Welcome to our January 360 presentation I'm curator of Education, Anna Smith and today I'm pleased to introduce artist
Mark Dion Mark Dion has compared the mission of his
work to the mission of a museum both offer a means to gain knowledge through
things These things that Dion presents to viewers
often hold up a mirror to the present condition of humanity's relationship with the natural
world. Dion's longstanding interest in exploring
how ideas about natural history are visualized and how they circulate in society has led him to create work that questions—
sometimes playfully, sometimes hauntingly—the objectivity of science. Dion's work has been presented at many US
and international museums and galleries including major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Tate Gallery, London and the Sterling and
Francine Clark Institute in Massachusetts. Dion works worldwide and has recently undertaken
large scale projects in Essen, Germany in London, in Norway and in Seattle. I know we're all looking forward to hearing
from the artist himself so please join me now in welcoming Mark Dion. Hello thank you so much for coming today uhm
uh I'm Mark Dion uh and I just in case you don't recognize
me I wore the same shirt as the brochure (audience laughs) so you would know. And uh today I'm going to do something that
might be well for some of you nostalgic, for some of you it will probably be an entirely
novel experience I'm going to do a slide presentation (crowd
laughs) and uhm slides are uhm you know there's usually
a mount of plastic or a uh cardboard and there's a transparency lighting an image of remarkable clarity and uh perfect color
correction. and like many old school slide shows which
were about people's travels to distant parts of the world so you know uncle Harold's trip to Fiji and things like that My slideshow is very much a travelogue because for better or worse because for better or worse I'm a very international traveling artist I'm very uhm internationalized So without further ado I'm going to start (I'm trying to figure out if this is my button here)... Ok uh and we're going to start on normally I try to show a chronological uh presentation and start with some uh early work but I want to show you something that I'm very excited about because it just opened uhm in uh in uh end of September early October in Norway and Norway is an absolutely fascinating place Noway of course as you all know is incredibly wealthy because of its petroleum wealth and its exploitation of that and because of that enormous amount of money uhm uh they have been investing in infrastructure and so they've been building new opera houses and universities and airports and road systems and all sorts of other things with that money and uh investing in in the future of the country so one thing they did was they uh the road there are incredibly perilous the main road from Bergen to Oslo was impassable during the winter most of the time and so what they've done is make these tunnels the tunnels are enormous there's one tunnel that is 26 kilometers long it's the longest tunnel in the world and so after this project was done what do we do with the old roads? and the old roads go over mountain passes they go past glacial ponds it's some of the most extraordinary landscape you can imagine uh and uh and they said well we'll turn this into the tourist road and uhm the tourist road, people can come and enjoy the country and so busloads of Italians and Japanese and Korean people uh look at this incredible landscape and they said well to sweeten the deal we're going to spend ten years inviting young architectural firms to build new pavilions to build anything you need, a roadside stop, a scenic overlook uhm uh a little rest area we're going have these very young architects do radical projects and they did that and it was very successful for ten years they won lot's of architectural awards now it's time, let's do the same thing with artists so they commissioned Louise Bourgeois, there's a Turrell project they're working on uh the last project of actually the last project of both Louise Bourgeois and Fischli and Weiss uh and they invited me to do a project and so I came and saw this beautiful landscape and this is the site I picked which is the pass over the Arlen mountain and I thought well the worst thing in the world I could do is destroy this landscape with a sculpture I mean that would just be insane It's an incredibly beautiful landscape It has this wonderful ecololgy of uh of uh Tundra filled with remarkable...it's really like almost a kind of a forest in miniature right? beautiful, rare plants uh so I wanted to make something of course that enhanced your experience of this landscape without destroying it I played with the history of this site. I brought my team, we worked for three years on this project We uhm took over one of the abandoned grocery stores in the middle of the town and became very familiar with people over there We worked one month each year and we created a passage to the underworld We built a raised uhm uhm cement walkway that you could traverse without crunching this beautiful, very fragile tundra ecology and when you enter this space you walk about twenty five feet down a dark corridor It's only about this high which is my revenge on all those tall Norwegian people (crowd chuckles) so they're bumping their heads constantly uh and then you find yourself in a room and you're in this room and you are in front of a very large diorama and that diorama depicts an interior of a fantastical cave and it's all glitter and blue lights. It's lit by a skylight because we are so far from electricity. The entire piece is lit by the skylight uh and uh and this diorama depicts a large brown bear and she's sleeping on the ruins of civilization, she's sleeping on material culture. So uh starting at the bottom with Paleolithic and Neolithic objects uhm and working up through Viking culture, Roman culture and the beginnings of stable agriculture and civilization right up to iPod chargers and uh you know you see a slide carousel— things that are just barely archaic Here you see some of the things from the earlier parts—the Neolithic objects, stone tools whatever we couldn't find or buy we just made and I work with such amazingly talented sculptors... people who are trained in uhm theatre so I just tell them 'make me a Viking helmet, I need it in two days' and they make me a Viking helmet They're kind of incredible. I have an incredible team of people who are all artists I have no studio or permanent employees. We just kind of assemble when we have a project and then we disband and they have their own things and their lives. Okay...So I just wanted to show that just to show you what I've been up to and what I'm really excited about and that was for me a really exciting commission. I want to time travel back now to 1992 where this incredibly handsome, young, thin man was invited to do a project in Venezuela and I was invited by two museums to do a project. I asked each of the museums to create four empty tables and each of those tables represented a week that I was traveling in the Amazonas territories of Venezuela, traveling in a dugout canoe with the {Perl Pehu} and there I was collecting a variety of natural objects. At the end of each week my objects would go...ooops, I didn't mean to do that... would go from from my canoe...ah there we go, thanks...would go nto a box That box would go onto the canoe We'd rendez-vous with a speed boat. The speed boat would take the box to the port... would go onto a truck, onto a plane, across country onto another truck and into the museum and then uh the museum technicians would open it. I told the museum curators there would be instructions as to how the things should be shown...should be exhibited but that wasn't true. So they open this box and they have no idea what they are looking at. They have no idea what to do with what they are looking at that any kind of narrative I might have had, any kind of uhm presentation of relationships of ecological relationships, of place was completely lost impossible for them to interpret so by the time the second boxes arrive, uhm they're not longer in a panic. They no longer just blurt the stuff out, they say "Okay, it's true. There are no instructions, there probably never will be. But we're professionals. We're museum professionals. We know how to deal with things. We can deal with it formally. We know that long things go with long things; round things go with round things..." and they come up with a perfectly sensible, formal solution to how to show this material and they do that for the rest of the boxes as well. These are the kinds of things that are arriving And so, you know, there is a very wild moment when things come. There's a wild moment when people encounter these things. And of course when I think about the temporal context which is in 1992, people are thinking a lot about 1492 people are thinking a lot about how Europe's mind was blown by the discovery of the Americas and by an entire world of new plants, animals and materials and cultures that had never been encountered, never been anticipated before. Now the last box I sent is not so much what I'd taken from the jungle but rather what I brought with me. So trying to shift the focus, make it very clear that the real specimen here is myself in this kind of guise of the colonial naturalist—almost kind of like a reenacteur. What I didn't want to do is be the kind of artist who wags their finger at the explorers of the past and the mistakes they made and the inappropriateness of their endeavor but rather implicate myself a little more into that as my psyche is certainly constructed by that fantasy and that image as well I'm not entirely innocent These are the last boxes. So as an artist I've always been very influenced and interested by fields outside of the art world as well and I've strived to work with history museums, natural science museums, zoos, botanical gardens, other kinds of institutions that share my passion for the history of natural history and the representation of the natural world...I mean that's really my problem in my work. My question in the work is "How is it that certain things get to be called nature at any particular time by a particular group of people?" So one of the first projects I did like this was done in a small museum in Switzerland and I was invited to do a project but I was actually traveling in the Amazon at the same time so I asked them to create a vitrine—an empty display case and while I was traveling I would identify invertebrates so uhm fish, reptiles, amphibians and birds and whatever I could positively identify I would make a list and mammals...uh...that list would get down river, get to a hotel with a fax machine it would be faxed to the museum and if they had the animal, or any of the animals on the list they would add it to the vitrine. So I never knew if this was going to be bursting with things or if it was going to be completely empty. So it was very interesting in that idea of chance, of contingency but not a kind of...not the same kind of chance you see in people like John Cage perhaps but something else, a chance that really teases out aspects of the ideologies of the museum itself You know museums at this time—19th century natural history museums—you know they're striving to be like Noah's Ark. They want at least two good examples of everything right? But that desire is really frustrated by uhm the practicality of the place. So Switzerland doesn't have the colonial clout maybe that uhm Germany or Britain had. So their collections aren't as global. Maybe when the boat shows up on a particular island, it's raining So they don't have as great representations from that island Maybe uhm the collector of insects is more interested in crickets than beetles and so she lets the beetle collection languish a little and the cricket collection just grows and grows and grows. This is what I think about as the subjective nature of the museum. These are the subjective reasons why the museum doesn't achieve its perfect microcosm which is the kind of desire of the museum in general. So for instance in this case, there's a long list of animals but they only have the great Kiskadee Everybody has a great Kiskadee...Kiskadees even come here to Texas So some years later those boxes that were in Venezuela arrive in New York City and become part of an exhibition I do with American Fine Arts in which I create three fictional bureaucracies. And the job of those bureaucracies is to organize the natural world. Each of those bureaucracies has a different sensibility, a different kind of methodololgy a different way of doing things. So this is the New York State Bureau of Tropical Conservation. So in this case I'm not thinking about conservation like wildlife protection I'm thinking about it more as like art conservation and I worked for years as an art conservator. So every leaf, every twig, every severed butterfly wing comes out of those boxes as carefully preserved by this handsome young man (audience laughs) and catalogs wrapped in acid free paper and glassine given a retrieval number and put onto the shelf. So that process of protecting each thing also means that each thing is no longer accessible. So it's not big game hunting, there's no trophy on the wall, there's only a box with a number and something has been put into a condition where it will never rot but it will also never be seen. And once that's done, my job as the sculptor has been to constitute a collection and so that bureau is closed. All of the apparatus—all of the material that it took to do that task of cataloging and preserving and cleaning disappears and what you have is the collection and then each of these pieces also had a kind of door that gives you a sense of the sensibility of the task and I think that each one of these...I think about them a little bit like period pieces in a sense. The door kind of gives a clue. As I said each of these uhm bureaucracies was...generated through an expedition. And not all of those epeditions were to exotic, far away places like Venezuela. This was an expedition five blocks over to New York City's Chinatown where for four hours I collected every fresh sea creature I could get my hands on. These were brought to the museum and put on ice And the methodology or the strategy behind this particular collection was orthodox taxonomy. So to take each of those organisms and find out what it is, what is it's proper name in science. You can imagine this little bit of urgency behind this task (audience laughs) Once I could tell what something was, it was given its common name and its proper, scientific binomial name and placed on a shelf in an order in the kind of order you would find it in scientific collection Now this is something that is...this is hard even for people who know what they are doing to do. Identification of organisms is not an easy thing You know you go through this process of keying out...which is a process of eliminating possibilities by looking at physical traits. And so... thats really hard and one of the reasons it's also extra hard is that in Chinatown you don't know where these animals are coming from So if you have an octopus you don't know if that's come from the Mediterranean, the Sea of Cortez the south China sea...so it's really difficult. And also, I'm not a biologist and uhm and I'm certainly not an icthyologist So I'm punching above my weight. So this isn't the artist taking on the mantle of scientific truth This is someone really struggling with something and really struggling with a discipline uhm that is a bit above their field of expertise. And so uhm it's not...I'm always suspicious of the way artists use science because science really is the voice of authority in our society. So I'm always trying to find a way, when I engage with science, to undercut the mastery of that. I could just claim to be an ichthyologist and who's gonna know? But an ichthyologist would know and so I want to make it clear that when I am working with these things that I am a engaged, interested amateur but that's it. And a big part of my work is a kind of celebration of of...the dilettante tradition meaning that, you know, the tradition started with people like Goethe and Schiller when to be a dilettante meant to be someone who is interested in everything as opposed to being a dabbler which I don't think I'm a dabbler So again, once I've finished all of stuff goes away, all the material goes away and what we're left with is the collection. And this is The Department of Marine Animal Identification of the City of New York: The Chinatown Division (audience laughs) And every good bureaucracy, needs a really good bureaucratic name. I've very happy to say I've seen this piece recently and those fish are still in really good shape. This was done in, I think, 1993 maybe... and that preservation technique really works incredibly well. And this is just alcohol. And I also did a project called The Department of Marine Animal Identification of the City of San Francisco: The Chinatown Division. And I love the idea of doing the same project in different places and really kind of testing this notion of what context does when you change it and what can happen to a project in a different location. A lot of my work is also inspired by people who I think are lynchpin figures in the history of natural history so people who really...what nature means is really different before and after them. So people like of course Aristotle and Baron George Cuvier and Darwin and people like that and people like Rachel Carson. Some of those people we know really well and some of those people have kind of disappeared. And this is one of them. This is Charles Beebe or Charles William Beebe otherwise known as William Beebe. He was a great popular writer. He wrote twenty six what we'd call best selling books. He was the curator of birds for the Bronx Zoo and he also he wrote for the New Yorker. He did radio broadcasts. He was quite a celebrity in his time. This was at the turn of the last century. This is a actually a photo from 1917. In 1917 after the war, he was kind of disgusted by the first world war which he flew in and uhm...he decided that if you're studying biology, the science of life, maybe spending all your time in the basement of the natural history museum working on dead things is not the place to do it. So he believed you could take the laboratory out of the basement and into the field. And of course now people do this all the time. That's really the standard way people do things but in 1917, there's not a lot of people doing this. So he created the first biological field stations in tropical america. This was in Guyana where he brought teams of people: botanists and ornithologists, icthyologists...invertebrate scientists, artists, photographers to come and work at the station and look into ecology, look into the relationships between things rather than just the things themselves. So, really interesting guy and he wrote beautifully. Beautiful books. So this one was called Jungle Peace that he produced in 1917 from this. One of the stories is that he's just about to leave and he's taking his steamer from the mouth of the Amazon back to New York. Before he does, he measures out a square meter of leaf litter and he takes that and he stuffs it into his duffle bag. Then he gets to his steamer room on the ship and he dumps it on the table. And he spends the entire trip going back and breaking that into all of its parts. So dividing that into how many different kinds of leaves are here? How many invertebrates are in this? What kind of feathers are there? What kind of soil types? So, this kind of incredibly interesting and laborious thing that would appeal to someone like me. And of course he discovers lots and lots of new organisms that have never been described by science and in some way this is a real indication that this thing we call biodiversity is really centered in the tropics which we all know now and another great story of mine...of his rather...is called My Jungle Table. My Jungle Table is a story in which he is...he has his assistant build him a table in the forest so he can do dissections on birds—on Tucans and things like that. And every time he starts, the ants smell this and they climb up the legs of the table and eat his specimens right in front of him and this is incredibly frustrating. So he puts the legs of the table in coffee cans of water but that makes the table start to grow again so the table actually sprouts and it starts to grow (audience laughs).. and then of course there are spiders spinning webs on tables and inside of the wood there are beetles and they are knocking to each other. You know so it's kind of great allegory for how impossible it is to kind of just remove one part of this big system and just look at that. So I combine these two stories for a project at The Museum of Modern Art in Rio that happened during the Earth Summit—the first Earth Summit. So I don't know what the registrar was thinking to let me bring in a meter of tropical forest right into the center of the museum of modern art but they did So for the first ten days or so I was going through this material, sorting it out, finding out what was in it, breaking it into its various components, using contemporary technology and also...that was very much you know a sort of performative thing and my experience was that the audience in Brazil doesn't have that kind of distance from the art object that we might have here. They get involved. Sometimes really, really, really involved (audience laughs). So this started a series of whole entymological endeavors where I'm trying to look at some of the, you know, the small things that really run the planet in a way. So I start these all over the world. This is a piece called The Great Munich Bughunt We found a Linden Tree which had been dead for about five years. We brought that into the very chic gallery district of Munich ("chicy-meeky" they would call it) and then working with graduate students in the entymology department from the university in Munich we did a kind of CSI investigation on this tree. really took it apart and looked into how many organisms this thing was supporting after its death. In a way it's very much meant to go against the grain of a kind of very particular very hygienic forestry policy that they have where they don't really allow something like a dead log to be in the forest it's, it's considered a kind of problem because it breeds other insects and causes all sorts of problems but we know from ecology that a tree like this is much more biologically productive when it's dead than when it's alive and so it's an important part of forest ecology—not good for a tree farm, but it's really good for a forest. So each of those things was prepared in a special lab and you can imagine that there are a lot of people coming into this gallery because it has a big glass front and people walk by and they see a giant tree there and people in lab coats and they kind of do a double take and come into the gallery and we are interrogated and uhm you know for me that's kind of really an interesting point that these projects have a kind of performative aspect but we never pretend to be anyone else. I'm always...I'm not pretending to be an entymologist I'm an artist who is, I think, shadowing a methodology of another discipline. And we start with this cabinet and we begin to fill this with all of the component parts with molds and primitive plants and fungi and invertebrates and all sorts of things even mineral specimens. And by the end, of course, this cabinet is really full. And so at a certain point I realize that you know the problem with this is that I'm always bringing nature into the museum and maybe, maybe it's already there. And so we shut down the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago over a weekend and with my dedicated staff of amateur entymologists We start in the basement and work our way up to the director's office trying to find every invertebrate that's in the museum that's not supposed to be in the museum. You'd be surprised what a Tony Smith can hide if you...(audience laughs). And so all of those things are brought together and catalogued. And then I work with a microscope technician on this platform for the first ten days of the project and we photograph every one we found and catalogued where they were. Perhaps not surprisingly, the registrar's office had not a single living thing (audience laughs) but the director's office was completely packed (audience laughs) And so after, you know,...as I said there's often this kind of interactive, performative aspect where we are working on the collection, constituting the collection, and then when that's done sometimes my platonic self stands in for me. And so while I'm off doing something else.... So at this point I found myself in a kind of tricky situation because I was very much now identified, classified, as the naturalist artist. And as anyone who studies classification knows, once the butterfly gets a pin through it it doesn't move very far. And so it became a problem for me that this was going to really interfere with my creative future. If I was just that person, that person who was included in every show about animals and art, green art, art and ecology....So I needed a way to kind of throw the hounds off my trail. And so I thought, "Well what's really important for me about this?" And what I think is my contribution to the discourse in art is this notion of shadowing a methodology. So I just shifted what I was going to shadow away from zoology and ecology and toward archeology which is also something I had an amateurs's passion for and a bit of a knowledge of and as my mother liked to say "That's what you were doing when you were seven—digging up bottles in Massachusetts" (audience laughs). So one of the first projects I did like this was done in 1997. I was invited as a guest of the Nordic Pavilion, for the Venice Biennale, because I'm the Nordic ideal (audience laughs). And so uhm you know Venice is an amazing place with a great history of art, it's a great romantic city, great history of architecture, political intrigue and also incredibly disgusting mud. And that mud is at the bottom of these canals. So of course you know there's no car traffic in Venice, it's all by boats. And so it's very expensive for people in Venice... If you buy a washing machine it has to come by boat. If the washing machine breaks, it doesn't necessarily have to leave by boat. In the middle of the night it could get close to the edge and fall into the canal and you've saved yourself some expense. And so these things do accumulate at the bottom of the canal and cause trouble for traffic so in Venice there is a Navy of barges that dredge these canals, that go around picking up this incredibly remarkable mud They fill the center of the barge. They take it to the Lagoon. And they dump it. And they do this over and over and over again So I thought "Gee I wonder what's in that?" So we took one of those containers to the Venice Biennale This is the Nordic Pavillion Uh and uhm if you've ever smelled the bottom of these canals, you uh know that this didn't make us good friends with our surrounding Pavillion neighbors. There are lots of complaints about that. But there is the mud. And the mud is, it's kind of legendary—there are all sorts of stories about it. It's very much what people say: it's anaerobic, it's full of household waste, it has sewage, and it has chemicals and it has lots of petroleum and uhm because of where ours was, it was full of a lot of hospital material but it is incredibly archeologically rich. You really could not stick a pencil in this without hitting something. You know Venice is not an ancient city by Italian standards, you know there's no Rome in Venice for instance But it's still a city that has always been very devoted to material culture. And so, there's a lot of stuff there. So my project was to go through this and find out exactly what that was And uhm....So there are three parts: one part was the sample itself, the second part was I turned their storage room into a small wunderkammer, a small curiosity cabinet. But it's a little bit like, the curiosity cabinet, you know there's the curiosity cabinet that we all know, that evolves into the Enlightenment Museum.... It also had another history in the Middle Ages, of of course, the treasure trove. And the treasure trove is not where you show your treasures it's where you hide your treasures you put them in the darkest dungeon of the highest tower you know the Renaissance is really when you invent bling right? Well the curiosity cabinet, shows your wealth, your influence, your taste, your ability to get the best of the world and bring it to you. So this is kind of a space in between that. I don't have precious metals, I have rusty bits of iron. I don't have pearls, I have bits of white ceramic and shells. I don't have emeralds, I have broken green bottles. This is kind of like my crocodile hanging from the ceiling. Whenever I do a project like this, the most important thing for me is not to uhm not to really do this in a way that an archeology museum would do it. Now I don't want to recapitulate their methods. I don't want to, I don't want to uhm... It doesn't make sense if I'm telling you the same story with the same material as an archeological museum is telling you. So I'm not going to tell about the evolution of a material. I'm not going to talk about the influence of styles from one part of the world to another part of the world. I'm trying to present something with a sense of the simultaneity of history. In a way like we experience it, where you go to Venice and there's a sixteenth century bridge and at the end of that bridge is an eighteenth century house but it has a new McDonald's in the basement. And that's, I think, what I'm trying to get at with some of these projects. So I want to be that alien archeologist who comes to earth and has no idea what these things are, what they are used for, and begins a very naive kind of organization. Because it is Venice, there's a lot of ceramics and a lot of glass And I'm putting those together, I'd like to also like to toy with your expectations of what it is to visit a museum and what kinds of things museums are for. So every piece here, whether it's from the Middle Ages or the Renaissance or contemporary or the eighteenth century is given a number but you will go mad if you tried to find it on a corresponding sheet that will tell you what those numbers are. (audience laughs) Because it doesn't exist. So I like this notion of kind of presenting the illusion of didacticism right? It looks like it should tell you something but when you try to find out exactly what it's telling you, good luck. (audience laughs) And the last part and uhm this is representative of my earlier work too is the laboratory and I'm always conflating the idea of the laboratory and the studio. You know, that's really important to me I feel...my experience of visiting artists in the studio is always so rich, just like my experience of visiting scientists in the lab. I've never seen a painting that was better in the museum than it was in the studio. You know there's something about that. So even if I can't give you that experience, I'm simulating that experience. Although this was my actual studio So in here you see things in the process of being cleaned, you see objects still embedded in mud, you see possible different kinds of classifications going on you know , a classification for round things, a classification for ceramics versus glass. A classification for long things. You know there are a number of ways I could have put this exhibition together and so you're looking at a decision. I found everything in this project. I had no help at all. This was an entire summer. And this was the worst summer of my life (audience laughs) Uh so you know I had my tetanus shots, it's incredibly hot there. this material is so stinky and it doesn't just wash away it's really greasy, so I swore I would never do another archeological project after this one. It was such an ordeal. For my next archeological project (audience laughs), I worked in the city of London and London of course is a much older city than Venice is. And the reason for London being where it is is because of the Thames. You know the Thames River goes through the heart of London. It's an incredibly strong river. It's a tidal river so it changes each day several times. And at a certain point this area is exposed is called the foreshore. So at high tide this would be underwater. At low tide for about four hours you can go onto the foreshore and the foreshore is incredibly archeologically rich. So uhm, it is just absolutely full of things. And the river is so strong when it goes in and out, it's like a new roll of the dice every time you step onto the foreshore. It's a whole new collection of stuff. Because that river just scours the foreshore. So I did a project with the Tate and the Tate suddenly had two museums. It had The Tate Modern and what now is called The Tate Britain. And I did two archeological digs, one in front of each of those on the Thames. Those places Bankside and Milbank of the neighborhoods they have very different social histories. They have really interesting social histories, but quite different. And the sites are remarkably different and that's evidenced of course by what we found So I worked with a team of volunteers and the volunteers had to be either over 65 or under 17. So teenagers and pensioners—groups that don't often work together. And I had about fourteen of each. And each we would identify...we did one week of collecting on each site We would identify and area and they were instructed to take every bit of material culture they could find. Every human produced object— which when you are working with that many people for that long, you can find some great stuff. And I also had amazing...these were my project managers who were fantastic, who I had worked with on various other projects. I worked with really incredible volunteers. This is Alexis and Alexia Ancini And they were two of the most talented people I've ever met in terms of...you know like in archeology you have this notion of the search image right? It's the thing that you keep, the image you keep in the back of your mind when you're looking for something. It helps you find that thing. You know like even if you're looking for shells on the beach right? You have this notion of shell in your head. And you walk down and if you have a very refined search image you find a hundred shells on a walk and your friend finds twelve. And these two young ladies were amazing. They just...they were finding needles and pins from you know The London Bridge that partially collapsed into the Thames. was the center of the needle, pin, wire and nail trade. So they're pulling eighteenth century needles out of the sand. I mean just incredible skill. So this is my band of pirates on any particular day. So, as I said, we did one week at each site The next stage of the project is we created these sort of Indiana Jones style tents on the lawn of the Tate. This is uh....Each tent contained the finds from the two sites and then we had one kind of tent where we did lunchtime lectures and events like that. So we found easily tens of thousands of things here. So this lawn can be very crowded in the summer You know it's really...you think about the steps of the Metropolitan in New York or the steps of the Chicago Art Institute. It is packed in the summer. So we had this tape and the rule was anyone except an obvious lunatic can come behind that tape. So people were able to come through—of course sometimes lunatics got through anyway (audience laughs) People were able to come through anyway and talk with us as we went through this process and that process was that everything—every single thing that we found— and to say we found tens of thousands of things is no exaggeration came out was cleaned and categorized and catalogued. and so this was an entire summers-long project for us. And we went through that process, it's sometimes hard to get teenagers to clean dishes all summer long I can say So we went through that process really refining things. So first you clean all the glass then you break that down into green glass, clear glass, brown glass purple glass. And then you break that down into bottom necks and bottom bottles and glass with writing on it. And you're just refining and refining and refining and refining. These are just some of the bones from Bankside. Bankside was the part of London where the things that you would maybe offend the sensitive people of the city of London proper were done on Bankside. So that's where the slaughterhouses were and the vinegar factories and the bear-baiting and the theatre and the brothels and the drinking went on. So all of that is evidenced. And in some way, the Tate's presence there really signifies the end of a certain kind of Bankside. A Bankside that really goes back to pre-Elizabethan day Ok as I said everything is cleaned and categorized and refined and refined and refined People snoop around, they tended to treat us a little bit like The Antiques Roadshow They wanted to know what was the oldest thing we found, what was the most valuable thing we found I just like this man becuase he's such a dandy (audience laughs). And then finally there is a very large, double-sided cabinet created. The cabinet is based on the sort of aesthetics of the early British Museum cabinets The British Museum, the nucleus of the first British Museum collections come out of the Thames. So ships are coming from Newcastle, barges are coming from Newcastle, unloading coal. They need to refill their ballast. They are digging up the gravel at the bottom of the Thames and as they do that, they're finding Viking swords. They're finding Roman cups. They're finding all of this archeology And so these guys are being paid pennies a day, but if they pocket a Roman coin and sell that to a dealer they're making a fortune and so that's really the beginnings of the collectors market and the early beginnings of the British Museum collection. Uhm there's a really fascinating story about that stuff.. So a double-sided cabinet: one side of course containing Bankside material; one side containing Milbank material and, there's a lot of it. And this really contains about 99 percent of what we found. There's a few tires that we don't include, a dead dog and a shopping cart but otherwise, it's all in here. Okay, I think we need the next carousel. There's only seventy more carousels to go, so you're doing really well (audience laughs) And like the early cabinets, they're not meant to be static. They have an interactive component. You can open the drawers and look at things. And when you open the drawers, you begin to get a sense of a kind of system of classification right? So but that system—and there are many drawers—that system is constantly changing on you. So you might open a drawer and there are ceramic objects and they're organized by size from smallest to largest. The next drawer, is plastic bottle caps. They're organized by color. It's the color spectrum. The next drawer is locks and keys. They're organized by function. So, you're trying to figure out what's the system and the system is constantly changing. So what the system really is, is an encyclopedia of systems. This cabinet is an encyclopedia of how one might attempt to put things together; how one might understand history, whether that's through chronology, through use, through color, through form.... There's also...you know, I can't show you every credit card we found, I can't show you every human tooth we found, every broken bit of mirror, every identity card, every...uh you know.... So, I want to show you that there are things there that we couldn't show you. And so those are in these boxes. Here's some of the things organized by function Here's a detail of the...of what I call the greatest hits drawer which has those needles and pins I talked about and a voodoo doll and bullets from the second world war and fragments of Roman ceramics and buckles from 18th century shoes and 18th century, uhm Renaissance children's shoes and silver spoons and lice combs from the middle ages and and a four hundred million year old sea urchin fossil which is always good to know exactly what is the oldest thing you've found and teeth from the bears from the bear-baiting pit so there's just like an incredible amount of stuff here and the last element of this project is uhm...you know I'm always thinking, I work with so many people on these projects and, you know, in film a lot of people work on these projects and at the end you have this thing called the credits so every key grip, and every lighting person and makeup people they all kind of get acknowledged. But we don't really have something like that in the art world. So I'm always trying to imagine, if we did, what would that look like? What could that be? So this is an attempt at that. So this is photographs of all the people who worked on the project. So not just the volunteers I worked with but also people like the curators and the publicity staff for the Tate and all of the people who kind of are behind the scenes and don't often get acknowledged. So I've done a fair number of these archeology projects. The point of them was not to allow myself to be pigeonholed as the "natural history artist", so I became pigeonholed as the "archeology artist" because these projects were in very high profile sites like Venice and The Tate and MoMA. So...always at the center was myself orchestrating this so I tried...I had to try to think about... I was very conscious of the way artists used their bodies to help uhm...to create a kind of alter ego or to create a method to kind of promote your own process in a sense. looking very much at people like Smithson, Joseph Beuys, artists who I really admired. and the way that the art press is voracious for photos of the artist, right? We can't help ourselves. But at a certain point that began to work against me and this became a little too much about me and I don't want this work to really be about me. So I wanted to do another archeological project but step out of the center of that or try to critique my own presence in those projects. So I did a project at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows and Flushing Meadows is fantastic. You know that's where was the site of two world fairs. Before that, Flushing Meadows was New York City's garbage dump. So, if you've ever read The Great Gatsby and I'm sure everyone in this room has, when they're driving through these mountains of ash that's Flushing Meadows, that's the garbage dump uhm and so, we stepped twenty feet out of the front door of the Queens Museum and started digging. And you didn't have to dig far to find an enormous amount of material. So I organized that material by chronology not from when it was but from when we found it So the first thing we found to the last thing we found And all the excess stuff we filled these sarcophogi with Uhm and I had turned myself into a young Korean woman (audience laughs) and so when you came to see a Mark Dion archeology project, you actually saw Kate Wall my very talented assistant at the time who had taken on the role of doing all of the things that I normally do in these projects. So all of the processing, the cataloguing, the drawing of the objects all of that was taken out of my hands. And we did find...this is an extraordinary site which we just...hardly scratched the surface of what's there. We found entire newspapers from 1932 that were readable. And I very much love this idea of a kind of archeology where things are just put next to other things without regard for material, without regard for technology, without regard for use in a way that really feels a lot closer to everyday life. These are the sarcophogi I was talking about Alright how are we doing on time? How are you feeling? Feel like you can do a little more? You up for it? Okay... So I want to talk a bit about public art public art is the realm of art where the greatest aesthetic crimes are committed. I think you all know this. It is the worst. So I'm always looking for, "what would be a good model for public art?" Uh...cause there are so many bad models. That's not hard to find. So one of the things that really interests me is this idea of looking at, in architectural history, the category of structures that are called the folly. And the folly really exists as something in between art and architecture and that's what I love about it. The folly are buildings that were constructed not to have a practical purpose, like a barn or a chateaux, but rather, I think their purpose is to generate meaning is to create meaning and to develop situations right? And mad aristocrats some of which had beautiful ruins on their properties, and they built grottos, and they built temples to the winds and they built pleasure gardens, and they built magnificent hunting pavilions and just...and rustic houses and just incredibly insane architecture. And great, meaningful, fascinating miniature architecture. So i became very very interested in trying to see if we could breathe some life into this idea. And so the first project I did like this was on the border of Holland and Germany It's...it's at..it's a small reserve for a kind of heath a kind of...what was once a the vast historical ecology of this area which now there's about 40 acres of left and so it's incredibly important for science It's really just hanging on by fingernails. They wanted to create a kind of gateway into this area. So I suggested that we build two structures: structures that are related to an empirical understanding of the natural world. The first is a traditional hunter's cabin. This of course is the first day and it's built. And one great thing about working with the follies is that it's great to do a public work that is a ruin because a ruin is like the only thing that gets better as it gets worse. So you know you can let them graffiti this—vandals take your best shot. You're just going to to increase it. So it's constructed with great detail, with an eye to the vernacular to how people would have built a structure like this say a hundred years ago. And what was for me the biggest discovery, it was a real breakthrough for me, was to realize that when I worked in this kind of architectural form, I could be a sculptor I could work in terms of form but I didn't have to give up the complexity,—the material complexity— of being an installation artist as well. So the building becomes a vitrine and the way the viewers experience this is by looking through the windows, by having an encounter where you're peering into this. And so then I could have that material richness that I've had in museums and galleries but it's still outside. And so you could construct a kind of character. You know so in this case, a hunter—someone who has an intense knowledge of the natural world— who has undoubtedly great affection for it but nevertheless their expression of that always results in death. And that's a very paradoxical, strange situation to me. Uhm...and so all of the aspects that you might find within the local culture that are inside this but of course it's always rewards for special viewers—rewards for people who put more energy into it. and they see that, "Oh there's photographs of hunters but actually those are celebrity hunters. Oh it's Kirk Douglas and it's Ted Nugent and it's uh, you know... (audience laughs) it's people who might be recognizable. So it's companion building is also something where the scientists have... a biological field station. And field stations of course, are to help biologists deal with difficult conditions: the middle of the ocean, the Antarctic, the North Pole, the Amazon uhm... this is you know ten minutes from city center it's not the most difficult environment in the world. But nevertheless, inside of this structure, and again you encounter this very much like a giant vitrine, it's built as one would build a building in this area right now and you see all of the tools and equipment for people who have an intense interest in the natural world, who want to understand the mechanisms of the natural world and that relationship often results in death—often results in a specimen being taken So, and again there are also things that... there are computers without electricity there are phones without phones lines, there are clocks that never move sinks without water, so there's enough indication that this is a discursive space this is not a practical space, this is not a...this is a space that's meant to generate meaning and reflection and not to be used. So my friends from the Galerie fur Landschaftskunst in Hamburg, who are an amazingly fascinating group of artists who are organized as an artist collective gallery and all of the artists are organized around a contemporary interpretation of what it means to be a landscape artist today Alright? So they say, "why is it always fake with you? Why can't you do something real?Why can't you do something we can actually use?" "why do you want to make buildings that can't be used or shouldn't be used? Well I don't let's try something. So we convinced the city of Hamburg to give us this barge, and we built this house on it. We constructed a floor on the barge so it could be used as a kind of social space and we made a collaboration with botanists and soil scientists from the university who were interested in the canals of Hamburg. Hamburg has more miles of canal than Venice does as any Hamburger will tell you. And so we created this space that was used by artists, by the soil scientists had their annual conference on this space the botanists used the barge for sampling different places but also, because of our association with the university, we got lots of...lots of great stuff to play with Artists play with this stuff very differently from scientists, I can promise you that some might say inappropriately. But also this this...and one of the things we tried to do was fulfill this promise of the university. You know, the university is this place where you have dedicated people working in various fields of knowledge under one roof who share ideas. No. That never happens. They never share ideas. They're never under one roof. So...but at night, over a beer or two, soil scientists and artists and plant people and the general public actually talk together i n a really interesting way So that's the kind of thing we wanted to have happen here and as we went on with the process, this is it in the Ulster, and we had you know, the local scuba diving club said "oh could we use the barge to do a dive in the Ulster?" and we said, "oh yeah no problem". And artists wanted to hang drawing machines off the side of the barge and the wave action would create drawings. And we said, "no problem." And somebody wanted to do nature illustration classes for young people on Saturday mornings we said, "no problem." A woman wanted to read The Odyssey by firelight at midnight and we said, "no problem." So it became this this kind of platform, people wanted to do a rave, and we said, "no." (audience laughs) Otherwise you know it became this kind of very open platform for interesting dynamics and at the same time I was interested in creating a space that was visually very generous. And that kind of acknowledged a tradition or various traditions where these fields overlap and come together. And we trace that back not very long ago in history Another one of these projects was done in San Diego at Tijuana Estuary Park. Tijuana Estuary Park is located where the Tijuana river enters into the Pacific Ocean. Tijuana River is an incredibly polluted river. This is right on the border so you have lot's of border police— immigration naturalization— trying to keep people sneaking across the border. You have lots of people sneaking across the border. It's adjacent to Imperial Beach which is a big development which would love to develop this land. It was saved largely because it was a garbage dump before and it was also where the Navy tested its bombardment tactics in the 1940s. It is adjacent to the Navy helicopter test site where the Navy teach people how to fly helicopters and often there are...in fact you can never be here without one to four helicopters overhead sometimes Navy Seals dangling from them. It's also close to a very large sprawling suburb So there are kids on their BMX bikes and there are rangers chasing those kids trying to get them. So this is not like the most restful wildlife sanctuary you've ever heard of. But if you are a bird who needs to nest on a beach this is your best shot in many miles. If you are a fish that needs to go up river, Tijuana River is the river. Uhm, you know if you are a garbage-eating raccoon or a possum, this is probably the place where you spend the day sleeping it off. And so it's essentially a landscape of mischief and I was really interested in that, in the vernacular of mischief in buildings. And so I built this which looked like it could have been left over from the Navy. Or it could be a surveillance thing from the immigration police It's sited on this beautiful bomb crater which is absolutely filled with migrating birds So how do you see this piece? So you go to the park ranger, you give the your license or some ID, They give you the key and you hike out what's about three miles. So none of my friends from New York saw this work (audience laughs). And then you open this building and instead of mischief what you find is a kind of mecca for birders. This is like a bird watchers paradise. It's full of the kind of things that turn birders on. Lists and maps and graphs and charts and photographs that look like the triumph of nature photography...Birds up close, but they're actually all dead birds from the natural history museum. And uhm...reference books and...of course there's lots of optics and there's recording devices and there's watercolors and pencils and there's a hall of fame of people who have done a lot for birds. People like Marjorie Stone Douglas and Roger Tory Peterson and Rachel Carson There's a map in case you want to build a bird (audience laughs). And people are allowed to come here and hang out and people did hang out. This project was open for about four months, not one thing was stolen, not one thing was vandalized, not one thing was broken. It was kind of extraordinary. So as I said, my friends in New York couldn't see that piece so I made one for them as well. So this is the Urban Wildlife Observation Unit which, you know has probably the biodiversity of your parking lot out here. And so I manned that with a very talented and charismatic DJ who was probably the most ignorant person of the natural world who I'd ever encountered So really a nice guy but if you had a question about nature, you probably shouldn't be asking him. But his job was actually to encourage you to come into this place where it was a kind of clearning house of information. So you know we changed the aesthetic a bit. The other place looked much more like something from the military period from the Forties, it had all that great steel desk furniture. and this is much more kind of Theodore Roosevelt era we even have a diorama to acknowledge the natural history museums of New York in there. And of course people came in and used the optics, although I think very few four legged animals were seen with those optics. And just in case you didn't get anything out of that, we produced a field guide to the wildlife of Madison Square Park. which has entrances for things like squirrels, pigeons, grass, uh...things that you might actually encounter in the park itself and this became something I really like to do, this, producing these field guides. In relationship to really traditional...working with a really traditional notion of the folly, this is a very strange park in Austria, It called Schloss Grafenegg. It was a Gothic castle in the 19th century. The duke who owned this castle took a trip around Europe and decided that his castle wasn't Gothic enough So he made a Neo-Gothic castle out of his Gothic castle. And so that's why it looks like it's very Disney-esque in a sense. And he also built beautiful French formal gardens and English gardens in the English landscape tradition. One of those, in the French formal garden there was a beautiful fountain, that had a small, Bocksider hedge about so high. And the fountain was hit by lighting and destroyed so they cleaned out the ruins and they let the Bocksider hedge grow over a hundred and fifty years until it achieved this height of 22 feet which you see there. And it's a perfect circle. I think it's kind of a remarkable thing because Bocksider grows so slowly. But the public to this castle seemed to think that that was the outdoor restroom And so the gardeners wanted to cut down this kind of amazing thing and so I thought, well you know, I'm going to come up with a piece that makes them save this. and so I built this ruin tower which was incredibly difficult to make inside this Bocksider circle And uh the tower...you can...through the area that the public had made, the hole in the circle, you can enter through and peer through the window of this tower and what fascinated me about the French formal garden tradition, and the English picturesque garden tradition is that they both represent "nature volume ten" all the time, right? You'd never get a sense of nature as a cycle. It's always nature full-on. So what's missing is that notion of the cycle of nature. What's missing is the other part of nature, death and decay. So I wanted to make a shrine for that within this garden so you could find death and decay somewhere in the garden and here it is. So you look through that window and you see a perfectly constructed diorama of a forest scene with a dead deer in the center and the deer is in the process of decomposing. She's covered with maggots and flies and there are mushrooms and... there are crows and other animals about to eat her. So...that's...a not entirely unplayful reference to Bambi as well. And so uh...and to a certain kind of forest culture going on in Germany and Austria. How these projects work generally is I'm invited to a place and I get to snoop around and find and interesteing location Find a tidbit of social history, find an opportunity to make something and go against the grain of the culture that exists or to celebrate an aspect of the culture that exists or whatever the motivation. So on one hand it's an incredibly great job to have I was invited to go to Essen in Germany which is the former coal mining region not the most beautiful part of the country a region which has a lot of problems ecologically because the coal mines make is impossible to have pipes So all of the sewerage has to travel above ground. So it has a smell, this region. So I was brought to an area which I was interested in working, the marina, and it was February and it was bitterly cold and the marina is kind of expansive, partially unfrozen water and absolutely filled with bids with water birds. With gulls, with mergansers, with ducks with geese, So...but we arrived there, it was so cold, we had to go into this small little house that was there This (picture) is obviously not taken in February, but this is the house And so we enter into this space, it's nine o'clock in the morning bitterly cold and suddenly it's like you're in a tavern scene from a hobbit movie. There are lots of gigantic men and they are laughing and roaring and drinking schnapps and beer and the walls of this place are caramel colored from years and years of cigarette smoke. There are girlie pictures behind the bar and so we get our coffee and we are drinking it and... "What the hell is this place?" And, it's the fishing club. It's the fisherman's club. The fisherman's club—so when does fishing season open? Oh in May. So I thought this is like great. Here are these guys, They're having a wonderful time, they're...all of that, they're telling stories, they're laughing, they're telling jokes, it's all based on their relationship with an animal, with fish. But at the same time, it's kind of this extremely testosterone driven place. I haven't felt like that kind testosterone since you know I was in the locker room in high school probably. And so I thought, well, I want to make a place like that. But I want to make it not for machos, but for dandys (audience laughs). So this is the Amateur Ornithologist Clubhouse. So we found...I found this amazing oxygen tank at the sewerage treatment plant. So this was used for pumping oxygen into the sewerage treatment process. And we modified it. We built the tower. We opened up new windows to it. We built out own hobbit door (audience laughs). And so this is for the gentle folk of Essen. to come and spend an afternoon contemplating our feathered creatures. Which you know, just because it's for dandys, doesn't mean you can't have fun. Because as far as I can tell clubs are only about drinking and smoking So you can also do those things here, but you can only smoke Larks and you can only drink Grey Goose, Wild Turkey, Famous Grouse (audience laughs) Tucan Rum...uhm...there's a few other things. Uh and this has an attendant and she or he keeps track of all the birds people see. Everything is kind of catalogued and listed. You see also this frieze of famous naturalist names. And everything in this building is related to birds. And of course this is Germany so there's super great kitsch there. And great ceramics, prints...every aspect is bird related. Okay, what do you think? Time to stop? Oh no wait, let's do one more, one more. C'mon we're going to do one more...one more. Okay. This is it. I promise, I promise. So this is the city of Folkestone. And again I was invited to come to Folkestone. Folkestone was a great seaside town in the 19th and early 20th century. It was a...it was this place with magnificent hotels and homes. It was the place where people like Bernard Shaw lived there and H.G. Wells. That's where the Prince of Whales would take his mistress.... So this kind of amazing place. And since then, since British people, I guess, vacation only in Ibiza and places like that, places like Folkestone have fallen on harder times. There was a company in Folkestone who...that was their home headquarters. And the director retired and he's given all of his money to create a sculpture triennial. So every three years there's a big sculpture exhibition to kind of bring people to Folkestone and show them what an amazing place this is And it is an amazing place. I also grew up in a seaside town so I really identified with that and I noticed that the one thing that was maybe different than my seaside town is people here hated gulls. Absolute hatred of them. And I thought, why is that? And they hate gulls, because some people love gulls too much. So people would feed gulls and gulls are, of course, very intelligent, very adaptive animals. So they would learn to associate people with food and they would demand food. And so if you come out of your fish and chips shop on Friday the gull would come from behind you at forty miles per hour and knock your french fries onto the ground and all the gulls would come down. There's a gull that knows how to work the electric door at Tesco and can walk into a Tesco, pick up a bag of chips and take it out and open it. So this created some kind of animosity but of course gulls are fascinating they're like remarkable animals and they're also some of the animals that have been studied so thoroughly by etholologists that they are...we can really understand a lot about gulls. We can't speak gull, but you can understand gull. You can understand a lot about gulls. So what the gulls really have is a PR problem. And so what the gulls really need is a Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit. (audience laughs) So the Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit travels through the city of Folkestone, and my gull enthusiasts with evangelical verve, convince people that to know gulls is to love them. And what we find out much to our surprise is that people actually didn't hate the gulls. It was...It's a very small, very noisy, very grumpy minority not unlike The Tea Party who hate the gulls....But the vast majority of people really had positive stories. So we ended up becoming more of a kind of site for collecting positive stories about gulls than disseminating things about gulls...although we also....My gull had a lot of attitude, a little intimidation perhaps. But we also did produce another field guide which teaches you a few easy introductions to gull vocalizations and behaviors. So it is kind of...you can really understand gull (audience laughs). So thank you. (audience claps)
