As Sheryl Crow growls her way through “If It Makes You Happy,” the music video for one of her most popular songs shows her trapped inside a Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History diorama of a simple red room wedged between a pack of stuffed wolves in the mountains on one side and polar bears on ice floes on the other. Before it’s over, we’ll see grizzly bears, moose, elephants, walruses, rhinos and more — an amalgamation of the more than 75 detailed habitat exhibits that sit at the heart of the museum’s displays.
In the video, which has been viewed more than 67 million times on YouTube and remains popular decades after the song won a Grammy in 1997, the glowing paintings in the diorama’s dark hallways function as a metaphor for confinement, as well as transgression, escape and freedom.
Crow wears animal-print clothing and cocks his claws comically at the camera. When visiting Boy Scouts press their faces against the diorama's glass as if trapped inside, a girl wears braids that look like the horns of the Arabian oryx she's gazing at, and a very vivid elephant crosses the stage from the right, we can begin to wonder which side of the glass is holding back the wild.
The walrus diorama in NHM's North American Mammal Hall, which was featured in an elaborate parody of “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” in a Super Bowl ad.
(Natalja Kent/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
The music video is a testament to the ongoing popularity of dioramas and the way they can be appropriated for new contexts and meanings, a process that will get a boost this month when the Natural History Museum unveils three new variations of artist-commissioned dioramas for the citywide event PST ART: Art and Science Collide.
In dioramas, the boundary between reality and art is always uncertain. In early times, diorama makers were concerned about the disappearance of wild nature. They wanted to preserve it in order to inform, educate, and improve humanity, even if they had to send out hunting parties and specimen collectors to kill animals, uproot plants, and place them in front of a painted background and behind glass to do so. Some, including influential Smithsonian taxidermist William T. Hornaday, were also tied to racist ideologies concerned with preserving a “pure” white race of human beings.
Artifice marks the way dioramas are represented and understood. In the 1970s, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto became famous for his series “Dioramas”, photographs of habitat groups, including some at the Natural History Museum, which have no evidence of enclosures or signage. At first glance, they look like genuine wildlife photographs.
Similarly, a 2012 Honda Super Bowl ad blended fact and fiction when Matthew Broderick parodied his role in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Supposedly playing hooky after filming a movie, he visits the walrus diorama at the Museum of Natural History. Broderick gazes at the walrus as it gazes at him, evoking one of Bueller’s most-quoted statements:
“Isms, in my opinion, are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: “I don’t believe in the Beatles, I only believe in myself.” Good point. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I would still have to ask people to carry me.”
Animals are “good for thinking,” wrote French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his famous book on totemism. And animals in dioramas can clearly disturb anyone’s thinking.
Depictions of nature in dioramas have been influenced by the traditions of landscape painting and film backgrounds, with their conventions of visual realism, compositional balance, and creation of particular moods through dark forests, brooding mountains, sunny skies, or menacing clouds. Interpretive labels seek to shape what people perceive in the scene, the connections they make as they move from one diorama to the next. The shifting interpretations, in turn, have shaped what is included in each miniature habitat.
For today's attentive visitors, the new and old dioramas raise endless questions.
The NHM's polar bear diorama wasn't designed to illustrate climate change, but that's what the animals trapped on the ice floes remind us of today.
(Mario de Lopez/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
In a 2012 episode of “Mad Men,” a girl visiting New York City’s American Museum of Natural History (filmed, in another twist of reality and representation, in Los Angeles) asks about the musk ox diorama: “How did they get all these animals?” Her friend replies dryly that “Teddy Roosevelt killed them.” “Are they a family?” the girl wonders, to which her friend replies, “I hope so. Otherwise, what were they doing? Walking around saying, ‘We just need a baby to finish this diorama’?”
Sometimes, it’s possible to generate difficult but important engagement simply by changing the wall labels that accompany dioramas. In 2018, for example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City modified a diorama depicting an imaginary encounter between 17th-century Dutch settlers and a group of Lenape Indians by adding overlays to the glass that explained the ways in which the scene was historically inaccurate. These overlays preserved the integrity of the original diorama as an artifact and opened up conversations about its political and racial history.
Sometimes dioramas can change meaning without any obvious intervention. A traditional diorama of polar bears on an ice floe needs little change in presentation or interpretation to take on new meanings in our age of climate change. The scene, a version of which was first displayed in the early decades of the museum’s 110-year history, now seems to have eerily anticipated global warming.
New diorama designs can also spark new conversations. A diorama showing urban wildlife, both native and nonnative, in a Los Angeles backyard — a coyote with a cat in its mouth, birds around a feeder, a rat scurrying away, the downtown skyline in the blurred distance — illustrates the relationship between human residents, domestic animals, and wild animals, all living together in close proximity. This is what ecologists call a “novel ecosystem,” a habitat shaped by both people and nature.
But these examples also hint at the limitations of dioramas, and not just in terms of content, but as an art form, like a painting, a sculpture, or a film.
Formally, a diorama is a single scene in a narrative or story, like a still frame in a film or a panel in a graphic novel. It often evokes what scholars call a master plot, the kind of story line that dominates the way people think about things. A diorama of a pride of lions might represent a hunt or a hierarchy, reinforcing the idea of the lion king. But while it’s easy to invoke a master plot with a single scene, it’s much harder to alter or question it in such a limited display. This sticky effect can obscure labels, overlays, and counter-programming.
The creation of new meanings may therefore require new, experimental and even disruptive forms of dioramas. That is why the NHM has invited outside artists to experiment with new forms in the galleries. Some museums have decided to dispense with dioramas because their problematic meanings can be very difficult to change. But dioramas continue to attract large numbers of visitors, and their frequent appearance in various forms of popular culture attests to their continuing ability to entertain and communicate in surprising ways.
Perhaps we can learn from some of the ways dioramas are used outside the museum to inspire innovation within it. For starters, diorama designers of the future could experiment with more man-altered landscapes, such as the Los Angeles backyard scene. They could try virtual backgrounds, sounds, smells, animation, or holograms. These techniques could succeed in expanding the narrative beyond a single scene.
In any case, dioramas should remind us that nature, even and especially in its most authentic forms, is never presented to us as a pure reality, but is always filtered through layers of worldviews, social practices, historical memories and anticipations of the future.
What Lévi-Strauss concluded about totems can also be applied to dioramas. He placed reflection on nature through totems—that is, human beings comparing themselves to nonhuman beings, creating metaphors with animals and plants, speculating on differences and similarities, categorizing individuals and species—at the very origins of human intellect, language, and culture.
“There is nothing archaic or remote about it,” concluded Lévi-Strauss about totemism. And the same could be said of dioramas.
Jon Christensen and Ursula K. Heise are founders of the Environmental Narrative Strategies Lab at the UCLA Institute for Environment and Sustainability. This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Fabricating Wilderness: The Habitat Dioramas of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.”
