TY - JOUR
AU - Elstob, Isobel
AB - 1. INTRODUCTION A number of scholarly works published in the past twenty years have examined how the Victorians have been creatively replayed, revisited, or re-presented across media such as literature, film, and performance.1 The few accounts that have been made of visual artists’ approaches towards the period generally focus on the redeployment of Victorian tropes and motifs, such as stylized decorative forms, heavily patterned materials, and neo-Gothic ornamentation, presenting these as the key leitmotifs of postmodern or neo-Victorian visualizations of Victorian culture.2 But the ways in which contemporary artists exploit common historical understandings of the Victorian period have not yet been critically analysed. Indeed, the creative implications of historiographical approaches to remembrance and representation are almost exclusively discussed in relation to the work of artists such as Jeff Wall and Anselm Kiefer, who visualize the traces of large-scale narratives such as war and genocide.3 Of course, the visual memorialization of man-made horrors is crucial to cultural progression and healing, and its importance cannot be overstated. But these subjects rightly hold prime position in popular history – in textbooks, documentaries, classrooms, and museums – and could not, therefore, be described as marginalized elements of our shared past. While artists such as Judy Chicago and Fred Wilson interrogate the marginalizing impact of race and gender on historical interpretation and are discussed in that light, their works make very direct, often didactic, interventions in historical storytelling: Chicago throws a ‘dinner party’ for forgotten female heroes and Wilson critiques the museum’s role in historiographical interpretation by recurating exhibited objects.4 In this essay, I will show how a number of works by the American artist Mark Dion (b.1961) are informed by distinctively postmodern discourses surrounding historiographical representation. In this way, I will present an analysis of Dion’s practice that moves beyond existing scholarly focus on his museum works and argues that his interest in objectivity, materiality, and institutionalization also characterizes what I term his ‘history works’, for which the historical remembrance of overlooked Victorian cultures and events is the primary subject matter. In order to do so, I will argue that these works can best be understood as examples of (visual) historiographic metafiction – a concept adapted from literary theory to denote a conscious and creative querying of historiographical representation. Dion’s visual representations of Victorian histories will thus be seen to correspond to broader late twentieth-century artistic tendencies towards institutional critique, but as a critique of the institution of history itself that analyses the limitations and strengths of the discipline’s forms and methods. In this way, Dion’s approach to representation reflects the potential, and the problematics, of postmodernist critiques of historiography which emerged in the 1960s and climaxed in the 1980s.5 As Georg G. Iggers explains, this ‘line of argumentation […] has been steadily pursued in French and American literary theory since [Roland] Barthes’s formulation of it in the 1960s’ when ‘Barthes denied the distinction between history and literature and with it that between fact and fiction which has generally been accepted in Western thought since Aristotle formulated it in his Poetics’.6 One of the key results of these interventions is the foci of historical investigation. Iggers argues that postmodernism’s reflection of ‘a society and culture in transformation in which old certainties regarding industrial growth, rising economic expectations, and traditional middle-class norms’ means that ‘history has again assumed a human face as new attention has been given to individuals, this time not to the high and mighty but to common folks’.7 As this essay will demonstrate, Dion’s election to re-present anonymous, female, and/or marginalized characters from the histories of Victorian science echoes this shift in history’s subject matter. And the means through which he does so speak to the creative possibilities galvanized by the discipline’s introspection and reinterpretation in the late twentieth century. 2. THE ANONYMOUS NATURALIST The 1990s saw a wealth of publications seeking to redraw the relevance of women – both particular and general – to the histories of science. Books such as Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (1997), edited by Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, and Gates’s Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Natural World (1999) re-evaluated the contribution that women have made to scientific developments and discovery. Indeed, Gates describes Kindred Nature as ‘neither a challenge-response historical study nor a comparative gender study but, rather, a feminist cultural study intended to recuperate and spotlight women’s contributions in an effort to revise history’.8 This historiographical retrieval of ‘silenced voices from the past’ provides the subject matter for Dion’s 1998–99 photographic series, The Ladies’ Field Club of York, which he created in collaboration with artist J. Morgan Puett.9 Displayed in a wooden train carriage from the 1890s (the ladies’ mobile laboratory) at the National Railway Museum in York, the photographs were produced through the gelatin silver print method introduced to Britain in the 1880s. Each portrait photograph centres on a single female, costumed in high-Victorian dress and surrounded by the paraphernalia of her particular natural history pursuit (such as catching nets and binoculars), as well as by the specimens of its study (such as fossils, seashells, and flowers).10Lepidoptery, Mrs. E. N. Todter (Figure 1), for example, wears sumptuous materials: her dress is decorated with large bows and its hemline is heavily frilled. On her head, Mrs. Todter wears an elaborate hat garlanded with feathers, and her gloved hand hold up a catching net. The Ladies’ Field Club of York thus visually memorializes ‘forgotten’ Victorian female naturalists in an apparently straightforward and relatively didactic fashion. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett, Mrs. E. N. Todter, Lepidoptery from suite of 8 photographs, hand-painted text, mounted on photographic board, each: 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett, Mrs. E. N. Todter, Lepidoptery from suite of 8 photographs, hand-painted text, mounted on photographic board, each: 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. But two further considerations bear on the reading of these works. The first is the context in which the images were originally displayed. The National Railway Museum in York is a vast space that exhibits locomotives and carriages, graphic posters, photographs, and engineering plans. Speaking in 2012, Dion asserted that for him this museum presents a highly gendered slice of British history: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been to what felt like a more male museum. There was really something about that that seems to exclude the discussion of women’.11 Indeed, the artist points out that one of the only ways that audiences commonly interact with ‘femaleness’ in science museums is via analogies between woman and nature (the example he gives is found in Vienna’s natural history museum, where lead metal is visualized as a ‘poisonous hag’).12 This presumed correlation between women and the natural world was, of course, one of the greatest challenges that female naturalists faced in the latter half of the nineteenth century; their supposed closeness to nature often being assumed to lessen their ability to maintain the desired epistemological (and psychological) distance between observer and object.13 Through the exhibition of The Ladies’ Field Club of York in the Railway Museum, Dion and Puett thus not only insert the natural world into the industrial realm but also seek to install representations of female expertise into a domain allegedly characterized by male industry and inventiveness. The second factor that informs this series’ engagement with how history might be understood in ‘the present’ is the artists’ approach to storytelling. Each figure is given a specific identity: Mrs. Herbert Fowler, Miss Amelia West, Mrs. E. N. Todter; and each name is inscribed below her disciplinary specialism: anthropology, botany, lepidoptery. This is, then, a contemporary representation of a factual – but often overlooked – feature of Victorian history: women’s broad participation in natural history throughout the period. When this series was exhibited at the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York in 2002, its creative approach to storytelling was made even more emphatic: the invitation to the exhibition was reminiscent of a nineteenth-century advertisement for a local lecture or travelling display (Figure 2). The work’s strong narrative element was also accentuated by increasing the number of objects displayed beside the photographs: objects used and/or made by the imaginary ‘ladies of the field club’, including catching nets, framed butterflies, taxidermy in glass cases, and a porcelain phrenology head (Figure 3). This splicing of media, including constructed images, recontextualized objects, and fictive texts, illustrates an important element of Dion’s approach to visualizing the historical past: one that exploits the potential interdependency between material (‘factual’) and imaginary (‘fictional’) representation using what I would argue to be an intertextual weaving of their forms. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Invitation for Reception of The Ladies' Field Club of York exhibition by Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett at the Christine Burgin Gallery, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and the Christine Burgin Gallery, New York. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Invitation for Reception of The Ladies' Field Club of York exhibition by Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett at the Christine Burgin Gallery, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and the Christine Burgin Gallery, New York. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Installation views of The Ladies’ Field Club of York exhibition at the Christine Burgin Gallery, New York, 2002. Courtesy of the Christine Burgin Gallery. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Installation views of The Ladies’ Field Club of York exhibition at the Christine Burgin Gallery, New York, 2002. Courtesy of the Christine Burgin Gallery. Heidi Hansson applies Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’ as ‘a mosaic of quotations [through which] any text is the absorption and transformation of another’,14 to her analysis of historiographic metafiction (which she terms ‘postmodern romances’). Hansson posits ‘postmodern intertextuality [to be] a formal manifestation of both a desire to close the gap between the past and present of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context’.15 Like the postmodern romances of Hansson’s analysis, The Ladies’ Field Club of York also rewrites the past in a new context through the deployment of diverse forms of mediation. The sepia tonality, costume dress, and staged composition of the images encourage a nostalgic sense of viewership (if we take nostalgia to invoke innocence and time lost),16 while the inclusion of objects in the 2002 exhibition communicates a material evocation of Victorian culture. But the artists’ choice of models for the photographs installs the most explicit, if in many ways the most disguised, intertextuality between two distinct temporalities. All the figures posed as amateur Victorian naturalists are, in fact, important figures from the contemporary British art world, including museum curators, gallery directors, and publishers.17 In her essay on Dion’s earlier work Selections from the Endangered Species List, or Commander McBrag (1989), Saskia Bos argues that ‘it is as if Dion uses time curves to create his work: following the activities of very different people in different centuries, he crosses those curves with one another, intertwining different time periods in a seamless whole’.18The Ladies’ Field Club of York also operates through the intertemporal intertwining that Bos describes, and, in addition, provides these imaginary Victorian naturalists with contemporary ‘models of success’ to inhabit. Furthermore, by exploiting the interpretative potential of various texts (images, objects, costume), The Ladies’ Field Club of York echoes historiographic metafiction’s querying of how, and why, the realities of the historical past might be represented and rewritten in ‘the present’. 3. THE USURPED NATURALIST The installation of objects at the Christine Burgin Gallery exhibition is one of Dion’s most common tactics of representing science and its histories. He often includes pinned specimens, taxidermied mammals, and ‘tools of the trade’, such as magnifying glasses and microscopes, in his installations. Of course, the function of a work like Theatrum Mundi: Armarium (2001) differs vastly from that of, say, The Curiosity Shop (2005), despite their common inclusion of found objects and images from the histories of science. Nevertheless, for these installations Dion’s focus is the nature of display itself, with the form that such display takes – whether that be a visual revival of Wunderkammer or a material re-creation of Victorian collecting – constituting the central subject matter. This devotion to materiality and the visual corresponds to the ways in which Victorian culture is often addressed by artists today. In the catalogue for the exhibition Victoriana, its curator Sonia Solicari writes: ‘[f]rom glass domes to taxidermy, Staffordshire dogs to flock wallpaper, the past decade has marked the return of the decorative’.19 And, of course, there has been a remarkable revival of Victorian styles, forms, and materials in contemporary art practices, from Polly Morgan’s taxidermy to Matt Collishaw’s use of the zoetrope and Tessa Farmer’s fantastical use of entomological specimens.20 But in the 1990s Dion began to employ objects as more than material citations of Victorian culture; assigning to them instead an evocative function designed to stimulate the viewer’s historical imagination. One of the earliest examples of this approach in Dion’s oeuvre is The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace (1994) (Figure 4), which visualizes a moment in the history of Victorian science via a three-dimensional tableau. Centring on a well-known episode from Wallace’s life, Dion re-creates the naturalist’s Malay Archipelago campsite: a hammock is strung up between two trees overhung by a large mosquito net and surrounded by plants, packing chests, catching nets, an extinguished campfire, maps, and charts.21 This is, then, a seemingly authentic re-creation of the specific moment in time at which Wallace conceives the theory of evolution by natural selection while experiencing a malarial ‘delirium’. But Dion’s use of objects in this mise-en-scène goes further than the practicalities of visual re-creation, and exploits Victorian attitudes towards objecthood itself. For the Victorian collector, the butterfly, rock, or mammalian specimen was not prized for its scientific value alone, but also for its status as an object: a material and aesthetic thing. As Lynn Barber shows, the Victorian passion for nature’s objects meant that ‘by the middle of the [nineteenth] century there was hardly a middle-class drawing room in the country that did not contain an aquarium, a fern case, a butterfly cabinet, a seaweed album, [or] shell collection’, and this devotion to objecthood is widely reflected in the work of the most popular natural history writers of the period.22 But for natural historians, this materialism extended even beyond fervour for the specimen, and into a collective dedication to the paraphernalia of natural history itself. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Mark Dion, The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace, mixed media installation, originally exhibited at Galerie Metropol, Vienna, 1994. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Mark Dion, The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace, mixed media installation, originally exhibited at Galerie Metropol, Vienna, 1994. Courtesy of the artist. There is evidence that Victorians themselves were aware of this tendency. In his popular novel The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863,) Charles Kingsley wryly parodies the naturalist’s propensity towards collecting the stuff of collecting: [The naturalist] had a great pair of spectacles on his nose, and a butterfly-net in one hand, and a geological hammer in the other; and was hung all over with pockets, full of collecting boxes, bottles, microscopes, telescopes, barometers, ordnance maps, scalpels, forceps, photographic apparatus, and all other tackle for finding out everything about everything, and a little more too.23 Signifying the practice of Victorian natural history through its tools and instruments is therefore an established and well-worn representational device, and Dion repeats this approach in The Delirium, representing the culture of science through surrogates for scientific practice. However, while this use of butterfly nets, animal skins, and wooden chests does correspond with the aesthetic shorthand of neo-Victorianism as Solicari describes it, The Delirium expands on this trend in its focus on historiographical interpretation. Like The Ladies’ Field Club, The Delirium’s central concern is historiographical narrative and the question of whom that narrative has traditionally favoured. But unlike The Ladies’ Field Club of York, the installation does not provide the forgotten or the nameless with a story and identity, but instead offers a space in which a specific Victorian life might be remembered visually. Among the campsite’s props lies the figure of Wallace himself; not as a man nor as a mannequin, but as a bespectacled taxidermy fox (Figure 5). As Dion explains, his use of ‘the fox’ is metaphorical and inspired by Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, which celebrated the amateur polymath’s broad vision (the fox) over the professional specialist’s narrow view (the hedgehog).24 The artist’s decision to represent Wallace in this way is, then, a loaded and layered one: a postmodern citation of a modernist homage to Victorian amateurism and its contribution towards discovery. And while the story of Wallace’s part in the conceptualization of the theory of evolution by natural selection is well known to historians of the period, it is far less well less known to the general public, which is the audience for which Dion’s work is created. The Delirium was originally exhibited at the Galerie Metropol – a contemporary art gallery in Vienna – and its viewers would not have been conversant with this particular episode in the British history of science. In this setting, Wallace is not so much being re-presented by Dion as he is being introduced for the first time, both as a Victorian whose life is significant to histories of discovery, but also as a figure whose historiographical weight has been diminished by complex circumstances both ‘then and now’. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace, mixed media installation, 1994 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace, mixed media installation, 1994 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. In addition to the imitation campsite and Wallace’s metaphorical representative, the tableau includes an aural dimension: a looped recording emits a collection of soundbites from original documents, such as extracts from theoretical texts written by Wallace. Included, too, are visual pointers towards likely influences on his work, such as the copy of Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) lying near an unfinished letter addressed to Charles Darwin. Of particular note, however, is the playing of passages from letters that Wallace wrote while in the jungles of the Archipelago in 1858. These aural fragments reveal the frustrations and fears of a man who felt severed from his home, his profession, and even his potential: Why did I come to such a place? To what end? What is, in point of fact, a naturalist’s investigation? […] In London my more ambitious and astute colleagues climb the ladders to prestigious positions in various museums and societies, while I lie ill in the jungles of Malaysia.25 The inclusion of quotations such as this suggests that Wallace’s need to work abroad as a specimen collector is an important factor in his relative erasure from the dominant narrative of nineteenth-century science. But at the same time, Dion celebrates Wallace’s marginalization as an ‘amateur’ by electing to represent his identity as a fox. For the artist, it is this enforced amateurism – resulting in a broad vision informed by broad experience – that led Wallace, in a state of ‘delirium’, to conceive a theory that took Darwin thirty years to refine. The forms through which Dion depicts this version of the story are both various and divergent: the concrete is combined with the metaphorical, and historical documents are combined with imaginative storytelling. This amalgamation of forms aligns Dion’s approach to historical representation with mid-twentieth-century postructuralist debates and their creative results. In 1967, Barthes argued that ‘in the historical discourse of our civilization, the process of signification is always aimed at “filling out” the meaning of History’, leading him to conclude that historical discourse is in its essence a form of ideological elaboration, or to put it more precisely, an imaginary elaboration, if we take the imaginary to be the language through which the utterer of a discourse (a purely linguistic entity) ‘fills out’ the place of subject of the utterance (a psychological or ideological entity).26 This begs the question as to what form the ‘imaginary elaboration’ of historical discourse might take or its ‘utterance’ might be made. The literary response to this question came with the emergence of historiographic metafiction in the late twentieth century, famously theorized by Linda Hutcheon in 1988. These novels, by authors such as A. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, and Graham Swift, operate on the principle that ‘both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems’ and that both therefore ‘derive their major claim to truth from that identity’.27 I would argue that Dion’s history works, such as The Ladies’ Field Club and The Delirium, also take up Barthes’s prompt and, like literary historiographic metafiction, operate via self-conscious combinations of imagined and recorded events, characters and contexts. Part of the point of such an approach to representation is simultaneously to inform and to destabilize the reader’s (or viewer’s) understanding of both creative and historical narrativity. Seen in this light, Dion’s choice of Wallace as the subject matter for his installation is attuned to the postmodern principle that history is both elective and subjective. There is a strong sense in The Delirium that, for Dion, Wallace’s disadvantages, born from his working-class origins, correlate directly with his subsequent historiographical usurpation. What this work does not allow for is the subsequent professional success that Wallace experienced in his life, although Dion’s presentation is partly vindicated by Wallace’s eventual decline into poverty.28 More importantly for our purposes here, however, is how the artist has represented this specific historical moment. The forms through which the historical subject matter is threaded – historical records, personal documents, metaphorical representation, and material reconstruction – draw the viewer’s attention towards the artist’s position as sole author of an historical retelling. In this way, The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace is a visual response to the poststructuralist conceit that ‘the content of the discourse consists as much of its form as it does of whatever information might be extracted from a reading of it’.29 Wallace’s conceptualization of the theory of evolution by natural selection represents the subject content in this case; but it is the naturalist’s perceived erasure from common historical accounts that is most significantly being drawn through Dion’s formal methodology. 4. THE FIELD NATURALIST Since the late 1960s, a number of artists have worked according to a tendency theorized as institutional critique. Defined by a ‘methodology of critically self-reflexive site-specificity’, the foci of institutional critique are, most often, the physical and social sites in relation to which visual art operates.30 These include the physical and architectural structures of museums and galleries, as well as more fluid structures such as funding channels, political affiliations, and curatorial selection processes. Dion has been closely associated with institutional critique throughout his career. Curatorial works such as Cabinets of Curiosities at Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota (2001), The Bureau for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy at Manchester University (2005), and Oceanomania: Souvenirs of the Mysterious Seas, from the Expedition to the Aquarium at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco (2011) return display to its pre-Enlightenment origins. Although these works are each distinctive in both their conceptualization and results, they all seek to interrogate epistemologies through the curatorial re-presentation of objects. For Dion, the museum has thus been an ideal site for such critiques to take place; it is, after all, where the world’s material culture is defined by its classification, labelling, and exhibition. However, one of the earliest strategies employed by artists interested in engaging with institutional frameworks was the use of sites beyond the museum. In the 1970s, this approach was informed by a desire to ‘de-materialize’, and thus de-commodify, art production. By transferring the processes of art-making from inside the studio out into the natural world, artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer effectively confiscated institutions’ (museums’, galleries’, markets’) ability to lay claim to any tangible, or saleable, art object. But in many ways it was what happened to such works after their creation that truly distanced their purpose from traditional institutional expectations. Land works become part of the landscape into which they are embedded, most often evolving according to natural elements such as wind, rain, and tidal flow. But for Dion’s (off)site-specific works, it is the process of making itself that is most important, aligning his practice to James Meyer’s concept of the ‘functional site’.31 Meyer describes the functional site as one that ‘may or may not incorporate a physical place’: rather, it is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them. It is an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things.32 Miwon Kwon adds to this definition when she asserts that the functional site ‘is […] structured (inter)textually rather than spatially, and its model is not a map but an itinerary […] a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist’.33 While both The Ladies’ Field Club and The Delirium operate through intertextual structures, neither work depends upon the artist’s own actions (or ‘passage’) for its narrativity. For these works, the narrative structure, or element of storytelling, is relatively conventionally drawn – through costume, objects, and composition – and the final representations are (formally) static. But a number of Dion’s works have been ‘articulated by the passage of the artist’, which both problematizes and informs their approach towards narrativity and representation. For many of his (off)site-specific works, Dion appears to affect the role of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century field naturalist, travelling through, collecting from, or recording the objects and environments that he traverses: from the banks of the River Thames (Tate Thames Dig, 1999) to the coastline of northern Florida (Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered, 2008). While each of these works cites a particular historical practice or episode, whether the act of shorecombing or the journeys taken by a specific individual, they can also comfortably be categorized as celebratory: paying homage to the activities of Victorian beachcombers or to the adventures of American naturalist William Bartram. But in the early 1990s Dion conceived a process that not only evaluated historical narratives of scientific discovery but also sought to expose their relationship to institutional interpretations of the natural world. On Tropical Nature (1991) references two very different eras of scientific exploration. Isolating himself in the rainforest of the Orinoco Basin, Venezuela, Dion collected specimens from his surrounding environment, such as bark and soil samples, insects, rocks, and vials of river water. This was, of course, the region of South America that gentleman naturalist Alexander von Humboldt explored from 1799 to 1804, ultimately mapping over 1700 miles of the Orinoco River. And it was partly on reading Humboldt’s account of this journey – Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804 (1819–1829) – that a young Wallace was inspired to travel to the same region, paying his way as a professional specimen collector with his friend and fellow naturalist Henry Walter Bates.34 The collecting phase of On Tropical Nature was documented by photographer Bob Braine, who captioned his images with descriptive texts such as ‘In the field, Orinoco River basin, outside Caracas, Venezuela’.35 The subsequent display phase of the work incorporated these images into an exhibition at the Sala Mendoza gallery in Caracas of the specimens that Dion had collected. Having assured the gallery staff that the weekly specimen delivery crates would be accompanied by curatorial instructions, the crates’ arrival without this written guidance obliged the curators to take responsibility for the final arrangement and exhibition of material. In the event, the specimens intermittently dispatched by Dion from the rainforest were arranged, grouped, and displayed by colour, size, shape, and/or material in the final exhibition of the work (Figure 6). On Tropical Nature thus operates across a number of physical and discursive sites. As Kwon explains in her analysis of the work, these include the sites of collection and display, as well as the sites of curation and ‘the discourse concerning cultural representations of nature and the global environmental crisis’.36 This explanation supports the argument that a work like On Tropical Nature is dependent upon the ‘passage of the artist’ for the construction of an intertextual narrative: each site within which the objects and artist exist informs the other(s). But the specificity of the Orinoco Basin alludes to another, historically located, site: the actions and achievements of Victorian specimen collectors. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, Arte Joven en Nueva York, exhibited at the Sala Mendoza, Caracas, 1991. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, Arte Joven en Nueva York, exhibited at the Sala Mendoza, Caracas, 1991. Courtesy of the artist. The majority of specimen collectors in this period depended upon payment for their services from private individuals, museums, and universities based in Europe and/or North America. Travelling the world to source specimens for sale, these collectors were inevitably severed from the scientific community for whom they worked, which invariably affected their ability to rise swiftly in the ranks of their chosen discipline(s). As we have seen from Wallace’s correspondence written a decade later, his 1848 trip to Venezuela initiated a career that he felt was profoundly hampered by his isolation from the ‘prestigious positions in various museums and societies’. But this geographical distance between specimen collector and specimen recipient had another historical consequence: the inevitable difference between how the same materials might be understood in two separate places of examination. By neglecting to include curatorial instructions for the gallery staff, Dion ensured that the specimens’ classification was carried out hundreds of miles away from the site of their collection. Detached from the rainforest, the gallery workers grouped the objects together according to their type and physical qualities (colour, size, texture, etc.). Braine’s photographs of Dion’s process during the three-week field excursion also function to emphasize the differences between these two sites of natural history practice. The artist is pictured in the act of gathering specimens from grasses on hillsides that lie among the clouds – an image that vividly contrasts with the orderly layout of petri dishes, vials, and jars that compose the final display in Caracas. But the artist’s replicative approach highlights something else too: the loss of the found objects’ particularity in favour of their representative potential. Dion explored the conversion of nature’s objects into culture’s specimens again in the following year in his (off)site-specific work Nos Sciences Naturelles – Observations of Neotropical Invertebrates (1992), which was made in collaboration with the Museum of Natural History in Fribourg. Isolated in the Brazilian rainforest, the artist gathered the taxonomical names of species he observed, which he faxed to his collaborators in Switzerland. On receipt of the faxes the museum staff sourced as many matching specimens as possible from their collections, which curators then displayed in glass vitrines alongside the received faxes. The process of Nos Sciences Naturelles was thus intended to emphasize the unnaturalness of taxonomic classification, as Dion’s observations are arbitrarily translated through a coded system of generalized textual surrogacy. To put it another way, the work enacts a literalizing of the human tendency to think that ‘if you’ve seen one Great Auk, you’ve seen them all’, underlining the loss of particularity in favour of generality upon which modern science depends.37 This approach may give the impression of possessing a distinctly post-Foucaultian character. And, of course, natural history’s devotion to the line and surface of the ‘thing’ meant that Linnaean descriptive approaches held a particularly crucial place for its practice well into the mid-nineteenth century. But while taxonomy was celebrated in this period for its ability to ‘permit the visibility of the animal or plant to pass over in its entirety into the discourse that receives it’, there are also a number of examples of Victorian naturalists making it the subject of an interrogative critique.38 From the curious case of Charles Waterton’s Nondescript (1824) – a fictitious specimen ‘found’ in the jungles of South America – to Kingsley’s warning that ‘to squabble jealously for the right of having it named after you, and of being recorded in the Transactions of I-know-not-what Society as its first discoverer’ is ‘morally dangerous’, many nineteenth-century commentators critiqued the ethical implications of taxonomical practices.39On Tropical Nature and Nos Sciences Naturelles also highlight the epistemological and ethical consequences of historical modes of specimen collecting, and pointedly underline taxonomy’s status as an artificial discipline fraught with problematic interactions between content, form, and representation. 5. THE ARTIST–HISTORIAN Dion has been thought of as an artist–scientist throughout his career. The relevance of science to his practice is undeniable, and this essay has touched on only a few of his works from the past twenty years. But what critics have uniformly overlooked is the equally important role that the discipline of history has played in his oeuvre. Of course, numerous writers have identified his interest in the histories of science, its characters, and its practices. What has not been noted, however, is the interrogation that his works perform of the discipline of history itself: re-presenting marginalized narratives from scientific histories through the splicing together of diverse forms of mediation including historical documents, and historically located objects, practices, and locations. One of the most important ways that Dion evokes the nineteenth century is by installing objects, materials, and media capable of conjuring ‘Victorian culture’ in the mind’s eye of his viewers. His use of gelatin silver print and costume for The Ladies’ Field Club, taxidermy and props for The Delirium, and glass vitrines and display cabinets for On Tropical Nature and Nos Sciences Naturelles allies his practice to recent artistic interest in Victorian methods, tropes, and motifs. But Dion’s deployment of visual citations for an extinguished culture is neither experimental nor cynical; in other words, he is not seeing ‘what happens’ nor is he mocking ‘what happened’. Dion’s works operate as interrogative forms of critique, aligning his approach to historiographic metafiction’s creative exposition of the postmodernist conceit of history ‘being rethought – as a human construct’.40 While it might be easy to accuse Dion of performing his own fetishization of how the Victorians ‘look’ to us, this probing function of what I have collated as his history works elevates their purpose well beyond pastiche. These works function not on the surface but on the very mechanics of history’s construction by drawing their viewers’ attention to the difficulties that the discipline is confronted with in its most important task: to bring an unremembered past to life.41 Dion has often described how vital it is for him to retain an ‘amateur’ status in relation to the scientific practices with and on which he works. Speaking in 2012, he explained that this ensures that his view remains that of an ‘outsider’ to the discourses he deploys: It’s important to be this amateur and always be struggling […] To always put myself in this position of someone who doesn’t really know, of someone who is punching above their weight. It’s not about mastery, it’s really about the difficulty of trying to understand things from the [amateur] perspective.42 While Dion made these remarks in response to a question about his attitude towards science, they also hold true for his approach to history. Identifying with amateur Victorian naturalists has led Dion to focus on the concept of marginalization in his work. Specifically, as we have seen, he homes in on the notion that history is a fallible discipline (just as science is) that elects its content and the forms through which it is narrated. Dion’s museum works are largely understood to return scientific display to its pre-Enlightenment forms: reviving and extolling subjectivity, materiality, and the visual in order to exhibit knowledge. In many ways, his history works can, too, be seen to make anachronistic use of pre-Modern approaches to a particular discipline; returning history to its pre-Rankean origins, but in the analytic and self-conscious manner that a postmodern context invites. The works examined in this essay show Dion invoking a variety of historical narratives from Victorian culture in different ways. From image-based memorialization to process-led reproductions of Victorian natural history practice, he has exploited a range of methods to expose and evaluate how we think about the past. I have argued here that these works operate through visual forms of intertextuality, producing a new kind of historiographic metafiction: one that is visual, aural, and site-based in its construction. Importantly, too, the intertextuality that informs such works is both concrete and discursive: exploiting the representational potential of objects, images, and media, as well as the signification of historical documents, texts, and practices. This approach allows viewers to engage with complex ideas surrounding history’s construction, representation, and understanding, but also to learn about elements of our past that may be unfamiliar. For this reason, in the end, despite their strongly analytic tone, I would argue that Dion’s history works function most significantly as visual celebrations of Victorian culture, its relevance, and its retelling in ‘the present’. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Footnotes 1. See Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. by John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts, ed. by Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016). Commonly discussed works include John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), television series such as Fingersmith (2005–) based on the novel by Sarah Waters of the same name (2002), and film productions such as Dreamchild, written by Dennis Potter and directed by Gavin Millar (1985). 2. On this trend, see Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, ‘Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism’, Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011), 1–23; Sonia Solicari, ‘Neo-Victorian Things: A Scrapbook’, in Victoriana: A Miscellany, ed. by Solicari, exhib. cat. (London: Guildhall Art Gallery, 2013); and ‘Introduction’, in Secret Victorians: Contemporary Artists and a 19th-Century Vision, ed. by Melissa E. Feldman and Ingrid Schaffner, exhib. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, 1999). 3. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the artists who work with such subject matter, but both Kiefer and Wall (and to some extent Gerhard Richter) have been frequently and explicitly discussed in relation to historiographic memorialization ‘after the event’. On Kiefer, see Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Andrew Weinstein, ‘From the Sublime to the Abject: Six Decades of Art’, in Absence/Presence: Essays and Reflections on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. by Steve Feinstein (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005); Andreas Huyssen, ‘Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth’, October, 48 (Spring 1989), 25–45; on Wall, see Paul Gough, ‘The Living, The Dead and the Imagery of Emptiness and Re-appearance on the Battlefields of the Western Front’, in Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance, ed. by James D. Sidaway (London: Routledge, 2016), 263–80; and Joanna Lowry, ‘History, Allegory, Technologies of Vision’, in History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art, ed. by David Green and Peter Seddon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 97–111. 4. On Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1974–1979), see Jane F. Gerhard, The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970–2007 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2014); Susan Havens Caldwell, ‘Experiencing “The Dinner Party”’, Woman’s Art Journal, 1:2 (Autumn 1980–Winter 1981), 35–7; and Carol Snyder, ‘Reading the Language of “The Dinner Party”’, Woman’s Art Journal, 1:2 (Autumn 1980–Winter 1981), 30–4; Wilson has worked in this way across a number of works, but here I am specifically referencing his curatorial installation Mining the Museum, at the Maryland Historical Society (1992–1993). On this work, see Maurice Berger, Jennifer A. González, and Fred Wilson, Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000, exhib. cat. (University of Maryland, MD: Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, 2001); Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, ‘Mining the Museum’, Grand Street, 44 (1993), pp. 151–72; and Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. by Fred Wilson (London: Ridinghouse, 2011). 5. The work of key theorists in this area, such as Roland Barthes and Hayden White, will be discussed later in this essay. 6. Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/University Press of New England, 2005 [1997]), p. 10. It is important to note that Iggers, and other historians and historiography specialists, such as Richard J. Evans (1997) and José C. Bermejo-Barrera (1993), have, in turn, highlighted the limitations and problematics of this literary view of the subject’s construction and signification. 7. Iggers, 2005, pp. 13–14. 8. Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Natural World (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 5. 9. The work was commissioned by curator Andrew Cross as part of the Arts Transpennine ’98 project and funded by the National Lottery Fund. 10. The photographs themselves were taken by a hired studio photographer before being framed by Puett. The objects that surround each subject had been collected over the course of many months by both Dion and Puett, including the antique backdrops in the scenes. I would like to thank J. Morgan Puett for this information. 11. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012. 12. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012. 13. For further reading on how the female self was viewed in relation to scientific practice in this period, see Jeanne Kay Guelke and Karen M. Morin, ‘Gender, Nature, Empire: Women Naturalists in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Literature’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26:3 (2001), 306–26; Julie English Early, ‘The Spectacle of Science and Self: Mary Kingsley’, in Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, ed. by Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 215–36; Stephen J. Gould, ‘Recuperating the Women’, in Gates and Shteir, 1997, 27–39; Evelleen Richards, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals’, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 119–42; George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Mary R. S. Creese, Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800–1900 (Lanham: MD, 1998); and Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 14. Julia Kristeva, Word, Dialogue and Novel, 1966, p. 85, cited in The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 37. Originally translated by T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. S. Roudiez, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 15. Heidi Hansson, Romance Revived: Postmodern Romances and the Tradition (Umeå: Umeå University Press, 1998), p. 117. 16. In her introduction to History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Kate Mitchell explores the concept of ‘nostalgia’ in relation to postmodern returns to the past as an effect with the potential to subvert rather than romance the reader’s understanding of the historical past. See pp. 3–7. 17. The models included Lisa Corrin of the Serpentine Gallery, Iwona Blaswick and Frances Morris from Tate Modern, and Gilda Williams, a commissioning editor for Phaidon Publishing. 18. Saskia Bos, ‘Selections from the Endangered Species List (the Vertebrata), or Commander McBrag Taxonomist’, in Natural History and Other Fictions: An Exhibition by Mark Dion. An Illustrated History of the Wonderful and Curious Things of Nature Existing Before and Since the Deluge, exhib. cat. (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1997), p. 19. 19. Solicari, 2013, p. 49. 20. See Polly Morgan: Psychopomps, exhib. cat. (London: Haunch of Venison, 2011), examples of works that use taxidermy include To Every Seed His Own Body (2006), Communion (2011), and Hanging in the Balance (2013); Mat Collishaw, exhib. cat. (London: Blain Southern, 2012). Collishaw uses the zoetrope in his 2014 work All Things Fall, and In Fairyland: The World of Tessa Farmer, ed. by Catriona McAra (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2016); see, for example, The Depraved Pursuit of a Possum (2013). 21. Wallace spent eight years (1854–1862) exploring the Malay Archipelago and it was where he conceived the theory of evolution by natural selection, writing down his ideas in a 4000-word essay that he sent to Charles Darwin. The theory was widely known as the Darwin–Wallace theory for much of the nineteenth century. 22. Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), p. 13. For examples of this trend in Victorian natural history writing, see Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860); Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Sea-Shore (London: Routledge & Sons, 1855); and Arabella Buckley, The Fairy-Land of Science (London: Edward Stanford, 1878). 23. Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1908 [1863]), p. 187. 24. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012. 25. Lisa G. Corrin, ‘Mark Dion’s Project: A Natural History of Wonder and a Wonderful History of Nature,’ in Mark Dion, ed. by Lisa G. Corrin, Miwon Kwon, and Norman Bryson (London: Phaidon, 1997), p. 124. 26. Roland Barthes, ‘Le discours de l’histoire,’ Social Science Information, VI, 65–75, in English, ‘The Discourse of History’, trans. by Stephen Bann, in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, Vol. 3, ed. by E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 [1967]), pp. 16–17 (his italics). 27. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 92. 28. Towards the end of his life, the precarious state of Wallace’s finances following a loss of income and the struggle to find work led to Thomas Huxley, William Spottiswood, and Joseph Hooker petitioning William Gladstone to provide Wallace with a £200 pension (which Gladstone granted). 29. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1990 [1987]), p. 42. 30. Andrea Fraser, ‘What is Institutional Critique?’, in Institutional Critique and After, ed. by John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2006), p. 305. 31. James Meyer, ‘The Functional Site’, in Platzwechsel, exhib. cat. (Zurich: Kunstahalle Zurich, 1995), p. 27, cited in Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 29. 32. Meyer, 1995, p. 21. 33. Kwon, 2004, p. 29. 34. On inheriting his brother’s surveying tools, Wallace was able to benefit from the explosion in railway building in the mid-nineteenth century, allowing him to earn and save a substantial amount of money over a relatively short period following his brother’s death in 1846. 35. Braine worked with Dion on several projects from 1989 to 2005. 36. Kwon, 2004, p. 28. 37. Corrin, in Corrin et al., 1997, p. 84. 38. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2006 [1966]), p. 147. 39. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, or the Wonders of the sea-shore (London: Routledge & Sons, 1904 [1855]), p. 24. For more on Waterton’s Nondescript, a fictional object that critiques taxonomical accuracies, see Brian W. Edginton, Charles Waterton: A Biography (London: James Clarke & Co., 1996). 40. Hutcheon, 1988, p. 106 (her italics). 41. Of course, for those periods that remain within living memory the task is problematized in entirely different ways. 42. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012. © 2017 Leeds Trinity University
TI - The Artist–Historian: Victorian natural history in the work of Mark Dion
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1080/13555502.2017.1359657
DA - 2018-01-25
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-artist-historian-victorian-natural-history-in-the-work-of-mark-8MmxV2MfJj
SP - 86
EP - 102
VL - 23
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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