Towards the Hidden Mundane (original) (raw)

This paper is a discussion of the ways the American artist Mark Dion approaches to the dominating anthropocentrism of modern science. The study is based on three artworks that demonstrate key transitional moments of Dion's art practice. The paper opens with the examination of On Tropical Nature (1991), the artist’s pivotal early work. The first chapter will posit that, in the frame of this work, Dion empowers the functional site of the forest, displaces the taxonomic system, activates a fictional character of an amateur scientist, and, based on representation of nature in botany, establishes his way of conducting artistic discourse about social and cultural stereotypes. The second chapter moves to The Library for the Birds of Antwerp (1993), and focuses on the artistic manoeuvre that evaluates the connection between living beings and their representations, viewed through the prism of the interplay of zoology and art. This vision explores the possibilities of the structurally constructed distance between human and non-human. In this part, the progression of Mark Dion`s strategy, including the urban functional site, the open-endedness strategy, and the viewer inclusion will be outlined. The third chapter concentrates on representing the order of the human past as a science related subject, as the next multi-factor move that emerged in Mark Dion`s Dig series. The chapter focuses mainly on one of the most debatable artworks, The Tate Thames Dig (1999). It will be argued that such fields of humanities as art, anthropology and archaeology, featured by this artwork, are producing a new synergy in the field of reconceptualisation of the anthropocentric doctrine. Conclusively, the development of a river as a functional site and a performing science related activity there, will be foregrounded.