Artist's inspiring a new installation

For this past installation, my organizational use of organic and found materials are inspired from the methodology of Mark Dion, who, referencing science and natural history was an obvious starting point for me, but trying to find artists before him encompasses new visual vocabulary and conceptual impetus'. Mark Dion is considered a sort of pop-scientist, he regains from what institutions says is important a naiive and more exacting reality of what is pertinent in our daily lives - everything from our spoons and knick-knacks and broken bottles has a place and name, because they have taken part in our daily lives, and it is this reason for which Dion surreptitiously finds a place for all random miscellanea, if history will deign to forget it. He also draws from singularly powerful figures like Robert Bertram and Sterling Clark to recreate and enact their moments in history, also blurring the lines of fact and fiction. As we know, bias is always present within the observer and with a human observer, no matter the methods used, we ultimately delete from historical memory whatever fits the paradigm at the time. Dion strips away even these methods to produce a viewpoint which is beautiful, ironic, and rich with social commentary.

Mark Dion's paper-mache rendition of Sterling Clark's China Expedition. Here is  presenting the wares and tools of the undocumented journey; Juxtaposing the 'phantom images' with the bravado of the trophy room, Dion shows that science and expedition, going hand in hand,were exclusive to a society of privileges as much as to their idealistic and individual curiosity.

Artists who could be the conceptual predecessors of Dion's amalgam of 'natural history, found object reliquaries' are Joseph Cornell and Joseph Beuys, though this can be argued, I sympathized with their organizational and visual inclinations. Both men worked from a post war perspective, so it seems that they were creating from rummaged objects and bare materials a treatment for the subconscious in a tramautic period. Beuys worked as a contemporary shaman with fat and felt, and even had his own personal mythology. Supposedly he was rescued by ethnic Tatars when his Luftwaffe plane crashed in remote western European territories. He said he was nursed to health, bound with fat and felt to stay warm. He returns to these materials again and again, a poetic constancy. Joseph Cornell is a more subdued figure, called by one critic, a 'Dime Store' alchemist, he constructs these hermetic frames (much like Dion's inspiration - the wunderkabinet) for depositing objects in quiet, and sacred organization. His objects are also telling of the people who possessed them, betraying the American link to the western Europe they would be in violent league against.

Joseph Beuys, "I like America and America likes me", 1974

Joseph Cornell, Untitled, 1945

Click on the names below to link with interesting articles on the artist's and their process

Mark Dion

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Cornell


Bibliography:


Scribner, Charity. 2003. Object, relic, fetish, thing: Joseph Beuys and the museum. Critical inquiry. 
                EBSCO publishing: 635-649

Shaw, Lytle. 2009. Docents of discourse: The logic of dispersed sites. Boundary 2. 36 (3): 25-47