Scientific stuff, yet strangely vague
Exhibition Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World Whitechapel Gallery
American artist Mark Dion comes across as a sort of David Attenborough of conceptual art in the breathless opening text of his biggest British exhibition to date: an “explorer, collector and activist” who reveals “the wonder, fragility and barbarity of life on earth”.
Dion is one of a prominent breed of artist – Olafur Eliasson and Carsten Höller are others – whose work has a quasi-scientific cast. In Dion’s case, the lens is natural history. Indeed, the 56-year-old has led expeditions to remote jungles, and organised public art projects that he frames as quasi-scientific research.
As you enter, the Whitechapel’s large ground floor space is alive with the fluttering and twittering of 22 zebra finches contained in a large, walk-in aviary. This is no mere birdcage, though, rather a kind of preposterous avian library, its central tree laden with books (including works by Marx, Descartes and George Orwell) that the birds are notionally invited to peruse.
Dion, then, performs the role of quasi-scientist in a decidedly quirky way: an artist obsessed less with our furred and feathered friends, per se, than with the ways we categorise and quantify the world around us. The show’s six immersive installations – which date from the Nineties to today – take us through some of the apparatus through which man observes, records and reflects on the natural world: fustily atmospheric libraries, Victorian display cases and hunters’ hides or “blinds”.
Four of these are arranged over the ground floor, their interiors got up as the habitats of fictional characters, each revealing a different approach to hunting: an aristocrat’s reed-covered lookout complete with deer-skull trophies and brass hunting horn, for instance, and a survivalist’s watchtower collapsed with a tangle of camouflage clothing and spilt cartridges.
While Dion, perhaps surprisingly, approves of hunting as a personal, if “increasingly archaic” way of interacting with nature, otherwise his aims often remain vague. Does The
Glutton, for example – a corrugated-iron shack inside which a table is laid out with animal-head-patterned vintage china – represent the gluttony of hunters or of humanity in general? Or, is its aim more enigmatic and poetic? If the latter, it doesn’t feel quite enigmatic or poetic enough.
In the Naturalists’ Gallery, a mocked-up Victorian reading room with books (mostly by Dion) laid out for the visitors’ inspection, more than a hundred of Dion’s works line the walls: photographs of stuffed polar bears in museums around the world and whimsical cartoons with a deliberate “outsider art” awkwardness. In a series of prints titled The World in a Box, he makes witty play with graphs, maps and diagrams, suggesting that his real talents may be those of a quirky illustrator, rather than a creator of grandiose installations.
His Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, commissioned by Manchester Museum, has none of the fierceness and edge you’d expect. Again, we’re in a world of eccentric Victorian scholarship, peering into an office, crowded with objects scoured from the museum’s stores that Dion hopes will “make you smile, laugh, shake your head in shock and condemnation or gasp”. Yet the rather tame assemblage of artefacts feels “interesting” rather than hair-raising.
The Tate Thames Dig, from 1999, in which Dion and teams of local volunteers excavated the river banks, unearthing an extraordinary wealth of historical bric-à-brac – from medieval shoes to crushed lager cans – was clearly a brilliant museum education project. But cataloguing these finds in old-fashioned museum display cases as a sort of “cabinet of curiosities” isn’t enough to transform it into a really resonant work of art.
Dion’s work seems mild-mannered – reluctant to dig into the problems in a way that will really get under the viewer’s skin. While the exhibition describes him as an “activist”, he seems more than happy to remain a detached and rather bookish observer.
Until May 13; 020 7522 7888; whitechapelgallery.org