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The Drama of Digging in New England's
Trash
By ANN WILSON LLOYD
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=B"}

ROCKTON, Mass. -- THE artist Mark Dion is a globe-trotter and
museum buff. His work consists of scientific- looking installations and
museum-based natural history projects often intended as private
homages to muses ranging from Virgil and Aristotle to P. T. Barnum and
Stephen Jay Gould. The sly subtleties embedded in them, though, are
not about the exotic "other." In almost all of his elaborate, entertaining
displays, we meet mostly ourselves.
Mr. Dion, 40, has recently become known for a series of archaeological-
type digs. These have taken place in a drained Venetian canal, along
opposite banks of the Thames in London and in turn-of-the-century ash
pits that surround the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona
Park. A forthcoming project will feature whatever Mr. Dion unearths
from the former sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, to be
shown when that institution reopens after renovations.
Whether trash or treasure (and it's mostly trash), every last chicken bone
and bottle cap from these digs is scrubbed, sorted and artfully displayed
in specially made casks, vitrines, cabinets or pedestals — in short,
treated like a precious artifact. Largely because of this attention to detail,
Mr. Dion's displays never fail to be mesmerizing, lovely to look at, even
funny, but also a little sad: so much history, waste and clutter, and every
bit passed through countless human hands.
For the last 15 years, he has shown his projects extensively in Europe
and Latin America. Now he has come home to dig. Mr. Dion, who lives
in Pennsylvania, grew up near New Bedford, Mass. He recently turned
his shovels on three sites here in southeastern New England, where as a
boy he not only found his first discarded treasures, but also was
fascinated by the eclectic collections in New Bedford's Whaling
Museum, one of the current project's four sponsoring institutions.
"New England Digs" was initiated by the Fuller Museum of Art in
Brockton, Mass., where it was first shown last fall. It will be on view
from Jan. 26 through March 10 at the David Winton Bell Gallery at
Brown University in Providence, R.I., and from April 6 through May 11
at the new University Art Gallery in New Bedford (run by the University
of Massachusetts in nearby Dartmouth).
The exhibition consists of three large, handsome Shaker-style cabinets,
each designated for one of the three cities (Brockton, New Bedford and
Providence) and artfully filled with finds from corresponding sites, plus
other artifacts too large to encase: a crumpled boiler, a chunk of tile floor
and a massive, rusty safe. Inside the cabinets are typical small-rubbish
items like bricks, bottles and blackened bits of metal, but also colorful
shards of dinnerware through the ages, balls, toys, marbles and, from the
Brockton site, a particularly nice grouping of plastic swizzle sticks. Bins
sometimes hold the overflow of glass and pottery.
Mr. Dion studiously avoids making serious scientific or archaeological
points in these projects. "He refuses to explain and contextualize," said
Lasse Antonsen, director of the University Art Gallery. "By implying that
objectivity is a historically framed activity, he challenges established
methods that led to disciplines like anthropology, archaeology and
zoology."
Mr. Antonsen, along with teams of other intrepid volunteers, assisted the
artist on one of the digs, where, as usual, authentic procedural
techniques were used only selectively. Mr. Dion takes pains, in fact, to
choose well-disturbed areas that would arouse no genuine
archaeological interest. Conversely, he must also steer clear of the
industrial pollution that lurks below much urban landscape.
In Brockton, trial digs uncovered just such a dubious legacy from the
city's former shoe manufacturing industry. The site finally chosen,
Department of Public Works land at the edge of a city cemetery, had
been piled with twice-relocated dirt fairly glimmering with a mother lode
of artifacts. (In Providence, Mr. Dion and his team dug in a former dump
on the edge of the Seekonk River; in New Bedford, on the spot where a
19th-century building in the city's historic downtown waterfront burned
down a few years ago.) In the exhibition catalog, Mr. Dion is quoted by
Denise Markonish, curator of the Fuller Museum, explaining that the
sites were "insignificant and disturbed," which are terms archaeologists
use to characterize a valueless area where the context and stratification
are ruined. "Still," the artist added, "one can find wonders."
The alchemy that turns junk into wonders has something to do with the
act of discovery and the mystery of unbroken time. "A fragment of blue-
and- white willow export porcelain thrown away in 1894 lies inert for
107 years until someone from the dig team finds it," Mr. Dion continued,
"creating a momentary bridge to the person who lost or threw the object
away." Finding that same fragment at a yard sale just wouldn't be the
same.
For viewers, the alchemical moment occurs in front of Mr. Dion's
gloriously visual presentations, but factoring into that moment is photo
documentation of diggers doing all that tedious work. The installations
result from weeks spent mucking in cold, smelly mud; then endless
soaking, scrubbing and sorting. Mr. Dion considers this behind-the-
scenes process a kind of fugitive performance, without the usual
performer-audience relationship.
Recontextualizing that willowware shard, he says, renders it comparable
to a letter in a word and part of a sentence of a larger text, one viewers
have to decipher for themselves. "There is a long history of using trash in
modern art as assemblages and readymades," Mr. Dion said, "but here
objects are allowed to exist as what they are or were, without metaphor,
noninterpretive, not even archaeological."
To most viewers, though, the text the objects conjure is inevitably a
nostalgic tale. To Mr. Antonsen, the installations are, in part, about
reframing desire. Ultimately, though, darker thoughts creep in regarding
the pervasive depths of our cast-off material culture and how soon the
planet will become a vast kitchen midden.
Still, that block of fused nails in the Brockton cabinet is a wondrous
thing. Rusted together in the shape of their former box, the aggregate
nails have become an accidental piece of Minimalist, process sculpture.
And cosseted carefully behind the glass doors of the Providence cabinet,
an assortment of rough bricks takes on engaging visual properties that
are lushly tactile, formal and abstract. By now, Mr. Dion has become,
perhaps, the art world's leading practitioner of ceramic-shard
arrangements. Displayed here in shallow drawers that viewers may
open, these multihued or monochrome reliefs are perfect studies in
assemblage and collage.
Seemingly at the top of his game, Mr. Dion is winding up these
archaeological projects. "I was becoming the natural-history guy, then I
started the digs; now I don't want to be the archaeological-dig guy," he
said in a recent talk at the Fuller Museum.
His newest project may finally disclose the hidden performer: he is
devising an opera based on early anatomy lessons, drawing further on
the artist-as-impresario aspect of his work. A few years ago in the
Netherlands, he advertised a public anatomy lesson in the manner of
quasi-medical expositions that were immensely popular in the 16th
century. Tickets and posters were printed, a professor of anatomy from
a local veterinary school was hired, and Mr. Dion then tried to obtain an
exotic, recently deceased zoo animal as the subject. A goat was all he
came up with.
"I've always been disappointed in how contemporary artists have given
over some of the big questions to other disciplines," he said, regarding
his interest in science and philosophy. Equally fascinating to him is
gullibility and spectacle. P. T. Barnum, he said, was not only the Disney
of his day but also a template for contemporary artists. "It's easier to
understand artists like Jeff Koons or Andy Warhol through Barnum," he
said. "He understood that being tricked was O.K. as long you were also
amused."


On 8 Jan 2002, at 9:03, Agbe-Davies, Anna wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I expected the list to be abuzz with indignation over this article
> that appeared in the print version of the NY Times on Sunday (Arts
> section).  Did anyone else see it?
>
> ARTS | January 6, 2002
> The Drama of Digging in New England's Trash
> By ANN WILSON LLOYD (NYT) News
> The artist Mark Dion creates installations by displaying findings from
> archaeological-type digs....
>
> I don't think this link will take you right to the story, as I don't
> subscribe to the web publication, but maybe someone else on the list
> does? Cheers, I think,
>
> Anna
>
>
> ___________________
> Anna Agbe-Davies
> [log in to unmask]


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