Currently Reading: Mark Dion, 1997, Phaidon, London.
Survey by Lisa Graziose Corrin, Interview by Miwon Kwon, Focus by Norman Bryson, Artist’s Choice text by John Berger, Writings by Mark Dion.
Overview
Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who takes on the roles of explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist to make his art
His research and collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine lab equipment, artefacts and taxidermy animals
Since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories and museum caches of the great historical naturalists, crossing Darwin and Linnaeus with Disney and Hitchcock
His still lifes resemble walk-through Wunderkammers or cabinets of curiosity – an artist’s take on science and discovery
I reread this book as I’d identified Dion as one of the closer linked artists to my own practice through my rubbish research. I studied Dion’s work at college and attended a talk by him at the Manchester Museum circa 2005. Coming to it again, with a specific rubbish research focus, it seems like my memory of what I’d previously studied was a dust-covered museum archive itself. I’d catalogued it into long-term memory with key concepts such as the museum and museum-critique, animals and taxidermy, taxonomy and classification systems. A lot of the detail was hazy with dust. I’d recently seen Xylotheque Kasselat dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012 and read Archaeology (1999), Black Dog Publishing, which focusses largely on Thames Dig (1999), so revisiting his wider body of work was bound to be useful.
In the interview with Miwon Kwon (p.11), Dion sets his stall out be saying irony, allegory and humour are the meat and potatoes of art and literature, which I would have to agree with.
He goes on to talk about his interest in the politics of representation and categorises the categorisers, so to speak (p.16): “ As I see it, artists doing institutional critiques of museums tend to fall into two different camps. There are those who see the museum as an irredeemable reservoir of class ideology – the very notion of the museum is corrupt to them. Then there are those who are critical of the museum not because they want to blow it up but because they want to make a more interesting and effective cultural institution.” It’s clear to me Dion identifies with the latter. Specifically, he is interested in the tension between the museum’s position as an educational forum and an entertainment forum (p.17, interviewing Michel von Praet who co-reorganised the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, 1990).
He says the museum has become more educational as part of the popularization effects (owing the reduced public funds) along with the commercial reliance of the gift shop, outreach programmes and cafes, etc). This comment chimes with the kind of things Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska were saying around the same time in The Value of Things, August/Birkhauser, 2000 (see November 2012 posts).
continued..
