MARK DION
THE MACABRE TREASURY
Museum Het Domein
Kapittelstraat 6 - Sittard
19/1/2013 - 5/52/013
Increasingly, my work has become macabre and laced with dusky pessimism. Early on I believed that ecological calamity could be averted by awareness. If people knew about issues like the loss of biodiversity or global warming, they would act so as to halt the problem. (…) Now, I just don’t believe that it will all work out. Not that there will be a single great catastrophe, but rather the world will slowly become less biological diverse, more impoverished, an uglier, less remarkable place to live. (…) Ozone holes, burning rainforests, ecological wars, species extinction, landfill landscapes will become fantastic theatre, a spectacle of ecosystem collapse. (…) Coming soon – the planet earth becoming a crummier place, and like numerous other rude spectators, it’s hard for me to keep my mouth closed during the show.
- Mark Dion, unpublished manuscript, 2001
The American artist Mark Dion (New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1961) is internationally acclaimed as one of today’s most prominent artists. He is playing a pioneering role with his work which focuses on ecological issues and our perception of nature. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions like museums shape our understanding of history, the ways we accumulate knowledge, and how we regard the natural world. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between “objective” (“rational”) scientific methods and “subjective” (“irrational”) influences. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society. Dion has had solo exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London (1999), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2004), the Miami Art Museum (2006) and the Nouveau Musée National in Monaco (2011), amongst many other places. In 2012 he took part in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel.
The Macabre Treasury is Mark Dion’s first solo museum exhibition in the Netherlands in fifteen years. Partly for this reason, the exhibition at Het Domein has the character of a concise retrospective with an emphasis on works created in the last ten years. For The Macabre Treasury Dion will transform Museum Het Domein’s contemporary art wing into a giant Wunderkabinett. The exhibition will be divided into various departments of a fictional museum. Dion’s macabre treasure chamber will thus include amongst others Departments of Zoology and Archeology, a Bureau of Museums and the Culture of Collections, a Hunting Salon, a Cinematheque and a Cabinet of Mystery. As part of the exhibition of his own work, the artist will present a selection of objects from Museum Het Domein’s historical collection and from other local museums and archives. As is the case with all of Dion’s presentations, the exhibition in Het Domein can be considered as an attempt to restore something of our earlier notion of the universal museum with its hybrid combinations of different disciplines and fields of knowledge. Newly inciting the curiosity of the museum-goer is just as essential. The artist once proclaimed that museums should be restored to their roles as “powder kegs of the imagination”.
Image: Mandrillus Sphinx, (detail), 2012. Wood, glass, plastic, tar, metal, ceramic, paper, cork, ribbon, and string. Overall installed dimensions: 175.3 x 67.3 x 128.3 cm. Private Collection, Paris. Photo: Jean Vong. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
