Michael Millner, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, "Mark Dion, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Culture of Nature"

Mark Dion (b. 1951) is a visual and conceptual artist especially relevant to scholars of the culture of nature in 19th-century America. MOMA, the Tate, the Miami Art Museum, and the British Museum of Natural History, among... [ view full abstract ]

Mark Dion (b. 1951) is a visual and conceptual artist especially relevant to scholars of the culture of nature in 19th-century America. MOMA, the Tate, the Miami Art Museum, and the British Museum of Natural History, among others, have hosted major exhibits of his work. His installations — which often root themselves in the practices of the natural history museum — are part Charles Wilson Peale, part P.T. Barnum, part Melvillian cetology. In this work, Dion takes the display practices and epistemological categories of the 19^th-century museum to present objects he has discovered castoff in the museum archives or in his own archeological digs on museum grounds. The cabinets of curiosity that result are disturbing and wonderful, simultaneously. Through a kind of Brechtian alienation, these installations make visible the connections between our modern frames for conceptualizing the natural world, the ways those frames have been historically circulated by the museum and other institutions (including the university), and the links between those frames and our current dire environmental predicament. But, in addition to bringing to light Dion’s genealogical critique, I’m also interested in bringing into view the work of affect in his installations, which stir intense curiosity and nostalgia, senses of immersion and melancholia, an awareness of non-human frames of time. It seems it is here, in its affective realms, that Dion’s work does the most work. This C19 presentation focuses primarily on Dion’s creations in connection with the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a site particularly germane to 19^th-century literary and cultural studies.