Wunderkammers, zebra finches, hunting standards, and a false unicorn horn. If you're the type who can't help peeking into the cabinet of curiosities there's a lot for you at Mark Dion's new show at the Whitechapel Gallery. If, however, you're someone who seeks some kind of narrative to your art viewing experience you may come away disappointed. Or at least confused.
Like anything in life, it's what you make of it and I found it to be a diverting hour or so spent amongst objects both quotidian and quirky. The raison d'etre for Dion's work is his wish to "explore natural history and its institutions including the language and imagery used to identify species, the uncanny quality of natural history museum displays, and nature in popular culture".
He's as much inspired by cinema as he his art movements like Surrealism and Minimalism, and he's just as likely to take from the foreshore of the Thames as he is the rainforests of Guyana. Which all makes for a very mixed bag show. A show that starts with sheds.
The Wonder Workshop (2016)
Sheds of a sort anyway. A couple of friends of mine used to regularly complain that the biggest cliche of contemporary art was the shed. They genuinely felt they never needed to see another shed in a gallery ever again. Sheds exploding, sheds being turned into boats, sheds just being sheds. 'Shed the shed' they said (or should've). Another friend of mine claims to love very few things more than rusty corrugated iron. Who knew sheds could be so polarising?
Of course, strictly speaking, these aren't sheds. They're 'hides', places where twitchers secrete themselves away for hours on end in the hope of catching sight of a gaggle of barnacle geese, a wedge of whooper swans, a colony of avocets, or even a raft of auks. Who gets the job of coining collective nouns for animals? It sounds both cushy and fun. If it pays too I want it.
The Hunting Blinds and Hunting Standards (2005-2008)
The Hunting Blinds and Hunting Standards (2005-2008)
There are four hides and they take up the bulk of the largest room in the entire show. They're all made of different materials (it's as if there were four little pigs trying to escape some huffy puffy wolf). Some of them look like cold war watchtowers but they've all been given names.
Our corrugated iron friend is The Glutton. Below it is The Librarian. It's the only one us visitors were allowed to enter and was kitted out with books, binoculars, and flasks. It looked pretty comfy. Below is the fancily named Dandy-Rococo and The Ruin lives up to its name, lying in a collapsed heap on the floor. Looks like the wolf got to that one.
Behind them on a nearby wall are six hunting standards featuring a hare, a deer, a gun, bears, and some kind of fierce looking hog. I didn't spend long looking at them.
The Hunting Blinds and Hunting Standards (2005-2008)
The Hunting Blinds and Hunting Standards (2005-2008)
The Hunting Blinds and Hunting Standards (2005-2008)
Costume Bureau (2006)
I'd been distracted by these four characters. Four different kinds of naturalists. From right to left we've got On Tropical Nature (Orinoco River Basin, Venezuela), The Great Munich Bug Hunt, Tate Thames Dig (more later), and Roundup (Chicago).
Like the hunting standards they added to the overall experience but were dwarfed both by the sheds and the room's centrepiece:- an aviary, The Library for the Birds of London, in which the visitor can enter and stand amongst eleven pairs of zebra finches (a charm, a trembing, or a trimming for the collective noun fans) as they fly around or perch upon branches. There are books on ornithology and artworks relating to birds piled or peppered around the cage and a nearby sign assured this conscientious vegetarian visitor that the finches were being taken care of.
Dion's created these aviaries for over twenty years now, from Antwerp to Paris to New York, and the reason he does so is to try to get us to think about the way we interact with the animals that are around us every day, all the time. As it's in London perhaps pigeons (or even parakeets) may've been more appropriate. But then think of all the shit the poor gallery staff would have to clean up. Euw!
The Library for the Birds of London (2018)
The Library for the Birds of London (2018)
The Library for the Birds of London (2018)
The Library for the Birds of London (2018)
I enjoyed my time caged up with the birds but I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to do while I was there. I took some photos (of course) and then tried to look serious. It seems unlikely a zebra finch would understand the concept of embarrassment or even be able to empathise with each other let alone a visiting creature more than a hundred time their size so when I left I failed to bid a fair adieu. We may be in this cage together, we may all be alive, but what I realised was we don't share all that much really. They don't care about me.
A flight of stairs takes you to the more sedate Naturalist's Study (home of the fake unicorn horn). Specially designed wallpaper (animal silhouettes), thick carpets, comfy chairs, yet more tomes both ornithological and artistic in nature, drawings of evolutionary trees that have been spruced up to include the names of influential figures in naturalism like Alfred Russel Wallace and William Beebe.
The unicorn horn is included next to a coral tree to show how the real world and the world of the imaginary can, over time, become intertwined. I sat and studiously read for a while before moving on to the Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy.
The Naturalist's Study (2018)
The Naturalist's Study (2018)
Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy (2005)
You're not allowed in so, like a kid at a candy store, me and my fellow gallery visitors poked our noses up at the glass window and took in the tables, chairs, bookshelves, and assorted objects but to no great avail. It was designed to "make you smile, laugh, shake your head in shock and condemnation, or gasp" but I must confess I did none of those things.
I just moved on. The show was all very interesting but I'd have probably benefitted from a personal tour by someone more au courant on affairs curatorial and ornithological than I. It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying it. I was. I just didn't really understand it. I'm a bit thick like that sometimes.
Tate Thames Dig (1999)
Tate Thames Dig (1999)
Tate Thames Dig (1999)
The Tate Thames Dig was something I could understand. I've written before about how I'd quite like to go mudlarking on the Thames and I've written often about both London and its primary river so to see the spoils of an archaeological dig on the foreshore at Millbank was most pleasing.
Dion and a team of teenage assistants dug no deeper than six inches down in the sand and yet found an astonishing array of material that told a story of London's history and our throwaway culture. A great deal of plastic (Lucozade bottles and the like), some knives, some bullets, a few outdated mobile phones and laptops, clay pipes, oyster shells commemorating 17c visits to local brothels and bear pits. Clearly a socialist in his naturalism Dion has accorded each object equal status. Just as every person has a story to tell so does every object.
One has to pass through a curtain into the final darkened room where sits 2015's The Wonder Workshop. Dion was commissioned to create a work for a Venetian palazzo and these wunderkammers were the result. The 'ghosts' of animals and objects that are now either extinct or at least obsolescent have been coated with a luminous paint to create a spectacle for the eyes as much as a question for the mind.
In making me think about conservation and curatorial practices, Dion's show had had a minor effect. In giving me a treat for the eyes it had been more successful. There'd been a minor dip in the middle but, on the whole, I'd come away informed, entertained, and ready to learn more. That was enough for a one hour trip and I'm curious to see more of his work in the future.
His Wikipedia page also tells me that he shares a birthday with me. Us August 28 folk have to stick together.
The Wonder Workshop (2016)
The Wonder Workshop (2016)
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