VISUAL MEASURE Habitat Dioramas and the Age of Database Mohammad Salemy

It is impossible to write about the American Museum of Natural Historys (AMNH) habitat dioramas without relating the subject to several histories. These include the history of European and American colonialism in the 19th and the early 20th century,1 the history of New York Citys urban development,2 the history of museums and their citizenspectators in the United States,3 the history of scientific representations and finally the history of image archives. We can accomplish this task more effectively if we expand our inquiry and identify a second subject that can diagonally correlate these various areas of study to our main focus. An exhibition such as this that itself utilizes digital archives can introduce the concept of technology as the second subject and use it to historicize the two notions of perception and representation. However, for technology to make these connections, we need to pay attention to the relationship between the man and the machine. Our understanding of the history of visual culture can benefit from turning to thinkers of the early 20th century like Louis Mumford who was amongst the first to acknowledge the material connections between human subjectivity and technology as well as ways in which they have interacted to shape each others fate.4 Nature Knowledge and the Knower is an exhibition that investigates the role of a group of particular artists and their contributions to the process of creating habitat dioramas at the AMNH by relating their work to the virtual modes of interaction with visual data that constitute a large portion of our daily lives today. This is not to suggest that all picture collections were historically fulfilling the contemporary role of the Internet. Rather, Id like to show how an unprecedented system of image creation, collection and organization used by James L. Clark and other Museum artists in the early 20th century was already pointing to the later developments such as the networked mode of knowledge gathering and virtual ways of observing and interacting with the world.

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These AMNH artists helped to systematize Carl Akeleys method of building dioramas into a repeatable template. The collections from which the exhibition is drawn date back to 1908 when Clark began to organize his own drawings of animals he was making at the New Yorks Central Park and Bronx zoos. Later on, he combined what he had started on his own with the collections he created at the Museums Exhibition and Preparation department. According to Steve Quinn, the author of Windows on Nature, funding from Franklin Roosevelts WPA program may have allowed Clark to hire people to help him with the creation of his archives.5 These files that were organized either based on their relationship to particular AMNH displays or their relevance to topics addressed by various exhibits at the Museum were kept together for common use. Stamped with Clarks and the museums name to perhaps safeguard their return to their folders, they fulfilled multiple functions for different people. For one thing, they allowed artists to cooperatively work on the same projects. They also functioned like an in-house large encyclopedia, by being the first resource that conjured pictures of things in the mind of the department staff who were creating and organizing exhibitions. The amount of visual data recorded in these files on a subject corresponded with its relevance to the artists interests and the Museums mandate. Consisting of both original photography and clippings from various media sources like newspapers, magazines and professional periodicals, these files not only informed the users about their subject, they also provided them with how these subjects were already seen by the public. This helped exhibition designers and artists to gauge their work according to what was publicly perceived as a subjects accepted image. The exhibition also includes tens of botanical illustrations and samples created during various expeditions. These studies helped those working in New York with the task of creating accurate natural colors and textures for diorama accessories. Only a handful of items from this exhibition have previously been displayed or reproduced.6 The online exhibition has been organized by taking advantage of capabilities offered by modern image databases to reestablish the relationships made by Clark between these items. Other types of connections such as the new cataloging standards for digital archives at the AMNH Library further interrelate the material. I also have reconnected these files through a few of my own criteria. By observing and learning Clarks own method of description, I have visually described and catalogued the items in the online exhibition under the element labeled Curatorial Note. In addition, all genuine text content included in the items, like handwritten or typed notes, has been separately transcribed and added to each record. Together, they provide new avenues for interrelating the exhibition material based on the users search criteria.

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The panoramic photographs exhibited at the Satellite Gallery were taken in close geographic proximity, near Guaso Nyiro River in what used to be called British East Africa, and is now part of the Republic of Kenya. Taken by Carl Akeley on July 1, 1926 as a commemorative photograph during the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy expedition, the larger panorama documents a diverse group of characters that contributed in various roles to the creation of the African Hall at the AMNH. The group includes more than 70 Africans without whose expertise in hunting and the techniques of preserving animal skins, the Hall would have never materialized. The group also includes the famed nature-genre filmmakers Martin and Ossa Johnson, two of the financial supporters of the hall, banker Daniel Pomeroy and the founder of Kodak company George Eastman, artists William R. Leigh and Arthur August Jansson whose works are featured in the archival section of this exhibition, Akeleys wife Mary Jobe, the acting manager of the expedition, and Billy Billy, the Samburu Queen and her entourage, whose tribe claimed to own the land. Commissioned by James L. Clark and photographed by Alfred J. Klein in the fall of 1933, the other panoramas depict an African water hole and its surrounding environment. They were meant to supplant the visual data already captured by the Museum artists in 1926, to provide additional details for the recreation of the Saharan location in the background painting of the Water Hole Group diorama. Panoramas are a unique form of photography. They hold a significantly greater amount of information than traditional photographs, and provide the viewers with an image of multiple horizons. Walter Benjamin refers to a particular type of mid nineteenth century literature as panoramic because of its unscrupulous multiplicity, technical construction and its ability to harmoniously isolate and contextualize sharply defined objects against a much broader background. 7 In the context of this exhibition, panoramas stand in for a number of ideas. First, they are virtual and immersive interfaces through which the viewers relate to complex visual knowledge. They offer a large frame for contemplation, encouraging the movement of the eyes and the body, which then can cultivate multiple associations between different parts of the picture. Second, they present their content as the direct and objective registration of nature by a machine, often masking the presence of the artist, whose subjectivity contributed to more than just operating the camera. Panoramic photographs also stand in for the potential and limitations of visual archives in documenting the cultural record, simultaneously underlining and undermining the use of photographs as images of history within the history of images. The panoramic photographs in this exhibition were taken using the Kodak Cirkut camera, which operates by rotating on a turntable-style tripod head. The turntable is surrounded by a large circular gear that synchronizes the focal length of the lens with the

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advancement rate of the film, which is regulated by the rotation of the camera. Together, they ensure that the lens remains focused on the negative that is spooling in the opposite direction in front of the circulating lens. We can connect the development of this sophisticated camera in the first decade of the 20th century to the advancements in micromechanics that had an irreversible impact on artistic ways of seeing. We can also relate the arrival of such a camera to the painting tradition, which for more than a few hundred years had imagined, anticipated and demanded such a tool for an accurate depiction of nature. These images have been digitally reconstructed by scanning archival contact prints that were made circa 1930s from large-format negatives (8 x 40 inches). In addition to being a unique display of visual information, the enlargements open up the possibility of making new observations. They offer the viewers two opposite but complementary views: from the one hand they show the picture of a natural landscape in Africa and from the other hand they portray the people who worked collectively towards recreating that land in America. This form of visual anthropology can provide the larger context for the online exhibition of James L. Clark archives (natureknowledgeknower.com) by familiarizing the viewers with the culture of expedition and the ways in which people involved with this activity measured, recorded and displayed nature. Habitat dioramas are distinguished from other types of museum displays by two characteristics, first through the accuracy of spatial representation, and second, by the uniqueness of the material they showcase in their foreground. The focus in a diorama is directed towards animal remains whose collection, taxidermy and mounting is the central objective of the entire display; amongst a set made up of mostly fabricated and painted materials, the mounted armature actually bears the very skin of a specific animal that once was part of nature. This second characteristic is what sets dioramas apart from the early 18th century panoramas that have been extensively studied in the history of visual culture.8 If panoramas exemplify Roland Barthes notion of reality effect, habitat dioramas double trueness makes them particularly admired by the general public and disliked by critics as part of their objection to what Barthes calls the tyranny of verisimilitude.9 The study of the James L. Clark archives demonstrates that accuracy and uniqueness in dioramas depend on the extent of the visual data that was collected and used in their creation. The collection and organization of field visual data as a fundamental part of the process of diorama making relates to larger shifts in scientific representation. Lorraine Datson and Peter Galison have complicated this larger history in their book titled Objectivity, in which they argue for the subjective roots of the epistemological turn to-

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wards objectivity.10 They maintain that the history of science and its representation cannot and should not be separated from the scientists and artists who engaged in these practices:
Behind the specimen, the tree, the flower, the snowflake, stands not only the scientists and the artists who see and depict, but a certain collective way of knowing. This knowing self is a precondition for knowledge, not an obstacle to it.11

Following Galison and Datson, I have tried to consider these questions: What set of characteristics of the diorama mode of museum display demanded the involvement of multiple sources of data and a systematic way for their collection and organization? What, at the core of the idea of a diorama, required a new system of seeing, measuring, recording and displaying of nature? If we agree that artists played an important role in the creation of both the image archives and the resulting displays, what kinds of preoccupations and artistic subjectivities have imagined and informed the need for the creation of these technologies? To appreciate the full impact of habitat dioramas in the age of their debut at AMNH in the 1930s, one should also bear in mind the limitations of early photography and silent cinema as nascent representational technologies. It is also relevant to account for the possibilities that this improvement on the perspectival portrayal of nature was offering to the growing mass of museum going public. Like abstract paintings, but for an entirely different purpose, habitat dioramas were meant to address the problems of representing a three-dimensional subject on a two-dimensional surface. However, unlike abstract paintings and their crowd alienating move towards non-representational imagery, habitat dioramas commitment to realist representation enabled them to attract large crowds of visitors to the Museum. They energized the crowds with a new mode of display that incorporated architecture, design and lighting. They promised visitors the intersubjective ability of not just seeing something but of being in a space of experience. They expanded the function of painting in the new mode of spatial visuality that simultaneously included the real and the copy. Dioramas seamlessly integrated the three and two-dimensional forms and provided everyone a set of illuminated objects that could be appreciated aesthetically, studied scientifically and comprehended rationally. oblivious towards the politically and aesthetically fashionable ideas of flatness and truth to materials, dioramas in the 1930s offered their lay audience a depth of at least 7-feet that contained everything that painting, photography and cinema had promised, but had somehow failed to deliver.

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Those who argue about the colonial nature of dioramas and their ideological role in shaping the American attitudes towards nature in general and Africa in particular fail to understand that if dioramas were successful in captivating their audience, it was because they were an improvement on the existing visual technologies. In relation to photography, they filled in the grey depiction of things with natural colors and shadows and provided the necessary depth for the display model to correspond to the real experience of nature. In regards to cinema, dioramas did not produce an actual moving image. However, as a cluster of displays in a hall, they provided multiple sets with which the visitors embodied perception could interact in real time. This kind of internal cinema had the advantage of trading the homogenous movement of film caused by a mechanical flickering of separate frames in the projector for the organic movement of the visitors body in between the sets. The openness of a place such as the African Hall allowed the crowds to combine the richness of looking at cinematic sets with the freedoms associated with viewing paintings at a gallery. Habitat dioramas, as conceptualized by Akeley and executed by Clark, were supposed to function seamlessly, as if a machine had casually scooped out a portion of a far away environment and had placed it, without stylization, in the museum and in front of the viewers.12 Both Akeley who envisioned the African Hall and James Perry Wilson who is known to have painted some of the best diorama backgrounds at the Museum regarded the artists ability to camouflage his work in itself as the highest form of art. According to Akeley, The painter must make the beholder forget that he is looking at paint, and feel that he is looking at nature.13 Thirty years after Akeley, Wilson reiterated the same point in an interview. According to him, the best art is the art of concealment.14 For these artists, the precondition to make art was to completely restrain their own ability to make subjective marks that could be identified as theirs or belonging to any other human. However if an artist consciously denies himself the authorship to subjectively contribute to his own work, some other force has to fill in the void left empty by this lack of agency. If Riegl at the turn of the century could say that, human artistic creativity is a contest with nature,15 it is possible that the AMNH artists who consciously restrained their subjectivity in order to portray nature were in competition with another force other than nature. Here, it would be wrong to imagine that artists like Arthur Jansson and Robert Kane who meticulously measured the color values of botanical specimens in Africa allowed nature to take hold of their creative impulse or William Leigh whose brushworks measuring the shape of tree moss in a Congolese jungle magically allowed the baboo tree to make a self-impression via the artists trained perception.

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The suppression of subjectivity in these artists in favour of objectivity was itself a subjective decision. Objectivity in the history of visual culture and scientific representation, as argued by Datson and Galison and demonstrated in this exhibition, is not an eternal and ahistorical phenomenon. Instead, it is the product of a particular type of subjectivity that has evolved alongside the changing technologies of seeing. The artistic will on display in this exhibition shows that despite the cameras capabilities in capturing a perfect image of the world, there were tasks for which technology was still ill suited. These artists consciously chose to mimic and compete with the avilable visual technologies. They freely decided to measure and collect data from nature to surpass the existing mechanical ways of seeing and representing that with the advent of photography had begun to literally enter their artistic practice. They chose to partake in technology by blending their own perceptive and depictive capabilities with what technology could offer. However, to accurately depict nature and its wild inhabitants and to seamlessly blend these observation with those of cameras, the Museum artists had to first standardize their observations into repeatable universal measurements. Measurement is a precondition for representation without which the artists can never find an avenue for articulating their observations and expressions. What we categorize as a certain style or a vision in an artist often has also to do with ways in which he or she is able to transform the expression of ideas and observations into unique units of measurement.16 If as George Kubler believed, [t]o explain something and to measure it are similar operations, 17 if explanation and measurement are essentially both different forms of translation, then visual representation could involve the act of measurement. By expanding Kublers idea and applying it to the practices of the Museum artists, I was able to see how every item in the Clark archives could be engaged in one or more forms of measurement: - Numbers: using numerical units to physically measure objects and space, - Text: using language to describe ones observation, - Photographic data: using a camera to produce a mechanically observed understanding of a space or an object such as an animal, a botanical specimen or a landscape, - Line-Shape-Form: using line, shape and color to depict objects or space, - Direct Sample: collecting actual materials like leaves, flowers and rocks as well as animal parts such as bones and skin as a direct description of ones observation. These overlapping forms of measurement covered the ambiguities that collecting one type of information could have caused and complimented the works of others engaged in other kinds of measurements. As a result, they created a network of interrelated studies for the creation of habitat dioramas. Like the thousands of flat scans collected by an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine, these multiple pieces of data, in the

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right configuration, could constitute a three-dimensional whole. In other words, the accumulation of quantitative (ontic) data obtained using various systems of measurement began to form a qualitative (ontological) measure of not only the dioramas authenticity but its metaphysical function. Browsing through the Clark files shows that prior to the arrival of computers, analog databases could run efficiently in the form of paper, file folders, notes, lists, charts and filing cabinets. They functioned by sorting and relating different types of mesurements whose accumulation could result in an accurate depictions of nature. To borrow from todays computer lingo, the combination of these small parts could effectively contribute to the creation of graphical user interfaces called dioramas.18 Web designers use the phrase information architecture to refer to their work. We can certainly claim that the creation of dioramas can be called just that, because what informs the visitors experience in front of a diorama is a meticulous architecture of visual data. Here lies the main resemblance between viewing dioramas at the time of their debut and our contemporary interactions with digital data through online interfaces such as Google Maps and Facebook. As in a diorama where the montage of collected visual data constitute a seamless atmosphere of nature, in Google Maps the recreation of a neighborhood or a city depends on the quantity and the quality of hundreds of images whose montage in the browser allows for a seamless viewing experience. In Facebook, a universal interface for each member formalizes various sets of data about different individuals. Occupied with small pieces of information gathered about them, the Facebook frame constitutes their online presence and represents them to their friends. In this model, we may not arrive at a single physical picture like in a diorama or even the Google Map, but we will conjure up a clear image of individuals that are caught up in a particular life. During the last two years of working on this project, I have been asked several times about why I am interested in old museum displays. To answer this question, I would like to say that my interest in habitat dioramas and realistic representations of nature is not the sign of my rejection of the prevailing critical attitudes in visual arts towards realism. An interest in the process of arriving at objectivity should not suggest a belief in its existence. Rather, by studying the anatomy of realistic forms we ought to see verisimilitude as not the ends but a means employed in the service of something larger. Most critical studies of habitat dioramas are limited in scope to highlighting the colonial content of their spectacular form. This rather palpable observation does not take us far if it is not connected to the discussion of the subjective structure of objectivity, a problem that still permeates all facets of our social life. It is through the latter argument that we can explain why dioramas remain one of the most popular museum displays in the world. In

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addition to their historical significance, my interest in the problem of dioramas and the origins of their technological means of production arises from their association with a much more invasive form of objectivity that has, almost unnoticeably, seeped into our contemporary scientific, artistic and everyday practices via the predominance of electronic technology. We live in the age of the database. This means that the organizing principle for the gathering and sharing of knowledge and for its visualization in our time has completely moved away from the linear and accumulative mode that was dominant until the end of the nineteenth century towards a navigational and relational model prevailing today. This reliance on interaction with structured data everywhere from videogames to the Internet and from our mobile phones and refrigerators to our computers and automobiles has begun to colonize our lives and has started to significantly change the way we view the world and ourselves. If, as I have argued, the Clark archives foreshadowed the emergence of databases, digital image archives and the Internet, how can we use our historical knowledge of dioramas and their creation to better comprehend where we stand in relation to digital technologies? This understanding can benefit from deemphasizing the forms of visuality and finding a place for the often invisible but crucial underlying structures that shapes their interface. It is only through making the structure of information the subject of critical reflection and a significant component of our analysis that we can begin to understand the true place of technology in our lives and reflect on the ways in which it is increasingly shaping our ways of seeing, knowing and, ultimately, being.

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NOTES

1 . The colonization of Africa didnt begin with the arrival of Europeans in the late 19th century. Persians had already penetrated the island of Zanzibar before the 1st century AD. While North Africa was conquered by Arabs and introduced to Islam in the 7th century, East Africas colonization began gradually via trades with Arab states in the same period. In the 1690s, Saif Bin Sultan, the king of Oman, established his rule over east Africa from Zanzibar. In the beginning of the 19th century, the age-old crusade between Christians and Muslims was resurfaced and fought in Africa. During this period, Christian missionaries competed with the African mosques and European colonialism was argued both in Europe and Africa as the salvation of the continent and as a solution to the tribal barbarism and the despotism of Africas Muslim rulers. The European interest in African landscapes didnt begin with modern day expeditions and goes back to Christianitys fascination with the Nile Rriver and its origin in the heart of Africa as a holy body of water that gifted the earth with prophet Moses, the founder of Judeo-Christian traditions. 2 . The AMNH archives as well as the New York Times occasional reporting between the years 1926 and 1941 documents how the construction of dioramas and their associated halls were dependent on the appropriation of funds from both the State and the City of New York. In order to complete the projects, museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn and other museum officials attended the City Hall meetings in which the merits of the AMNH expansion were measured against the overall plans for the growth of the citys services. During this period, the work on the African Hall was halted or slowed down several times due to external factors related to funding or permits from the City or the State. 3 . See Michelle Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory, (Maidenhead: Open University press, 2006) 37-45. 4 . Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929), 34-35. 5 . For general background on AMNH habitat dioramas, please see Stephen Cristopher Quinn, Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 2006). 6 . A faded copy of art_002_b2_08b: Ground orchid, botanical illustration with colors noted, for use in Leopard Group, Akeley Hall of African Mammals included in the exhibition has been on display alongside photographs of Akeley and Africa in a wooden backlit showcase in the African Hall. A few watercolor botanical illustrations, none featured in this exhibition, were reproduced in Stephen Quinns Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 2006). 7 . Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (London: Belknap Press, 1999), 53. 8 . See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997) and Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2011). 9 . See Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 141-148

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11

10. Lorraine Datson and Peter Galison, Objectivity, (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 11. Ibid., 53. 12. Before Akeley and Clark, Frederick Law Olmsted the landscape had experimented with a similar method for the construction of natural-looking landscapes across the museum and at the Central Park. Dissatisfied with the fabricated and over designed look of European parks and the limitations they posed on the city dwellers, Olsmted strived to use modern day machines and materials to bring the natural beauty of upstate New York to the city and plug it in the flat portion of upper Manhattan. See Albert Fein, Landscape into Cityscape, Frederick law Olmsteds Plans for a Greater New York City, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1981). 13. W. R. Leigh, Frontiers of Enchantment, An Artists adventures in Africa, (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1938), 40. 14. James Perry Wilson, unpublished interview by Rudy Freund and Rudy Zallinger, circa 1958, American Museum of Natural History Special Collections. 15. Alios Riegl, Historical Grammar of Visual Arts, (New York: Zone, 2006), 298. 16. See Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages, 1913-1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 17. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1962), 83. 18. In computing, a graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than programming commands. Unlike the earl days of computers, GUIs are now an integral part of users experience of the computers as well as gaming devices, household appliances and office equipment.

Cover illustration: Lion, specimen measurement chart for use in Lion Group, Akeley Hall of African Mammals, Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, Department of Library Services. 2011 ISBN 978-0-9869511-1-4

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www.natureknowledgeknower.com
With support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.

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