,” as Dion puts it.

In Dion’s work, commissioned for this exhibition, the official trappings of the story are all in place in the classic diorama format: the clear plexiglass front, the fragment of terrain, stilled versions of the creatures that inhabit it, and a background painted to suggest an infinite horizon. But this is hardly the official story. Dion’s diorama represents a landfill, littered with debris and being picked over by sea gulls, rats and a mangy dog. All of the garbage is animal-related in some way: egg crates, dog food, wrappers from Tiger’s Milk bars.

“One of the things that always bothers me is that in natural history museums, culture is always left out, as if human culture doesn’t exist alongside nature,” Dion says. “I wanted to do a diorama where culture was at the center of nature. I’m flipping the situation. Here, there’s nothing that’s not been affected and exploited by humankind. I’m replacing the organic, natural base of the food pyramid with a cultural base, consisting of things that have gone through the process of human consumption.”

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While the conventional diorama transports us to a pristine, timeless, exotic site, Dion’s thrusts us into the here and now.

“Dioramas tend to emphasize your distance from the thing depicted,” he says. “But most people will have some sort of personal association with what’s in this piece--like the contact-lens wash made with pig’s enzyme, or the hubcap with a cougar logo.”

Carl Akeley, the pioneering turn-of-the-century diorama maker responsible for the impressive habitat displays at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was famous for killing the grandest animal specimens he could find and assembling them in harmonious groupings. Dion turns Akeley’s practice inside out, avoiding the prime examples in favor of humbler ones, scrounging at the bottom of the food chain.

Dion’s bleak vision finds ample company in the show but is countered by work that assumes a more hopeful stance. Norman, of New York, presents scale models of neglected urban spaces retooled as socially useful, community hubs--a solar-powered labor exchange kiosk, for instance, and a “microfarm” squeezed into a densely populated neighborhood.

A sense of loss and nostalgia courses through the “Small World” show, through both the work that idealizes and the work that presents a coarser picture of reality than one willingly experiences day to day. As Ralph Rugoff writes in the exhibition catalog, dioramas trigger a sense of concrete connection to the world, a feeling that has been supplanted “by the paradigm of multiple ‘operating systems’ and the various speculative realities and parallel universes we daily experience as worlds under glass, be it a television screen, a security monitor, or a computer display terminal.”

For Kamps, the nostalgic tone of the show has personal resonance as well. Growing up in Milwaukee, Kamps spent many an afternoon in the city’s Public Museum, where Akeley got his start and where his first diorama still stands.

“It really affected the way I saw the world,” he says. “After wandering through the ‘Streets of Old Milwaukee’--a nearly full-scale historical environment--I’d go outside and think all of life was a diorama.”

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“SMALL WORLD: DIORAMAS IN CONTEMPORARY ART,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. Dates: Through April 30. Hours: Tuesdays-Saturdays 10 a.m.-5 p.m. (except Wednesdays, till 8 p.m.); Sundays, noon-5 p.m. Price: $4. Phone: (858) 454-3541.