麻豆传媒

Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 14 February to 13 May 2018

THE more I see of Mark Dion鈥檚 work, the more it says to me about the unsustainable conditions of the Anthropocene, and the mindset we will need if we are to change course.

Works created since 2000 are the subject of a forthcoming show at London鈥檚 Whitechapel Gallery. And if you can鈥檛 get along to that, get hold of the 2010 exhibition catalogue for Travels of William Bartram Reconsidered, in which Dion retraces the steps of the 18th-century naturalist William Bartram.

When Bartram explored the south-east of what is now the US in the early 1770s, he discovered gopher tortoises, sandhill cranes and rivers overflowing with trout and bream. Retracing Bartram鈥檚 path in 2007, Dion found golfers, retirees and highways jammed with SUVs. Undaunted, he set out to observe and record suburbia with the same objectivity Bartram brought to those territories.

By playing the role of naturalist, Dion uncovers the past and potential impact of our scientific endeavours. 鈥淗umans do not stand outside of nature,鈥� he has written. 鈥淲e, too, are animals, a part of the very thing we have tried to control, whether for exploitation or protection.鈥�

Since the early 1990s, he has explored this relationship between humans and nature 鈥� a relationship that has become increasingly troubled, and the troubles increasingly apparent.

Dion traces the origins of the natural sciences to the legacy of Aristotle, whose ranking of animals above plants was enshrined in his hierarchical 鈥渓adder of being鈥�, 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 bya stuffed duck and domestic cat.)

Over the years, he has reorganised objects in museum collections, constructing 鈥渃abinets of curiosities鈥� that disrupt traditional hierarchies. The living world deserves new systems of categorisation, partly because we need multiple perspectives to stand a chance of solving the world鈥檚 ecological problems, and partly because the acts of collecting and categorising bring us face to face with our assumptions.

鈥淏y playing the role of naturalist, Dion sets out to discover the impact of our scientific endeavours鈥�

For me, this is what makes the Whitechapel exhibition especially interesting. It will feature one of my favourite works, Costume Bureau: 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 (pictured above). This brilliantly embodies Dion鈥檚 clearest job description, given in an interview to the magazine Art21: 鈥淚鈥檓 working through the natural sciences as a dilettante.鈥�

I see Costume Bureau as both an invitation and a challenge. All of us can and must actively rethink our relationship with nature. Our future depends on the intellectual activism of amateurs.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淥rdering the world鈥�