Museums and Representation of Animals | 389 a given animal or group of animals has been taken, as well as to aid in the animal’s adjustment to captivity The artificiality of the setting, captivity, and close contact with many other species and, of course, with human beings, thwart these admirable goals and often present visitors with animals in a psychologically damaged state, what critics characterize as slaves embracing their slavery Nature centers, giving visitors a chance to see animals in their own environs, expend immense efforts to make sure that their visitors, in their encounters, not damage the habitat or the plant and animal life within it In a real sense, encounters between people and animals in sites of this sort are the most primal, though groups of ten or more people with cameras, binoculars, and guidebooks are not harmless in or to a habitat The complexity of museums’ attitudes towards animals, bound up as they are in each institution’s mission and vision, sometimes also evidence attitudes often unspoken and unacknowledged Sometimes these attitudes are the unwitting result of insensitivity—many museums are, in fact, no better in their treatment of indigenous peoples—and render them impossible to generalize They are made all the more complex by new generations of political artists with advocacy positions and new understandings of the roles of zoos and aquaria in a world in which habitats and their creatures are rapidly disappearing While the elephants of the American Museum of Natural History, and contemporary Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage Two, a life-size, walk-through Chinese landscape with nine tigers pierced by hundreds of arrows, would seem worlds apart in impact, if not in intent, they are similar They destroy the boundary between viewer and viewed, remove the glass from the diorama, and in that simple act totally reorder our perceptions People gasp when they walk into Cai’s installation, until they realize that the tigers are fabricated The gasp, the shock, is real Inopportune: Stage Two has been shown at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and other museums Photographer Jerry Uelsmann, in an untitled photograph from 1973, focuses on the diorama experience The photograph presents a majestic landscape in black and white, with a backlit, theatrical jewel case of a diorama in a dark foreground, almost a television screen, but with more depth; this is 1973, no HDTV Across the diorama walk deer, placid, unskittish, stopped dead in their tracks, a vignette within a larger story, a microcosm in a larger context and, really, a controlled way of seeing and experiencing, what is too big, too fast, too quiet, too other for many human beings to grasp otherwise See also Art, Animals, and Ethics Further Reading Balog, James 1990 Survivors: A new vision of endangered wildlife New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc Publishers Balog, James, & Pedersen, Martin B 1999 Animal New York: Harper-Collins Bell, Joseph 1985 Metropolitan zoo New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N Abrams, Inc Coe, Sue 1996 Dead meat New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Danto, Arthur Coleman 1988 Art/artifact: African art in anthropology collections New York: Center for African Art Fuller, Catherine Leuthold 1968 Beasts: An alphabet of fine prints Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company