Rhapsodies on the theme of a natural history museum. Mark Dion’s dilettante play with natural history exhibitions

• Main Author: Tańczuk, Renata
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Polish
• Published: Narodowe Centrum Kultury 2021
• Subjects: museo; art; Dion; Ursus maritimus
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.26112/kw.2021.113.02; https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/1944328.pdf; https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/1944328

Recognised as archives documenting natural research and human impact on nature and biodiversity loss, natural history museums prompt questions about how to explore, interpret and put their collections in context so as to provoke a discussion on the consequences of constructed concepts of nature, pressing ecological issues, and ethical obligations towards nonhuman beings and the next generation. Answers to these questions may be found in the analysis of selected works by Mark Dion who uses museum instruments and collections not so much to criticise the museum itself but to transform it into an agora. The author studies the artist’s works that refer to cabinets of curiosities. She argues that Dion’s Wunderkammer are visual quotations derived from their 16th and 17th century prototypes. Put in a new context, the quotations eliminate boundaries between words and images, theory and practice, art and science, nature and culture. The said quotations of cabinets of curiosities are of preposterous nature. Dion’s ‘mobile dioramas’ and his Ursus Maritimus project (1992–2002) are in turn recognised as subversive works where natural history museum instruments are used to unveil the institutional framework responsible for our seeing of nature and problems of the Anthropocene such as biodiversity loss.