When naturalist explored the south-east of what’s now the US in the early 1770s, he discovered gopher tortoises, sandhill cranes and rivers overflowing with trout and bream. Retracing Bartram’s path in 2007, artist Mark Dion found golfers, retirees and highways jammed with SUVs.
Nothing daunted, Dion set out to observe and record suburbia with the same objectivity Bartram brought to those territories. Dion also collected human objects, treating them as specimens which he catalogued and displayed in a museum that was once the Bartram family home. He called his project The Travels of William Bartram – Revisited.
One of the large wooden cabinets Dion filled with his finds is currently installed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston as part of Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-century naturalist. Another installation by Dion is on show at the Natural History Museum Vienna in Austria, while in February, Dion will have a major solo exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.
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So why is the artist having such a moment? After all, he has been exhibiting since the early 1990s, consistently investigating the relationship between humans and nature.
I think it has a lot to with the fact that this relationship has become increasingly troubled, and the troubles increasingly apparent. The more I see of Dion’s work, the more I find it says about the unsustainable conditions of the Anthropocene, the root cause of our recklessness, and the alternative mindset we will need if we are to change course.
Cataloguing fishing lures
Dion has always questioned the distinction between the natural and human worlds. “Humans do not stand outside of nature,” he writes in a catalogue essay for the Boston show. “We, too, are animals, a part of the very thing we have tried to control, whether for exploitation or protection.”
Many of his projects act on this conviction by upsetting neat anthropocentric distinctions. In the Bartram work, he treated his finds – for example, fishing lures and cocktail umbrellas – much as a naturalist of Bartram’s era would have handled seashells and wildflowers. We see them, collected and sorted, as by-products of a natural world to which we belong, alongside molluscs and plants.
But even as Dion insists on our animal nature, he recognises that humans are the species doing the collecting and sorting. By playing the role of naturalist, he sets out to discover the past and potential impact of our scientific endeavours.
Dion traces the origins of the natural sciences to the legacy of Aristotle, whose ranking of animals above plants was enshrined in his hierarchical “ladder of being”, the Scala Naturae. In 1994, Dion built an absurdist version of the Scala as a domestic staircase, with a statue of Aristotle on the top step; the stair below is shared by a stuffed duck and domestic cat.
But as with his Bartram re-enactment, Dion wasn’t just being funny: even though the Aristotelian system was supplanted by Darwin, the “ladder” metaphor continues to influence our behaviour.
“It’s the origin of the more regressive ways in which we view the world,” he explained in a newspaper interview a couple of years ago. “I want people to question this model of organisation and question all models of classification.”
Rubbish archaeology
And Dion continues to do just that. Over the years, he has reorganised objects in old museum collections, constructing contemporary “cabinets of curiosities” that disrupt traditional hierarchies. He has also run mock archaeological expeditions with volunteers – most prominently , conducted along the river Thames in 1999 – creating elaborate installations exhibiting artefacts otherwise considered to be rubbish.
On one level, Tate Thames Dig mocks archaeology, which has a long history of distorting the past by focusing attention on the precious possessions of the rich. But I think the greater significance of Dion’s work is to be found in his radical reshuffling of inherited assumptions and priorities: his recognition that we need to remodel the Scala, and that new categorisations need to be created by many diverse people.
This is partly because we need multiple perspectives to stand a chance of solving the world’s ecological problems, and partly because the act of participation can itself change mindsets. The acts of collecting and categorising bring us face to face with our assumptions and make us confront the power of classification.
For me, this is what makes the forthcoming Whitechapel exhibition especially interesting. It will feature one of my favourite works, : a set of four mannequins wearing different outfits Dion has donned for past projects, ranging from a bleached white lab coat to the rough kit of a field biologist.
This brilliantly embodies Dion’s clearest job description, given in an : “I’m working through the natural sciences as a dilettante.”
I see Costume Bureau as both invitation and challenge. All of us can and must actively rethink the human relationship with nature. Our future depends on the intellectual activism of amateurs.
at , Boston, to 31 December 2017
at , Austria, to 14 January 2018
at , London, 14 February to 13 May 2018
