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Herbarium, 2010 Call for price. |
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Tree Scheme, 2009 $800. |
Mark Dion
Mark Dion is an outstanding contemporary artist whose work in the visual arts is highly interdisciplinary, and whose investigations embrace museumology, science including its history and methodology, archaeology, environmental studies and other related fields. His explorations of museum practices and installation methodology often blur the line between artwork and museum exhibit. Dion’s research and exhibitions, often site-specific, have touched on such timely and critical issues as the philosophy and ethics of collecting, the diversity of museum collections, mediated approaches to nature through the lens of dominant ideologies, environmental politics and public policy.
Dion based this portfolio of seven photogravures, Herbarium, on Henry Perrine (1797-1840), a doctor, horticulturist and diplomat, who was one of the first American naturalists to grasp the vast agricultural potential of Florida. As a pioneer in subtropical botany, Perrine tirelessly collected previously unknown flora, gathering masses of plants, roots, seeds, shoots, and herbarium specimens. In 1838, the United States Congress awarded Dr. Perrine a vast land grant in southern Florida to establish an experimental botanical station for the research of alien tropical plants introduced to United States soil. However, before the experimental station was operational, Perrine was murdered in a Seminole raid on Indian Key. During the attack the house and compound were burned and Perrine’s invaluable herbarium and specimens were lost. Dion’s distressed portfolio of pressed marine algae specimens is in response to this tragic loss, presenting itself as the few remaining specimens salvaged from the remains of Perrine’s herbarium.
Dion based his two-color lithograph Tree Scheme on the “figurative system of human knowledge,” or the tree of Diderot and d’Alembert. This classification system was developed to represent the taxonomy of human knowledge itself and appeared in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a general encyclopedia published in France in the last half of the 1700s. Dion literally adopted the idea of the “tree” and entitled it “The Representation of Nature” on the trunk. Its leafless branches bear words—terms, names, disciplines—that relate to our responses to, and knowledge and classification of, the natural world. Surrounding the tree on the ground are objects that can be taken as a warning: the watering can of “The Museum of Natural History,” which can nurture the tree, the axes of “capitalism” and “the art world,” which can cut it down, and the fungi of “inertia.”
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