I have been watching some interviews with Mark Dion that I have found online, on YouTube and various other places. It is really fascinating to listen to him speak about his work and his process, rather than reading it in text or in a book. One particular interview, which was part of Chicago Humanities Fair 2013 was very fascinating, and gave me a better understanding of his art, and proved some of the things I thought of his work to be wrong.
There are the notes I took while watching the interview:
- Work not about ‘nature’, but ideas about nature – peoples ideas of nature.
- Considers how we arrived at our current relationship with the natural world, looking back through history and how our ideas of nature have changed, or stayed the same.
- Science doesn’t have a monopoly over what is ‘nature’, farmers, hunters etc all have their own view.
- Using the Natural History museum as a tool to address these concepts, they are the place where the official story of ‘nature’ is told at a particular moment in time by certain people.
- Considered becoming a scientist (studied it for a while) not satisfied with what could be achieved as a scientist, has to be all about fact. Scientists cannot use e.g. metaphor, artists can.
- Artists can use a variety of disciplines without being restricted like practitioners in fields such as science are.
- Interested in the science culture, science is good at telling us what things are, but not how we feel about these things – role of the artist.
- When using animals as a material in his work (taxidermy), places the specimens in a better situation than in which he found them.
