QUOTES FROM BOOK ABOUT ARTIST MARK DION
Miwon Kwon in conversation with Mark Dion
"I hadn't figurered out where or how I was going to apply the conceptual tools I had acquired. That came much later when I returned to what I was initially interested in long before school: environmentalism, ecology and ideas about nature. In the slick world of Conceptual and media-based art of the early 1980s, no one seemed interested in problems of nature. So it took me some time to get back to it as viable are for critical and artistic investigation. I had a lot of unlearning to do." 8
"Well one of the fundemental problems is that even if scientists are good at what they do, they're not necessarily adept in the field of representation. They don't have access to the rich set of tools, like irony, allegory and humour, which are the meat and potatoes of art and literature. So this became an area of exploration for Schefferine and me. Also, the ecological movement has huge blindspots in that it is extremely uncritical of it's own discourse. [...]
Tropical Rainforest Preserves (1990) is a good example of a response to a double phenomena. On the one hand, zoos in North America were creating rainforests inside cities as special exhibits. On the other hand, ecological groups were trying to export notions of a national park - locking up natural resources in order to protect them. Our piece was meant to reflect on such conditions in a humorous way by making an absurdley small reserve that was 'captured' and mobile, comically domesticated and reminiscent of the Victorian mania for ferns, aquariums and dioramas." 11
"I think the politics of representation as it involves the museum has always been part of my practice. As I see it, artists doing international 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 not because they want to blow it up but because they want to make it a more interesting and effective cultural institution.
[...]
Yeah I love museums. I think the design of museum exhibitions is an art form in and of itself, on par with novels, paintings, sculptures and films. This doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the ideological aspect of the museum as a site of the ruling-class values pretending to be public. Nevertheless, as an institution dedicated to making things, ideas and experiences available to people not based on ownership, I dont think museums are inherently bad, anymore than books or films are bad." 16-7
"But a disturbing thing about these shifts is that as the museum has become more 'educational' as part of its popularisation efforts, its also become dumber. The museum seems to conceive of its audience as younger and more childlike now. Rather than a place where one might go to explore some complex questions, the museum now simplifies the questions and gives you reductive answers for them. It does all the work, so the viewer is always passive. A museum should provoke questions, not spoon-feed answers and experiences. Unfortunately though, that seems to me what museums have become." 17
"But to get back to your question, I'm excited by the tension between entertainment and education in the idea of the marvellous, especially in pre-Enlightenment collections like curiosity cabinets and wunderkammers. Along with visual games, logic tricks and optical recreations, these collections attempted to rationalize the irrational. They were neither dry didactics nor mindless spectacles. They tested reason the way storerooms, flea markets and dusty old museums challenge cultural categories and generate questions today. This must sound lightyears away from when we spoke of documentary earlier, but somehow its related. If an exhibition is a challenge, it is both educational and entertaining.
Kwon: How do you provoke a sense of the marvellous or generate curiosity in our day and age?
One thing is to tell the truth, which is by far more astounding than any fiction. (I cringe as the word 'truth' passes my lips, but I always mean it with a lower case 't') For example, one of the biggest problems I have with the environmental movement and the museum is that they intentionally mislead people for the benefit of their own pocketbooks, which is unforgivable considering they are the organizations devoted to the production of knowledge.
The problem with charismatic megafauna for instance, which Bill Schefferine and I tried to deal with in The Survival of the Cutest (1990) is a case in point. Generally, in order to raise money for the protection of endangered ecosystems, conversation organizations draw isolated attention to attractive and photogenic animals - tigers, whales, pandas. These are not keystone species so the system wont collapse if they are taken out. Of course, all members of an ecosystem are important, but these animals are often the least critical ones, usually peripheral animals at the top of the food chain. They're not like the beaver or corals which produce systems that support other animals. Now forgroundin charismatic animals is not so bad if you acknowledge at some point their relationship to other forms of life in the ecosystem. If the conversation effort could highlight the fact that by protecting the jaguar, we can also preserve vast areas of habitat that benefits everything in it, including us, then focus on the 'cutest' would not be so problematic. But that's not what the conservation groups do. They haven't taken the opportunity to reveal the real goals. To me, that shows how much they are working against themselves." 18
"So I say freeze the museum's front rooms as a time capsule and open up the laboratories and storerooms reveal art and science as the dynamic processes that they are." 19
"In fact, I am generally pessimistic about the fact that the environmental movement has shied away from providing a more systematic critique of capitalism. It has become more corporate, divisive and collusive, missing an important opportunity to present a really meaningful challenge to the juggernaut of world market economy. Environmentalism has become eco-chic, another gizmo, another category of commodities. This has led me to a kind of disillusionments." 33
Lisa Graziose Corrin - A Natural History of Wonder and a Wonderful History of 'Nature'
"For over a decade Dion has immersed himself in the transitional cultural moment durng which the menagerie became the zoo, and the wunderkammer was dispersed into specialized museums of discrete disciplines, an academic (some say artificial) seperation of art and science that has remained virtually intact. [...]
They illustrate how the movement from encyclopedic, idiosyncratic displays of objects to a hierarchical model has help to construct our notions of knowledge, exploration and nature, and mediated our relationship to the world of living things.
It is tempting to view Dion's environments and his aesthetic preoccupations as nostalgic, even naive predilection for the arcane. However, Dion's arrangements are never mere simulacra. Although the objects he amasses or fabricates form a fascinating compendium of flotsam and jetsam, what is on display are the processes of naming and sorting and the political and ideological conditions framing them." 38
"Most important, 'the essence of deep ecology is to ask deeper questions of all paradigms, structures and assumptions about the human-centered view of the world'. In so doings, its advocated believe, humans will become sufficiently aware of the symbiotic connection between all things to make ethical decisions about the future. This advocacy of strenuous self-reflexivity and criticality in all areas of culture in order to salvage our ecosystem is central to Dion's later works. He cites the writings of paleontologist Stephan Jay Gould, eco-critic Alexander Wilsons and eco-feminist Donna Haraway as crucially significant figures. All three writers share a view of the environmental crisis as fundementally a crisis of culture." 47
"Alexander Wilson has analysed how theme parks lke Disney World, museums, fairs, nature films and even state parks have become synonymous with 'The Environment', concealing value-laden perspectives about the natural world that are dangerous to our survival. His dismantling of these constructed environments reveals that 'the whole idea of nature as something seperate from human experience is a lie. Humans and nature construct one another'. Donna Haraway, like Wilson, agrees than nature is constantly reinvented by humans as a series of artificial constructs. Her primary interest is in how social relations - gender, race and class - shape scientific enquiry, make science anything but a neutral, objective method of understanding phenomena." 48
"Displayed in glass cabinets, on shelves, set in niches and hanging from ceilings, the assorted contents of a wunderkammer were seen in one contiguous space as a holistic group of objects that could be touched and rearranged poetically to produce a kind of awe that could enlighten the mind, delight the senses and encourage conversation. Objects might be divided in any number of ways, for example, by the type of material they were made of, or according to a philosophical statement, such as that depicted in a painting of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella in their collector's cabinet (1626)" 52
"With the development of Linnaean taxonomy - a universal system of classification formulated by Carl Linnaeus in the first half of the eighteenth century - the endless play of meaning possible in the wunderkammer was superseded by the rational structures governing the display practices of the modern museum. At institutions such as the Zwinger Palace Royal Collections (Vienna), or, one of Dion's favourites, the Teyler Museum, founded by Pieter Tyler van der Hurst (1702-78) in Haarlem, we no longer find pantings, inventions, navigational tools and fossils in a single room. While Teyler concieved of a museum of art and natural history under one roof, the collections were divided into seperate galleries for each. Museums like the Teyler signal the advent of the process of forever severing these two experiences of the world from one another. Soon, each gallery had it's seperate display language. Paintings were framed and hung on satin walls; minerals arranged by type in endless flat vitrines; and the library became a seperate entity of its own, removing the object studied from the site of scholarly publication. Most importatn, specimens are labelled, catalogued, named and explained. Knowledge is elucidated now through the verbal rather than the visual." 53
"This amputation of the limbs of inquiry from the body of knowledge and experience marks a decisive rupture in the concept of nature as infinitely variable and uncontainable. Now, nature could be contained within finite constructions of genus (the family name) and species (the induvidual name). 'Sets' of objects could be made complete with dedication and, over time, through gruelling field work in the most inhospitable conditions. Behind the field work of explorers and scientists sponsored by museums was an insatiable demand for closure, to find examples of all living creatures, to number, label and enter each one in its proper vitrine for posterity. Exploration of unknown places led to 'discoveries'. [...] For the early naturalists, the orderly act of naming was a way of gaining control over the foreign 'chaos' found in the jungles and forests of new lands. Bringing their booty back to the west for display was the final act of taming the vast unknown they had encountered. What they could not forsee was the irony of their own enterprise. While collecting specimens to complete their categorizing, scientists, amateurs, and those obsessed with the mere act of collecting, destroyed numerous groups of living things, and sometimes, as in Nabakov's short story 'Terra Incognita', themselves. Today, the act of listing is more likely to include the names of examples extinct or about-to-become-extincts species." 54
"The project makes a strong case for the wunderkammer as a 'discursive space' where dialogue prompts an infinite series of discoveries and the only vehicle required for an adventurous journey is an open cabinet and an open mind. The viewer can make certain choices about the puzzle...' by opening drawers, examining the contents and making 'choices out-side the narrative structure within the museum." 76
"According to the artist, the rise of disciplines during the Enlightenment meant the demise of the wunderkammer, and the present-day isolationism is an extension of this historic phenomenon. Consequently, the lack of crossover between the departments and the art museum, in his opinion, suffocates the possibility of developing a fluid interconnected concept of knowledge. In this project, the rigidly defined institution of learning, embodied by objects from the self-contained departmental collections, becoming a microcosm for a stultifying view of the world in which academics in different departments, let alone faculty and curators, rarely share experiences and information." 81
"This approach to the zoo labels parallel insights Dion has brought to his gallery based projects, where the conjunction of colonialism, the development of zoos and museums of natural history, and the onset of mass extinction of species are inextricably linked. To Dion, the modest, low-budget Belize Zoo remains an exemplary model, promoting conservation and alternative resource projects and working with it's rural populations to increase commitment to preventing deforestation." 82
"From museum to museum, the ways in which objects were displayed and explained became increasingly standardised, lowering expectations and creating a fertile ground for the spread of an 'if youve seen one Great Auk, youve seen them all' attitude. When the Great Auk ceased to be valued even as a specimen, it ceased to also be valued as a living creature. Soon, the Great Auk was no more. Not even Audubon's lavish and exacting images could preserve interest in the disappearing bird life of North America once orthodoc taxonomy had transformed looking into naming. The question remains weather the activities of an artist can do much to save the Great Auk, the Black Rhino or Homo sapiens in light of the Enlightenment legacy." 84
Norman Bryson - Mark Dion and the Birds of Antwerp
On The Library
"The living birds that flew and sand amidst the installation remained then, as birds always do, beyond human grasp. Whatever discourses might be woven around them - whether old or new, barbarous or enlightened - the birds consistently escaped or evaded the discursive net cast over them. Rather than the advance of human knowledge, the birds marked the latter's limit or closure. Dion's work raises the possibility that in the era of managing resources now recognized to be limited, knowledge itself may be the resource whose historical limits we most urgently need to understand." 97
Mark Dion - Project for Belize Zoo 1990
"Belize is an anomaly in Central America. It is a newly independent, English-speaking, liberal democracy with a low population density and large areas of neo-tropical wilderness. For its size, Belize contains a surprising variety of rare habitats including mangrove swamps, the world's second largest barrier reef, savannahs, deciduous forests, montaing coniferous woodland and rainforests. Animal and plant species which have disappeared from other Central American countries can still be found in healthy numbers in Belize. While much of Central America suffers from deforestation and soil erosion, 60-70% of Belize is intact and unspoiled forest. The double pressures of a growing population (both internally and from refugees) and foreign investment interests present new challenges to the government and numerous conservation organisations working in the country.
[...]
Training programs expose the Zoo staff to wildlife and resource management projects throughout the US and Central America and have increased the number of skilled Belizian conservation professionals. The Zoo is an education success story and can take credit for affecting the conservation attitudes of the entire nation." 111
Mark Dion - Taxonomy of Non-endangered Species 1990
"As the goal of Natural History was to interpret the Universe, the intention of Disney was to produce one of his own. Disney, both man and corporation, constructed a microcosm which functioned according to a set of laws, a systematic imposition of will and vision over the previously organic framwork of society. What is the Disneyland concept if not an exercise in the total control over everything - nature, man, culture, history, geography and even the future." 112
"There is no dissent or disorder in Disneyland.
Be cautious, for this world is inflexible but may never show it. Here we are frozen by so many rules if one moves the wrong way the entire ice block may crack. We might just ruin everyone's special day. This hierarchy must not readily betray itself. Security by habit. But, should the system of implicit authoritarianism exceed itself, or the ordered character of the landscape become apparent (based on sheer force, both physical and psychological on the one hand, and passivity and unconsciousness on the other), it might just rain on the magic kingdom.
In Disneyland there is little that is more subversive than a service closet left open exposing a mop and a bucket."113
Mark Dion - M. Cuvier 'Discovers' Extinction 1990
"The establishment of the fact of extinction seems strange to us since we recognize that probably 99.99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. The fossil record clearly indicates that extinction is the norm, and survival the exception, and that once a species dissappears, it does not reappear. There is no shame in phylogenic death. It is not an issue of judgement. Under normal environmental conditions extinction is a natural process. Indeed we owe our own existence to the extinction of our ancestors and their competitors. But the biodiversity of the planet is currently facing a crisis, the likes of which have not been seen since the great extinction of the Cretaceous epoch (which led the dinosaurs to oblivion). Human populations are growing so rapidly and disrupting environments so drastically that the earth is witnessing the first mass extinction episode caused by the global spread of only one species - our own.
[...]
Nevertheless the rainforests are being destroyed at an astounding rate. Each second an area the size of a football field is lost forever. In 1988 alone an area the size of Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland combined was deforested. Anywhere from 6,000 to 150,000 species of plants and animals become extinct from tropical rainforest destruction each year. That rate of extinction is 10,000 times greater than before the appearance of man: Homo sapiens have had the greatest ecological impact on a broader frontier than any other animal in the 4.7 billion years of the planets existence." 115
Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace 1994
''My education is my own isolations. And yet the more I see of uncivilized people the better I think of human nature, and the essential differences between savage and civilized men seem to disappear. Unlike my distinguished colleagues who write from their London apartments about the immorality of the uncivilized races, I have travelled among illiterate people for nine years and have found them to be high of moral character. In fact, not once have I ever carried a gun for self-protection, not have I ever locked my cabin door at night." 124
A Little Bird Told Me 1995
"Our association with birds is curiously different from that with other animals, and with nature as something somewhere out there, for birds live among us; they share our urban landscapes and backyards more than any other class of wild animal and are a part of our everyday lives." 129
"Neither the same as huma, nor entirely dissimilar, birds offer an almost inexhaustible bank of symbolic meanings and uses. [...] Later folk attitudes tended to attribute to all animals reason, intelligence, language and indeed almost every human ability. 'The song of the wild birds was often interpreted anthropologically by country people. [...]
The Cartesian seperation of humans and the rest of nature rendered animals not only without souls but also incapable of speech, reasoning and even sensation. The virtuoso, Sir Kenelm Disby, following the Cartesian view of animals lacking any soul or spiritual dimension, did not hesitate to describe birds as mere machines, and their actions of nest building and feeding their young were no different from the actions of clockworks. The singing of the bird was the same as the ringing of an alarm.130-1
Science grows and Beauty dwindles - Lord Alfren Tennyson
The Natural History Box: Preservation, Categorization and Display 1995
"In the early half of this century the habitat group or diorma display become a dominant model. These hyperrealistic presentations allow a view into an idealized vision of nature, a world without human taints or influence. The best examples of dioramas are found in Chicago and New York and seak of an American affinity to cinematographic space and expensive spectacle. More importantly they represent the acceptance and integration of evolution and ecology into the museum. Animals are presented in the environments which produce them and which they too, shape. These exhibits are extraordinarily labour intensive, and since they represent a technological apex, they are rarely replaced. Dioramas function as time machines, not only to the place and period they represent but also to the particular moment of their construction." 137
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