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Joanna Marsh
Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curi-
osities (detail, Cabinets of the
Sea, the Air, and tbe Terrestrial
Realm), 2001. Installation at
the Frederick R. Weisman Art
Museum, Minneapolis, show-
casing works of art, artifacts,
and animal specimens from the
museums and special collections
of the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis and Saint Paul
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Interview
Fieldwork
A Conversation with Mark Dion
Artist Mark Dion delights in the process
of accumulating and disseminating
knowledge. He is an avid explorer, a
generous teacher, and a gifted student of
art, science, history, and popular culture.
Over the last two decades, he has created
an expansive body of work that investi-
gates how cultural institutions shape our
understanding of the natural and built
environments through the classification
and display of artifacts. To do so, Dion has
collaborated with organizations around the
world, from museums and libraries to uni-
versities and municipalities, staging a form
of institutional critique that recalls the
interventions of Fred Wilson and Andrea
Fraser. Dion’s installations, however, move
beyond the customary cynicism of such
interrogations, instead celebrating the
value of intellectual discovery.
Dion was born in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, in 1961 and had little
exposure to museums until enrolling at
the University of Hartford Art School in
1981. In 1985 he joined the Independent
Study Program at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, where he studied with
conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Hans
Haacke and media artist Barbara Kruger.
The faculty encouraged Dion to explore
an interdisciplinary approach that would
afford a synthesis of his wide-ranging in-
terests, and he began creating installations
33 American Art
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inspired by his passion for research
and collecting. Early projects like The
Department of Marine Animal Identification
of the City of New York (Chinatown
Division) (fig. 1) soon gave way to ambi-
tious museum collaborations with the
Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State
University and the Weisman Art Museum
at the University of Minnesota, for which
Dion culled the storerooms of academic
departments on each campus and
chronicled their history in intricately built
cabinets of curiosity (frontispiece). These
visually arresting displays have become a
common feature of Dion’s work, as have
his practices of institutional intervention
and mining collections, which evolved
into a series of literal excavations in the
late 1990s beginning with the Tate Thames
Dig (1999) and culminating in 2004 with
an archaeological dig at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.
In recent years, Dion’s work has
become increasingly immersive, leading
him ever deeper into the field. In 2007
the artist journeyed across the southern
states to explore the history and culture
of eighteenth-century American naturalist
John Bartram and his son William. Using
their travel journals, drawings, and maps,
Dion retraced the Bartrams’ expedition-
ary route through northern Florida and
the coastal swamps of Alabama to New
Volume 23, Number 2 © 2009 Smithsonian Institution
1 Mark Dion, The Department of Orleans and South Carolina (fig. 2). Along
Marine Animal Identification of the way, he collected and documented
the City of New York (Chinatown
Division), 1992. Marine animals
an assortment of specimens, which were
collected in Chinatown, door, displayed in curiosity cabinets at John
metal cabinet, blue lab coat, Bartram’s historic home and garden
dimensions variable. Photo, in Philadelphia. Since completing his
courtesy of the artist and Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New York Travels of William Bartram—Reconsidered,
Dion has mounted projects in Toronto,
2 Mark Dion at Fontainebleau State Denmark, France, and New York, includ-
Park in Louisiana, 2007, retracing
birding observations of eighteenth- ing a 750-square-foot brutalist bunker
century naturalist-illustrator entitled The Octagon Room in which
William Bartram for his Travels of viewers are invited to browse the contents
William Bartram—Reconsidered.
Photo, Dana Sherwood
of an abandoned office representing the
artist’s own interests and history over the
past eight years (figs. 3, 4).
When not wandering the globe, Dion
divides his time between Beach Lake,
Pennsylvania, and New York City. I caught
up with him earlier this year for a conversa-
tion at his studio in Washington Heights.

34 Summer 2009

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3 Mark Dion, The Octagon Room,
2008. Mixed-media installation
at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New
York, 8 ft. 4 in. x 27 ft. 6 in. x
27 ft. 6 in. Photo, Christopher
Burke Studio, 2008 / courtesy of
the artist and Tanya Bonakdar
Gallery

4 Mark Dion, The Octagon Room

(interior). Photo, Christopher
Burke Studio, 2008 / courtesy of
the artist and Tanya Bonakdar
Gallery

35 American Art

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 JM: You clearly have a love for the natural
sciences and a passion for empirical
research, and your work engages a variety
of scientific disciplines, from archaeology
to botany to entomology. Why did you
decide to pursue a career in the arts as
opposed to science?
MD: While I was meeting scientists and
working with scientists, I found a lot of
dissatisfaction. A handful of exceptional
people get to run their own research
projects, develop their own programs
and pursue their own interests, but it
seemed to me that the vast majority
working in science were unfulfilled. They
were working in places they didn’t want
to—in the academy, in the private sector,
often for people whose beliefs were the
opposite of their convictions. People
going into environmental studies and
wanting to make a contribution might
find themselves working for corporations
that want to do the least amount of en-
vironmentally responsible labor they can
get away with. Some of the jobs that were
available seemed monotonous, underpaid,
and uninspiring. On the other hand,
the job of being an artist is a remarkably
unique one. You write the job description
every morning. What your job is about
and what the core of your concerns are
really shift around your own interests. Of
course, it is a kind of dilettante approach.
We use that word only in the pejorative
now, but the origins of the notion of
the dilettante are interesting: a society of
dilettantes that [eighteenth-century men
of letters Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe
and [Friedrich] Schiller belonged to was
a society of people who were interested
in everything. I found that within science
you specialize early, and every choice you
make in that specialization means there
are roads you can’t take. In a period like
ours, when so many disciplines are so
highly specialized, there is a great oppor-
tunity for artists to bridge specializations.
Of course, I have met many people in
fields like conservation biology who are
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intensely fulfilled, but what they like to
talk about is the week once every two
years that they can do fieldwork—go
down to Venezuela and survey fish, up to
the Arctic and take ice cores, or on a dig
in Syria. But that is only one week every
two years, and the rest of the time they
are shackled to that desk and often to
an academic institution that has its own
kind of trade-offs in terms of time with
teaching and other things. Being an artist
represents a particular kind of freedom.
I noticed that early on. When I was in
high school, our teacher would give us an
assignment and essentially leave the room
and come back in the last five minutes of
class, so there was a kind of freedom and
trust. And one would never betray that
trust. I thought, “I don’t know what art is,
but if this is it, sign me up.” You still need
to be responsible, and I think artists of my
generation, like Christian Philip Müller,
Renée Green, Andrea Fraser, take research
very seriously. We try our best to approach
a field with diligence and seriousness
while at the same time we can change our
minds; we are not locked into a contract.
You have mentioned that you had formal
training in some of these areas. What did
that consist of?
I took classes at City College [in New
York] in biology and things like that,
to get a foundation, because I knew
pretty much once I graduated [from
the University of Hartford Art School]
that I was serious about this. So I took
the introduction to biology with all the
nursing students. Those kinds of things
were important to me; if I had time now
I would still be taking evening classes. I
did a lot of reading seminars, too, with
my fellow students Jason Simon, Gregg
Bordowitz, and Craig Owens, and we read
[Karl] Marx’s Das Kapital one summer
outside the classroom. I have also done
enormous amounts of learning on the fly
from having access to experts, from being
curious and asking people questions,
 being able to surround myself with some
of the best people in their fields, many of
whom are intensely generous.
Speaking of the media artist Jason
Simon, I recently read a short essay he
wrote about a project you and he did in
1986–87 while you were working at a
painting conservation studio.
When I was going to school, I didn’t
have enough money to get by in New
York, so I worked at what amounted
to a thirty-hour-a-week job as an art
conservator at a private studio in SoHo
that specialized in nineteenth-century
American art. So I did get my hands
on Bierstadts and Churches. I wasn’t a
painter; I didn’t deal with the fronts of
the canvases. I was more of a techni-
cian; I dealt with the painting as more
of a physical thing. I was the person
who would remove the canvas from the
stretcher. If the painting had been relined
in the past, I removed the relining,
scraped glue off the back of the painting,
things like that.
How did that experience inform your
early work? Does it continue to do so?
Well, it does in terms of seeing representa-
tions as objects. Working in the studio,
one would see an object in the middle of
its life. I found that incredibly interesting.
For a while it ruined my perception of
painting; it took a long time to get past
the surface of the painting again for me,
to allow myself to be fooled by the [illu-
sionistic] space in the painting and not to
stop at the surface and not to see it as an
incredible object. It was quite early in the
1980s, at this moment when the Reagan
Administration was doing a particularly
conservative revision of history, going back
to create a kind of fantasy of the glory
of conquest and these kinds of things,
rewriting the history of the Vietnam War.
It was that notion of taking the past and
putting it at the service of the present,
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unraveling the hard-earned victories made
in social history by the people who have
really taken a complex look at cultural
production and tried to understand all
of the stories within it instead of just one
story. So Jason and I made a film largely
about how that happens in a restoration
studio. It was about how contemporary
values change the physical object, or the
images, in the case of these paintings.
This film told a number of stories of what
has happened to paintings and how the
marketplace had forced these paintings
to change in certain ways.
In terms of their value, their
interpretation?
Also in terms of their physical selves.
Paintings would be chopped down to fit
into more valuable frames. If it was going
to be too expensive to restore the whole
painting, it might be cut and made into a
smaller painting. Sometimes the restorers
themselves would paint names and jokes
onto the canvases.
Really?
I will have to give you a copy of the film
[Artful History, a Restoration Comedy]. For
me, this film was really about a more
general tendency that was going on
throughout culture. I think the film was
started in ’85 or maybe ’84 and finished
in ’86. We premiered it at the Collective
for Living Cinema, and it was shown in
an [1987] exhibition [entitled FAKE] at
the New Museum [of Contemporary Art
in New York] that Bill [William] Olander
curated.
Let’s go back and talk about nineteenth-
­century landscape painters, specifically
in the Hudson River School tradition.
You have said that you feel a significant
connection with them. Are there specific
artists—Thomas Cole, Frederic Church,
or Albert Bierstadt—with whom you feel
a strong affinity?
5 New Bedford Whaling Museum,
Massachusetts. Interior view
I come from a blue-collar background,
and when we were children we didn’t
go to art museums as an activity. But
where I come from, New Bedford,
[Massachusetts,] there was this fantastic
whaling museum (fig. 5), a social history
museum that talks a little bit about
the local industries, about the history
of whaling, and about nautical history,
and a part of that was paintings. They
had a very fine collection of paintings,
including Bierstadts—Bierstadt lived in
New Bedford briefly—also pictures by
William Bradford, who is sometimes
more well known for his photographs
of the Arctic than his paintings. But
Bradford was very much in that school
and did large-scale canvas spectacles,
such as whaling ships trapped in the
ice. That was the first sort of art I saw,
and I saw it in a way that was integrated
with other things—with natural history,
industrial history, with craft, with glass
that was made in the region, and with
vernacular arts like scrimshaw. It was
all one thing instead of quite separate
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things. That was an important force in
shaping my understanding of art’s place
in relationship to other things.
So the paintings you encountered at the
whaling museum were contextualized to
tell a larger story, as opposed to being
appreciated just for themselves?
That’s largely true. If there was a
landscape, its importance was that it
featured New Bedford or the region.
[Albert] Pinkham Ryder was also from
Fairhaven, which is where I spent my
childhood, in the town next to New
Bedford. Somehow this region had an
interesting relationship to art without,
certainly in my time, intentionally
fostering it. And if I think about
other painters like [Martin Johnson]
Heade who painted scenes there, the
New England marshes, it is all very
interesting and comfortable to me.
What brought a lot together for me
was reading Barbara Novak’s book
on the Hudson River School [Nature
and Culture: American Landscape and
Painting, 1825–1875] when I first
moved to the University of Hartford,
and the kind of complexity as an art
historian she brought to that, the diver-
sity of references. She really fleshed out
the history, putting it into relationship
with the concepts of nature, transcen-
dentalist thought, theology, and the
place of science at that moment. When
I look at the Hudson River School, I see
a group of people who are very much
the prototype for the contemporary
art world. They have a system in place,
they have a theoretical backbone, they
have their spectacular masters, they
have their younger generation that is
trying to push in different dimensions
and directions. They have to have a
relationship to the market as well, and
sometimes they have to exaggerate their
persona and create their persona, which
I think you also see in [John James]
Audubon.

6 American Museum of Natural
History, New York. Photo, Craig
Chesec
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That sort of mythology around artists.
Yes. I was drawn to them as people who
had a very theoretical approach to the
natural world and who also had within
the body of them very different emphases.
Some were pro-expansionists and some
were inherently, I would say, conserva-
tionists. That concept [of the conserva-
tionist] didn’t exist yet [in their time, but]
they were quite melancholy at the notion.
If you see the study and observation of
nature as a religious act, then you can’t
help but see the destruction of nature as
some sort of desecration. So I think these
conflicts exist within their work, and I
find that fascinating. I also love that they
tried to create spectacles—the amazing
rivalry between Church and Bierstadt to
make bigger, grander, and more spectacu-
lar paintings—and how that plays into
the role of entertainment.
There certainly is a kind of theater, par-
ticularly in Bierstadt’s work.
And I love the contexts in which these
would be shown, with elaborate cur-
tains, gigantic frames, and palm trees.
Visitors were encouraged to bring their
opera glasses to get a closer view of the
painting, and that idea of painting as an
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event, of art object as event, is exciting
and interesting.
Since the early 1990s your work has
increasingly involved forms of expedition-
ary fieldwork, in which you assume the
role of naturalist and explorer. What
prompted that shift toward a more im-
mersive and performative practice?
I had studied with a lot of people who had
a theoretical approach, a very intellectual
and philosophical approach. I felt their
commitment to that was sincere and made
sense, but the issues they were interested
in weren’t necessarily core to my sensibil-
ity. In the 1980s I found other intellec-
tuals like Donna Haraway and Stephen
Gould, writing more from the perspective
of an evolutionary biologist who was inter-
ested in the cultural critique as well, and
that was a great breakthrough for me. In
looking at the history of science as well as
the production of reproductions, the pro-
duction of embodied ideas through images
and things, and finding that there was this
field of the public history of science that
was incredibly rich and that insisted on
the same intellectual merit and the same
serious approach, that was a breakthrough.
Another breakthrough was going to the
Natural History Museum (fig. 6).
I think I had been in New York a few
years before I discovered the Natural
History Museum, and suddenly I felt
like I had found an endless source of
interesting material and ideas in one place.
I felt at home with the questions the
museum had been asking, and then with
expanding that when I started traveling
a lot to Europe. I started to realize that
there were museums that were themselves
relics—museums that had frozen at a
particular time, usually through fiscal
poverty—and that you could literally trace
the history of natural history, the history
of scientific thought, at least for the last
three centuries, through these institutions
and see how that attitude changed. I don’t
know how many times I went to Europe
 and toured museums and then when I
went back two years later they would be
gone; they had been renovated. So I felt
as if it was one of the last opportunities
to do that. I could go to Stockholm and
see the nineteenth-century organization of
the museum, go two years later and [the
museum was] completely renovated, com-
pletely destroyed. I gained a passionate
interest in that; for me there was nothing
as precise in making me understand the
way people thought at a particular time.
It is very different from reading. Of
course, I read a lot of travel journals, from
Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter
Bates to Darwin, and I read literature
from the time, Henry James and people
like that, and I have been a student of
history in a usually dilettantish way. But
nothing brought me closer to understand-
ing the way people understood the world
than walking through these [museum]
spaces and seeing how things were orga-
nized and seeing what was emphasized
or deemphasized. That is the great thing
about museums, that they are this place
where you gain knowledge through things
but you also gain knowledge through
things in relationship to other things. It
is one very precise composition, one total
artwork, where architecture, fine arts,
museum display, science, woodworking,
and furniture building all have to form
one thing. And when all of this is frozen
in time you really come as close as pos-
sible to seeing the way people understood
the world at that moment. So I became a
real maniac of trying to go to those places.
Do you think your own artistic approach
was spurred on by seeing the dissolu-
tion of those institutions? And do you
worry about the recent trend toward
modernizing museum displays and the
potential loss of material culture at major
institutions?
Absolutely. I worry about some projects
more than others. I always felt the impor-
tance of speaking out about the significant
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place of these institutions. I argue very
much that dioramas are artworks. The
people there also argue that they are art-
works, but at the same time those people
might dismantle them. I was working with
the Bell Museum [of Natural History],
which is a beautiful museum, part of the
University of Minnesota, with some of the
most important and incredible diorama
work that has ever been done. The people
there appreciate it, but nevertheless they
are raising money to build a new building.
I am a passionate advocate of protecting
and preserving these places. At the same
time, I understand the pressures and the
problems that museum people have, and in
particular, science museums are explicitly
mandated to represent the questions and
developments of the moment. It’s complex.
Someone has to speak out, to take that
extreme conservation approach. On the
other hand, I understand how difficult it is.
Science museums, as you say, are ex-
pected to present their material in a way
that makes use of contemporary technol-
ogy and is easily accessible to visitors in a
context they understand. There seems to
be a real paradox in the fact that a mu-
seum’s primary mission is to preserve arti-
facts, specimens, objects, but the historic
formats in which they were displayed are
not preserved.
They are not always appreciated. But
there is also research going on [behind the
scenes]; these places like the Smithsonian
[National] Museum of Natural History
are alive and vibrant and they are not
unified ideological institutions. They are
sites of battle and contention, and there
are people within the museum strug-
gling to pull it in different directions.
Institutions are a battlefield of ideas and
of people trying to make the museum as
responsible and democratic as it can be.
That is one of the things that brought
me to the notion of fieldwork, seeing the
activity of the back rooms of museums,
that collection [of specimens] was not
7 Mark Dion, Room from Travels of
William Bartram—Reconsidered,
Bartram’s Garden, Philadelphia,
2008. Photo, Aaron Igler / Green-
house Media, 2008, courtesy of
the artist and Tanya Bonakdar
Gallery, New York
only a nineteenth-century phenomenon
but something that museums still do.
It may not be a part that they want to
foreground; the idea that an ichthyologist
goes somewhere and kills hundreds of
fishes to find some new fishes is important
work, but it is something the public
might be squeamish about. So part of this
bringing together of my philosophical and
critical background, of my training and
my interests in the natural world, was for
me to find bridge figures who were also
interested in hiking, camping, and fishing,
in going to the tropical forests. In the
early ’90s I worked with Ashley Bickerton.
Ashley and I were great enthusiasts for
jungles, and we would go to places sepa-
rately. For example, I would go to Belize
and he would go to Hawaii; he would go
to the South Pacific and I would go to
South America. We were always reading
about tropical ecology. We were compas-
sionate, interested in all of the debates
that were happening in the environmental
movement on the crisis of tropical rain
forests. Going to the field brought together
a lot of things for me: my interest in
museums, and my interest in the history
of natural history, particularly linchpin
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figures in that history like Alfred Russel
Wallace, Henry Bates, and William Beebe.
And it brought in contemporary issues
about travel, ownership, attitudes toward
nature, conservation, plus things like
the construction of the identity of the
explorer, the going back and forth between
the macho character and the slightly
emasculated academic, and the way those
come together. Someone like Wallace is
far away from an Indiana Jones cliché
adventurer, yet the things he did would be
absolutely admirable by a macho standard.
And, of course, land art and linking back
to the history of people like Heade and
Church, who went to South America
and found that great site of inspiration,
who were inspired by reading Alexander
von Humboldt, this Enlightenment figure
who had blind spots but who also had
a remarkable ability to think beyond his
time with compassion and complexity.
In addition to Alfred Russel Wallace,
Henry Bates, and William Beebe, you’ve
recently become fascinated by the
naturalist William Bartram, and last year
you completed a site-specific project in
Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia (fig. 7).
8 William Bartram, Indian Shot,
Canna indica, 1784. Drawing.
Courtesy of the American Philo-
sophical Society, Philadelphia
Tell us a little about Bartram and how he
fits into your interests.
Bartram is a really interesting character,
and he is especially relevant to me because
of his status as an artist. I find his drawings
incredibly compelling and oddly unique.
That has a lot to do with the fact that in
his lifetime I don’t think he saw a lot of
art; he never went to Europe, for example.
I find his pictorial space extraordinary. In
many ways he represents a cliché of the
artist: he couldn’t get his life together early
on, he had complex relationships with his
father, his family constantly worried about
him as a failure, and there was concern
about how his talents as a draftsman could
be applied to any career with lucrative
ends. All of that in many ways makes
him a prototypical American artist. Also,
there is his writing, The Travels of William
Bartram. His perspective is quite advanced.
He is a Quaker, so there is a lot of stress
on humanity; he writes sympathetically
about Native Americans, and a very
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rudimentary development of the
notion of ecology, of how things
fit together, is certainly present
in his work. Some of his draw-
ings show the most remarkable
fidelity to the organisms, and
others are clearly invested with
fantasy, where you can see that
direct observation is not the
basis of the art. His drawings of
alligators are fantastic, they look
like dragons; with his drawings
of plants (fig. 8) and birds, it is
easy to identify specifically what
he is drawing. Bartram’s books
and travels offer a loose outline
on how to have an adventure,
and a big part of working on a
project like this is motivated by
pleasure—pleasure of his text,
pleasure of the landscape, and
by a sincere sense of adventure,
because I didn’t know what I
would encounter. When [my
wife] Dana [Sherwood] and I
set out on that trip, we didn’t know a lot
about the areas we were going to, even
though we had been to a few of them
before.
In fact, you had some misadventures
along the route, which I would love to
hear about.
Yes, a lot of misadventures. Because we
had traveled quite a lot to South Florida
before that, working with the Miami Art
Museum, I think our idea of Florida was
tainted. We were surprised to find the kind
of beauty and wildness that still exists in
northern Florida, distinct from South
Florida, and were pleasantly surprised
by how much of it is still left, [though]
it is going [away] by the day. That sort
of discovery was important, Bartram is
so important to that travel genre that we
love in America. He predates the journals
of Audubon and of Lewis and Clark. And
all the things that come after that, you
know, lead right through—On the Road

9 Mark Dion, The South Florida
Wildlife Rescue Unit: Mobile Labo-
ratory, 2006. Mixed media instal-
lation, 18 ft. 11 in. x 7 ft. 7 in. x
8 ft. 11 in. Miami Art Museum,
Museum purchase with funds
from an anonymous donor.
Photo, Tim McAfee
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and Easy Rider, this notion of the road
movie, and also Ansel Adams—all of the
work on American landscape is there and
intact in Bartram. Bartram is really the first
American-born [person] writing in that
way, and certainly the first who is an artist,
a botanist, and a travel writer.
You mentioned the project for the Miami
Art Museum, which you did in 2006, The
South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit (fig. 9).
In contrast to Travels of William Bartram,
it is a completely fictional project?
Right, it is very much a fantasy. The
landscape of South Florida is amazingly
interesting, with the Everglades right at
the doorstep of the city, and development
continues to be a problem there. Many
museums, many of the trustees and
the people who are making Miami an
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art capital are, not surprisingly, involved
with development, so I wanted to do
something that would engage those issues
of landscape and development. I worked
a lot with some people from the Fairchild
[Tropical Botanic Garden] there and met
a young botanist who told me how they
would find areas that were going to be
bulldozed to make new Wal-Marts. They
would do a quick botanical survey, and
then sometimes in the middle of the night
they would go and dig up plants that were
rare or plants that were very special and
move them to safer places. I thought that
was an amazing model for a certain kind
of quiet activism. On one hand it was sad,
because you knew that those safe places
weren’t necessarily safe. But at the same
time I liked this guerrilla mentality, this
guerrilla activism that has a certain gentle-
ness to it as well. I wanted to manifest that

10 Dig team at work collecting
materials as part of Mark Dion’s
Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Photo,
courtesy of the artist and Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New York
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
into a fictional SWAT team—in this case
it looked very official, almost like a para-
military organization—whose job it was to
find places that were going to be bulldozed
and to rescue everything they possibly
could. Of course, the irony is there aren’t
any places to put these things back to, so
it is a comically self-defeating endeavor.
Yet at the same time it does embody some
of the heroisms that you have to have in
relationship to that difficult, very harsh
and unforgiving Florida landscape.
This notion of rescuing objects from
extinction or obsolescence seems to be a
recurring theme in your work. Do you see
this as somehow mimicking the role of
the museum?
Well, sometimes, in the early projects,
the goal was to constitute a collection.
Once I had produced the collection, the
performative element of the work would
end or be taken down; all the equipment,
all the apparatus would be removed, and
what would be shown to the public was
just the storage element and the collection
itself. Sometimes my job as an artist can
be very much to embody the museum, to
personify what it does as one person—so
that includes the research, development,
fieldwork, and collecting, archiving,
storing, and displaying. And some of these
projects do personify the institution, which
is easy to do when you have a very focused
mandate like I had with the Tate Thames
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Dig (fig. 10) and Rescue Archaeology, a
later project for the Museum of Modern
Art [MoMA]. When the parameters of
what you are doing are very small, the
vocabulary of what you can collect is quite
limited in terms of what is there. You still
have to do the research, do the conserva-
tion of the things, and come up with a
system of display that the public can inter-
act with and comprehend. So I love that
kind of model, that I am the museum.
A tremendous amount of thought
and care goes into the presentation of
your field research, and one very ef-
fective model that you have used for
many years is the curiosity cabinet
or Wunderkammer (see frontispiece,
fig. 11), popularized in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. How and when
did you become interested in using the
cabinet as a display technique?
It is one of the techniques and technolo-
gies of the museum that is really success-
ful. I go to a lot of museums and always
think about what gets people excited.
For younger people it is increasingly the
push-button stuff. I have no appreciation
for that; you can do that at home. For
me going to a museum is to look at the
actual thing—not a picture of the thing,
not a video of the thing or a computer
representation, but the thing itself. Even if
that thing might be a kind of representa-
tion itself, it still exists in time and space
with me and gives me a sense of scale that
nothing else can. So I find those cabinets
compelling in that they allow you to
present things, and to present them in a
context. For me the difficult question was
always what kind of cabinet to put things
in. For me it’s much more interesting to
see new things in historically based cabi-
nets than to see old things in new cabinets;
there is no intellectual texture there. But
in taking a historical model of display
and investing [it with] something new,
something that for a lot of the archaeology
projects is genuinely important, people
11 Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curi-
osities (The Nine Cabinets), 2001.
Installation at the Frederick
R. Weisman Art Museum,
Minneapolis, showcasing works
of art, artifacts, and animal spec-
imens from the museums and
special collections of the Univer-
sity of Minnesota, Minneapolis
and Saint Paul
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
find themselves in that project—you will
find something in there that includes you.
It is clear that you are part of history, you
are part of this continuum.
And the experience of confronting those
cabinets, of opening the drawers, is one
of exploration and discovery that parallels
your own artistic process.
Even though things are locked away
behind glass, there is often an interactive
45 American Art
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element. They do treat the viewer in a
mature way. I try to create things where
the viewer can piece together a narrative,
and they have a lot of control over how
they come to the piece and how they
calculate things. I try not to pin down
the meaning too dramatically. With a
work like the Tate cabinets, it is largely
a collection of display options, display
technologies, a collection of methods
of organizing material, and it is a kind
of catalogue of these methods. These

12 Mark Dion doing fieldwork for
Rescue Archaeology: A Project
for The Museum of Modern Art.
Photo © 2004 The Museum of
Modern Art
13 Mark Dion, Rescue Archaeology: A
Project for The Museum of Modern
Art, 2004; installation view
of one drawer. Mixed media,
dimensions variable. Museum
of Modern Art, New York.
Photo © 2004 The Museum of
Modern Art, courtesy of the artist
and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
New York
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
methods often cancel each other out,
and you find in the end that it is not
a cabinet of things but a cabinet dedi-
cated to arranging things in different
technologies and techniques and differ-
ent kinds of emphasis.
Are the systems that you employ in your
cabinets parodies of actual scientific
classification systems?
Some may be. It does not make sense
for me to do these things in the way
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that, say, the Museum of London or an
archaeological collection or historical
society would do them. I don’t want
to tell the sort of narratives that you
would typically find in those places. I
don’t want to tell about the evolution of
a technology, the importance of when
the British mastered porcelain, or when
certain keys and locks were developed,
or when the influence of one society
was manifested in another. I want to
tell a variety of different stories, which
talk about roads not taken. When you
look at that cabinet and start opening
the drawers you begin to get a sense,
oh oh, I am going to open the drawers
and things are going to be arranged by
materials, like ceramics, for example.
But then you open the next drawer and
that actually is not the case, and then
you open the next drawer and things
are organized by utility—these are all
things used for this purpose—and in the
next drawer things might be organized
by color. So the cabinet constantly
promises one system and with the next
drawer another system, and the culmi-
nation of that is a catalogue of systems.
Between 1999 and 2004 you became
well known for a series of archaeo-
logical digs executed in the U.S. and
abroad, but in recent years you’ve
moved from excavating artifacts to
unearthing and preserving living
specimens. I’m thinking of the nurse
log projects. What was the impetus
for this shift to working with organic
specimens?
When I started doing the archaeologist
stuff it was largely a response to finding
myself pigeonholed as this natural
history, ecology artist, I saw my hori-
zons narrowing around that. But for me
the element that is most important is
not the specific practice of working on
issues of zoology or conservation, but
more about my borrowing aspects of
the methodology of another discipline.
14 Mark Dion, Vivarium, 2001.
Colored pencil on paper, 11 x
14 in. Photo, courtesy of the artist
and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
New York
So it was easy to shift that into some-
thing else. All the things I do seem to
have a relationship to early childhood
interests, like collecting things. Shifting
to archaeology allowed me to reinvent
how I could engage with a place without
having to be the natural history guy. Of
course, the archaeology things were very
popular, so soon I was the archaeology
guy. And then I wanted to retire from
those archaeology projects, so that the
MoMA project (fig. 12, 13) was going
to be the last one. But I think the Tate
was supposed to be the last one, and
then I worked with Roxana Marcoci
at MoMA, who is someone I like very
much and who is a very persuasive
curator. She had a vision of what this
could be, and she was right. After
those projects I wanted to get back to
core concerns: a continuation of the
project of American landscape and of
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All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
looking and having a relationship to
wildlife conservation issues and issues
of ecology that are complex. I feel I am
very aligned with ecology and ecologist
movements. I also find that sometimes
there is a lot of bone-headed thinking
in the ecologist movement and a lack
of a critical complexity. So I want to be
part of that but also not be afraid to be
critical of that. And also to continue
a way of thinking, as I said, of going
to museums and seeing what work is
interesting, what is not, what is missing.
I have a lot of profoundly basic questions
for museums, and the more I know
about museums the less I can answer
the question of what are these things
for. So I thought it would be interesting
to imagine an exhibit about nature that
wasn’t about a thing in a way but about
a process—a process that is often ex-
cluded from the environments (fig. 14).
15 Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium,
2007. Mixed-media installation,
greenhouse structure: 80 ft. long.
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Sally
and William Neukom, American
Express Company, Seattle Garden
Club, Mark Torrance Foundation
and Committee of 33, in honor
of the 75th Anniversary of the
Seattle Art Museum. Photo, Paul
Macapia / courtesy of the artist,
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New
York, and Seattle Art Museum
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
The first vivarium project I did was in
the central part of the Hofgarten of
Düsseldorf, in the public garden where
there was a quite nice cathedral forest.
All the trees are exactly the same age.
There is this kind of nature there, but
it isn’t involved in all the processes that
are important to nature, the recycling of
nutrients. It is a very controlled nature,
which is afraid of and denies decay,
denies process. Which I can only think
has some relationship to our distastes
of thinking about larger issues—as a
society we are wary of natural processes
and reluctant to deal with questions
of age and death and things like that,
which are part of natural processes and
which we are inescapably tied to.
That works in Seattle as well with
the Neukom Vivarium project (figs. 15,
16), particularly because the degree of
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ecological literacy among the public
in Seattle is very high. Seattle people
have such a different relationship to
the outdoors; it’s a priority for them
to get out into the natural world. I
have never been to a place where that
was so strongly the case. When I went
there, people didn’t take me to see that
giant Calder [sculpture], they took
me to the great salmon run. When I
talked to people at cocktail parties or
openings, they would say, “Have you
been to the salmon run?” And it’s such
a beautiful thing that some engineer-
ing team had the forethought to create
a situation in which you can see this
absolute phenomenon of salmon going
upstream to spawn. It is the idea of
nature as process and not nature as a
thing. So that was a template for me
when I started thinking about what

16 Neukom Vivarium, exterior view
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
work I should make there, what people
in Seattle really respond to.
In the Seattle project, you moved a
massive hemlock tree that had fallen
in the forest and built an immense
greenhouse around it, a vivarium where
the dead tree and the ecosystems still
living inside it and on it are protected
and displayed. Can you talk about the
process of creating that work, of finding
the tree?
That is the project I have worked on the
longest, the most complex, certainly the
most expensive [project], involving the
most input from experts—from archi-
tects and engineers to lighting engineers,
foresters, soil scientists, and ecologists.
So when they started to work on the
design for the park that [the architectural
firm of ] Weiss / Manfredi did, Lisa Corrin
[then deputy director of the Seattle Art
Museum] brought me in very early.
Normally we think that the relationship
between artists and architects is like
the snake and mongoose. Yet we shared
a lot of interests, and we really got to
work together on the placement of the
project and the initial design. Then we
had to find the tree, and when people
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think trees in Seattle, they think big.
They have a model for trees from the
Pacific Northwest Rainforest, where the
trees are enormous. Where to get a tree
and how to get a tree was complicated.
We went first, of course, to the national
forests. Ecologists were interested in
the project; they tried to express to us
the difficulty of doing it, the complex-
ity of the ecosystem that exists within
that, and then told us essentially
that they wouldn’t be able to help us
because the paperwork to get a tree
out of a national forest would stretch
from Seattle to Washington, D.C., and
back. So that was one impossibility.
Another possibility was that the Seattle
Art Museum has a lot of connections
with the timber industries, some of
its supporters are timber people. But I
did not want this piece in any way to
have the effect of greenwashing, to be
perceived as supporting that kind of
activity. So I worked with the project
manager Renée Devine, and we finally
came across the network of watershed
protection, vast areas of land that are
there to protect the water supply in
Washington State. They have different
mandates; that property is manager-
protected and at the same time it has
an educational mandate, with few
opportunities to fulfill it because the
land is essentially closed. On our ideal
list, we wanted either a Douglas fir or
a Western hemlock, which is the state
tree of Washington and also gets to be
of enormous size. Even though it is also
identified in the region, we didn’t want
a cedar, because cedars are rot resistant
and because of that they suppress biodi-
versity. So those were our target species,
and we found one that the foresters
knew exactly when it came down, they
knew the night it fell down, in an area
that wasn’t so secluded from the road
so we didn’t have to create a road to
get to the fallen tree. We were worried
about doing damage in removing a tree.
We tried to do this with the maximum
17 Mark Dion, Antiquarian Book
Shop, 2006. Exterior view as
installed at the Israel Museum,
Jerusalem, in 2008. Photo,
courtesy of the artist and Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New York
amount of sensitivity, and we were able
to move it onto the site. What we hoped
was that groups of people, volunteers
and docents, would adopt the tree and
take it on as a special project. It didn’t
happen in the first year to the degree we
had hoped, but now from what I under-
stand there’s a big change, and I think
it has been adopted in the way that Lisa
and I hoped it would be.
Do you also have personal collections
that haven’t made it into your art
projects?
I have several categories of collecting.
Of course, I collect things for my work.
I have a number of projects being devel-
oped in different stages and I am always
looking for things for them, and it takes
time to accumulate the right things.
You know, my life has just been made
miserable by eBay and the Antiques
Road Show. Everyone in every remote
little place with a drugstore thinks they
have a Da Vinci sketch or something; it
has made it really difficult to prospect,
and that aspect of the treasure hunt is
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All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
important to me. I don’t like going on
eBay to buy things; it isn’t my style.
I work a lot with helpers on different
things, but I can’t send someone out
to collect things; the parameters are
very narrow on knowing what is worth
having and how those things generate
meaning; it’s very precise. So I have
those work collections, which are always
growing, and I am always having to
store them in different places. I just did
this large project in Jerusalem called
Antiquarian Book Shop, a new sculpture
in the Israel Museum (figs. 17, 18). It
involved hundreds and hundreds of
books, but every book was specifically
chosen, and I also wanted to represent
as many languages as possible, so there
would be books in Greek, Farsi, Italian,
and Scandinavian languages. I would
always carry books around with me—all
of that was stored in this apartment,
nearly filling this room. Another cat-
egory: I also collect for my friends who
collect. My friend Jeffrey Jenkins has
hundreds of kinds of brushes, from the
smallest brush to eight-foot-tall brushes
for dusting radiators, strange things like
18 Mark Dion, Antiquarian Book
Shop, 2006. Mixed media, dimen-
sions variable. Installation view,
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2008.
Photo, courtesy of the artist
and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
New York
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
that. And I have many other friends
who collect a variety of things, so I am
always looking for them as well. And
then, of course, I am looking for things
for myself. I have a great collection of
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
photographs.
Focused on landscape?
Actually I am interested in portrai-
ture photographs that have artificial
landscapes in them, I am interested
in landscape and in animals, and also
in children’s costume. Costume is an
interesting element in those, but I very
much like studio photography that
tries to artificially construct the natural
world, also photographs that have some
indication of profession. And I collect
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Golden Guides. Do you know those?
The amateur naturalist guides? When
I was a kid, in our house we literally
had one book, and it was the Golden
Guide to the seashore. So I have a great
passion for the Golden Guides. I like
their compartmentalization of knowl-
edge. If you look on the shelf, there is
one for geology, one for reptiles and
amphibians, one for birds, and then
there’s one for casino games and one for
aircraft. And the holy grail of Golden
Guides is the one called Hallucinogenic
Plants. The illustrations are beautiful.
My fantasy is to do a catalogue in
the form of a Golden Guide. Michael
Oatman, who shares a lot of my inter-
ests in that period of illustration, and I,
we are always talking about how to get
it done.
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All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
19 Mark Dion, Concerning Hunting,
2008. Installation view, Kunst­
raum Dornbirn, Austria. Photo,
courtesy of the artist and Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New York
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
Your exhibition Concerning Hunting
(fig. 19) is currently traveling in Europe,
on the heels of another major survey
of your work [The Natural History of
the Museum] that toured in France,
Sweden, and Switzerland in 2007. To
what do you attribute the tremendous
international interest in your work over
the years?
Early on I noticed that much of the
work I was interested in, and a lot of the
artists I worked with, studied with, and
admired, had virtually no presence in the
States. They were friendly with artists like
Joseph Kosuth, Dan Graham, and later
Lawrence Weiner, and their entire careers
seemed to survive by doing things in
Europe. That seemed to be more in tune
with them, like Vito [Acconci], an incred-
ible artist who until recently did not have
much of a presence here. And I think that
gave me an indication that Europe was
the site of their engagement with art. In
Europe there was a potential for doing
things that were not so market-oriented,
things that were more conceptually chal-
lenging. When I did start working there,
it was Joseph Kosuth who included me in
some shows in the beginning. And when
you do one thing it always leads to two
other things, and those two things lead to
other things. Whereas here, I just didn’t
get that, since when you did something it
was very isolated and, without a sponsor,
it never evolved into the next stage. So I
found that Europe was a fertile ground to
do things.
And particularly receptive to conceptual
practices.
A conceptual approach that is really
interested in history, an approach that is
interested in the history of ideas around
nature, all of that was there.
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Finally, I am wondering what projects
are percolating at the moment?
There are a lot of different things that I am
working on now. I try to work in a quite
scattered way. I will work on museum
things, I’ll continue to work on gallery
things; recently I have been putting a lot of
energy into prints and editions and things
like that. And I have been putting more
energy into public art, partially because I
haven’t done enough of that in the States
and I would like to. Also with the [poor]
economy it is clear that not many people
will be purchasing art at galleries for some
time here. It is a good time to explore
public art for those reasons, and because
public art can be an extremely frustrat-
ing endeavor. Your chances of success as
an artist, in terms of fulfilling what you
want in the work, and for making that a
challenging but pleasurable experience, are
slim. I found myself frustrated with a lot
of that work that I put energy into at the
beginning. But now that I have become
better known and more experienced about
how to negotiate all the different bureau-
cracies and forces and factors that it takes
to make something happen, I am trying
to use that experience and some of that
notoriety to my advantage and go at this
with a little more behind me, and negoti-
ate the system. The audience you get with
public art is extraordinary. When I make
something for the gallery I can make a lot
of assumptions about the people who are
going to see that. Right now I am trying to
work on some projects for the Port of Los
Angeles, which would be really exciting
because that audience is a dynamic cross-
section of the people in San Pedro and
that part of the country. I don’t know a lot
about that audience. I can’t make assump-
tions about the books they’ve read or their
education or what they have seen. It is a
way to approach people in a fresh way.