Artist Lecture #2: Mark Dion

Mark Dion has made a career as a collection artist. He finds objects, documents them, and places them in various cases. His work is archaeological and anthropological. In 1992, he ventured to Venzuela, traveling around with native tribes. On his trip, he collected different materials and objects and sent them to the museum he was working for. He told them to place the objects on four different tables, but did not give them any instruction on how they should do it. Then, he would find different kinds of animals and insects. If he could correctly identify them, then he would send a list of the names and have his colleagues place them in empty vitrines. His work focuses on the history of natural history. On another entymological endeavor, he took leaf litter from different places and separated it into all its components. He then took a photo with a microscope and presented his images with no concern for scale. For another project, he shut down the Smart Museum in Chicago and with a team, found every living organism that should not be there. For an archaeological project in Switzerland, he took material from beneath some houses at a high elevation. The history of the objects he found was condensed because the objects could not be described in relation to each other. The most interesting project he performed was in Bankside on the coast of the river. The river bank would only show for four hours each day in which he had people either over 65 or under 17 hunt for every manmade object they could find. Over the summer, they cataloged each item, cleaned them, and prepared them to be interred into a giant wardrobe. The final display was a collection of photos of every person who had a part in the project.