‘Brutal magic’: Staging Human-Environmental Relations in the Anthropocene

When Charles Baudelaire visited the diorama, a form of nineteenth-century popular entertainment, he was entranced by its evident falseness which gave way to what he termed ‘useful truths’. By generating a convincing illusion of nature through conspicuously mechanical means, the diorama provoked its spectators to experience an intersubjective engagement with their environment. The form was later marshalled in the service of natural history, but the pedagogical and ideological imperatives of the early twentieth-century museum denied the explicit falsehood that was so central to the original diorama. When the form was revived by twenty-first century contemporary artists, the open acknowledgement of its illusory quality was restored as part of a critique of singular authority. Reckoning with the role of deception in an Anthropocene diorama displayed in Paris’s Museum of Hunting and Nature, this article asks how what Baudelaire termed the diorama’s ‘brutal magic’ might speak to environmental lies and truths today.