Mark Dion OUR PLUNDERED PLANET 6 ‘Meat and Potatoes’ ­ — Barbara Dawson

10 A Natural History That Glows in the Dark ­— Petra Lange-Berndt MARK DION 28 Science as Ritual: (Re)Uniting Myth and OUR PLUNDERED PLANET Rationalism in the Capitalocene ­ — Patrick Jaojoco

54 List of Exhibited Works ­ Mark Dion OUR PLUNDERED PLANET

Mark Dion and Robert Williams Hic Existo Monstrum (Here Be Monsters), from the series Phylogenetic Trees, 2004 hugh lane gallery

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Barbara Dawson Director, Hugh Lane Gallery change and its consequences for our planet for decades. They have found evidence of the changes through their research and recorded charts and logs. Artists are equipped with a different aesthetic with which to command ‘Meat and Potatoes’ attention and reflect on the familiar as well as the exotic in our world. The mastery of the visual image creates an alternative focus to the known dilemma. As Mark Dion says, ‘Scientists don’t have access to the rich set of tools, such as irony, allegory and humour, which are the meat and potatoes of art and literature.’ Amongst the celebrated notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci in the Royal Our Plundered Planet is a witty, intelligent and profoundly provocative Library at Windsor Castle in England is a small pen-and-ink study of a body of work with a sobering message. Mark Dion critiques the long seated man contemplating the movement of water. The little study confirms tradition of European Enlightenment in his use of the visual to ponder on the high regard Leonardo had for nature. He was fascinated by the natural and wonder about the vast ecology that makes up the magnificent Earth and world – its complexities, interrelationships and dynamics – and he had an about our wanton destruction of this rich resource. This exhibition attracts insatiable scientific curiosity about its structures and patterns. This scientific and confounds with an unforgettable impact. research and philosophical enquiry fed into his aesthetic desire as an artist Leonardo could not have envisaged the cul-de-sac in which we have to express visually the wealth of imagery, form and movement the natural found ourselves five hundred years later. world provides. Leonardo could not have predicted the future evolution of science and technology, and yet his art reveals that he was fully cognisant of the tremendous importance of unravelling the machinations of our eco- systems in order to understand and show respect for the interdependency of humankind and nature. Sadly, as humans have evolved these wisdoms have been ignored; overharvesting, poaching, intentional extinction, plunder of natural assets and pollution have upset the ecology of the planet, with catastrophic results. The lack of a concerted global commitment to attempt to reverse the disastrous destruction of Earth – the only known planet in our solar system that can support human life – is beyond ignorance. One of the most prominent artists calling our attention to this international ostrich-like behaviour today is the American Mark Dion. His work is a powerful statement and critique of the current crises in our environments – a statement that questions the direction of the debates, actions and non-actions through his imagery, which urges intelligent, international collaboration. Scientists have been warning about climate

6 7 The Aerial Realm, 2014 The Aquatic Realm, 2014

8 9 Petra Lange-Berndt

A Natural History That Glows in the Dark

As the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz describes it, from a contemporary perspective the territories of humans can no longer be clearly separated from those of animals. In the ecological age all arts are in one way or another connected with the song of birds, the olfactory dance of insects and the performative display of humans and other vertebrates.1 The EuroMAB Conference in Dublin in 2019 will address these environmental issues, bringing together representatives of UNESCO biosphere reserves from Europe and North America. While this meeting is pitching itself as a ‘celebration of natural and cultural heritage’,2 Mark Dion’s exhibition Our Plundered Planet, as its title suggests, offers a critical reflection on the use of such euphoric rhetoric. The show refers to American geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr’s book Our Plundered Planet ; in 1948 the conservationist and president of the New York Zoological Society had written about environmental destruction by humans. Even though research at this time was heavily influenced by the eugenics movement and Malthusian ideas, it raised awareness of ecological problems very early on. At a time when politicians still deny the existence of climate change and the current president of the United States of America is pruning protected areas in his country, exposing them to exploitation by industry, Mark Dion draws

1. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New The Wonder Workshop, 2015 York, 2008), 12. Walnut cabinet, objects with white glow-in-the-dark paint, black light, 259.1 × 243.8 × 30.5 cm 2. https://en.unesco.org/events/euromab-2019-conference [accessed 28 December 2018]. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

10 11 attention to such histories as these; in other contexts he has for instance displayed an Extinction Wallpaper. This work depicts animals such as the Passenger Pigeon, Ivory Billed Woodpecker, Black Rhino, Dodo, Woolly Mammoth and Tasmanian Tiger. As Dion points out, ‘all of these animals are emblematic of the different types of human driven extinction causes – overharvesting, habitat loss, intentional extermination, over collecting of eggs or specimens, and poaching’.3 Accordingly, the artist’s wide-ranging practice tackles many aspects of ecology, investigating the history of the biological sciences, wildlife conservation and biodiversity. Dublin’s biosphere reserve is located on its bay, an inlet of the Irish Sea, and Our Plundered Planet focuses on marine flora and fauna. It is important to realise, in this context, that Mark Dion is an amateur naturalist in the best sense of the word, guided in his activity by subjective preference. He has, for instance, enquired into the practice of collecting as a foundation for knowledge and into the institutions that impose order on and make sense of what we address as nature. Installations such as Sea Life (2011; see pages 13–15), with its specimens pickled in jars, borrow their format from the displays so typical of these collections – in this instance archival cabinets or storage facilities. But his aim is not to mimic the established order of things; Sea Life displays neither sea anemones nor algae, but toys for kids and dogs and also sex toys masquerading as marine invertebrates. What look like preserved organisms have been plasticised; for Mark Dion there is no way back to unspoiled nature. Instead, most works in this show are ecologically motivated memorials. Additionally, these installations reveal the absurdity of classifying the world’s diversity in all its dynamic processes. And lately the things on display have started to glow in the dark. Since 2015 visitors have been invited into The Wonder Workshop (see page 11), a greenish, luminous installation full of strange and wondrous items, a dialogue between art and nature. One can identify a coral, a lobster and a starfish, but also a seven-headed Hydra alluding to myths and dreams and mysterious things beyond recognition. Among the largest objects are a crocodile and

3. e-mail from Mark Dion, 3 January 2019.

12 a shark, their eerie glow triggering associations with life in the marine, on the unclassifiable, Dion highlights what has been rejected by natural bioluminiscent depths. Even though these things are based on illustrations science’s official system. There are, however, crucial differences between the of Cabinets of Curiosities in the 16th and 17th centuries, popular images Bureau Central de Recherches Surréalistes and Mark Dion’s practice as a of uncanny radioactive substances come to mind. An art audience may be whole. Most importantly, the artist works alongside the very institutions reminded of Tetsumi Kudo’s explorations of the existential possibilities for he criticises. He does not adopt the role of the travelling naturalist in a humanity in an increasingly polluted and consumption-driven world or the metaphorical sense, or as a flâneur, but has for some time undertaken actual Day-Glo colours of the psychedelic underground, but above all, these images expeditions to tropical rainforests, such as in Borneo and Brazil, to polar evoke the chemical industrial complex. The sea creatures found in Dion’s art regions and in urban contexts. Nevertheless, this glow-in-the-dark natural are clear references to animals after industrialisation. On 19 March 1881 the history is an attempt to initiate a ‘melancholic meditation on the end of popular scientific journal La Nature presented its readers with an experiment natural beauty and wonder in the face of greed or necessity’.8 Curiosity and to demonstrate how organisms are affected by mechanisation. A piece of wonder are intended to trigger critical reflection, not escapism. apparatus called the polyscope électrique visualises the inside of a living fish. In the 1990s Mark Dion commenced a new phase of artistic engage- The accompanying illustration situates the test rig in a darkened domestic ment with the natural world when, intrigued by the relevance to present- setting and shows the fish floating in an aquarium, illuminated by a ghostly day debates, he started grappling with the early modern model of the hand at the push of a button. ‘Let’s get to the experience of the luminous Wunderkammer, a phenomenon that emerged before the Enlightenment fish’, invites the text.4 Although the water suggests vitality, even fertility, no spawned public museum foundations with their various specialisations.9 organs appear in the phosphorescent fish, only a skeletal structure indicating Instead of being isolated like the exhibits in a modernist white-cube the mortality of the animal. This undead creature refers less to the rhetoric of aesthetic, things are grouped together, with natural materials, material enlightenment than to the mysterious and macabre (mis)adventures of the culture and art tumbling into adjacency and forming compact clusters. hero in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Besides, as the shipwreck in the drawing SOS (1998; see page 44) indicates, (1838) or the shadow worlds of soon-to-be-outdated museums of natural Mark Dion has always been fascinated by ruins and states of wear and tear. history. And not much later artists such as the French Surrealists turned Damage, decay and difference can generate their own patterns of order – their attention to the bankrupt estate of 19th-century scientific positivism, except that there are no fixed positions, only shifting ones. When we gaze critically examining the underlying concepts of reality.5 Hence in 1924 the programmatic title Surréalisme for the drawing of a fish to advertise the short-lived Bureau Central de Recherches Surréalistes on Rue de Grenelle 4. Dr Z., ‘L’expérience du poisson lumineux et le polyscope électrique’, La Nature, Vol. 8, 407 (19 March 1881), 241–242. in Paris. Here, at long last, the ‘incomparable importance’ of the ‘liquid 5. See Petra Lange-Berndt, Animal Art. Präparierte Tiere in der Kunst 1850–2000 electric fish’, of ‘rare intermediate states of life’, received fitting attention.6 In (Munich: 2009), 33 ff. 6. La Révolution Surréaliste, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1 December 1924), n. p. (translation by 2005 Dion in turn created The Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism the author). and Its Legacy at Manchester Museum.7 A wall with windows and a door 7. Exhibition catalogue: Mark Dion: Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism separates onlookers from a room that appears to be the residence of a scholar. and Its Legacy, The Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester, 2005. 8. e-mail from Mark Dion, 2 November 2018. We see vitrines piled high with dusty mounted animals, books, photos of 9. See, for instance, Mark Dion (präsentiert / presents) Die geöffnete Raritäten- und hairless dogs, monsters, fake creatures and other curiosities. By focusing Naturalien-Kammer (Cologne: 2002).

16 17 upon ruins, we are prised away from the logic of chronologies and delivered to the waves of currents in time; like ruins, memories are incomplete.10 But, most importantly, when a thing is in a ruinous state, it raises questions about preservation and care. Rhinoceros Horn (2014; see page 19), an artwork belonging to a group called New Curiosities for the Green Vault fabricated for display at Dresden’s Grünes Gewölbe (history museum, treasure chamber and Cabinet of Curiosities in one), presents part of an endangered African Black Rhino in a bog of gooey bitumen. The black mass soils the things it captures and converts them into the trash of civilisation.11 But despite the display of such hyper-realistic animal bodies, Mark Dion avoids auratic relics and souvenirs; this vertebrate was not shot and hunted in the wilderness. The horn, a replica by the Californian company Bone Clones, Inc., protrudes from the fashion jewellery, coins and assorted cheap trash – garbage slowly turning into an undifferentiated mass. The animal is caught in an entropic vortex of bitumen, which contaminates things, flushing away notions of pristine nature and the mythologies that go with them. Every object is destined for ruin and is in the process of decaying, even if some of this is lost on human perception. At the same time our Umwelt has long been ruinous itself. And it is precisely this state of things that prompts us to review our own position, because it urges us to act. Oceans and seas were long regarded as sources of artistic inspiration, places of imaginary underwater worlds.12 This fascination is disenchanted in installations like The Fisheries (2016; see pages 20–21), a work that updates still-life paintings – such as the ones by Flemish artist Franz Snyders – by addressing the problem of overfishing, the taking of fish beyond sustainable levels. These odourless models are not stand-ins for direct encounters,

10. Brian Dillon, ‘Introduction: A Short History of Decay’, Ruins, Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: 2011), 10–19, here 11. 11. Exhibition catalogue: Mark Dion: The Academy of Things, ed. Petra Lange-Berndt and Dietmar Rübel, Art Academy, Albertinum and Green Vault, Dresden (Cologne: 2015), 98, 212 f. 12. Exhibition catalogue: Oceanomania. Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas from the Expedition to the Aquarium. A Mark Dion Project, Villa Paloma / Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2011. Rhinoceros Horn, 2014

18 19 but flag up the desire to control nature, to market and adapt it to meet human we find in the world. It provides material for developing new strategies and needs. The animals displayed point to dramatic stories of environmental modes of perception, enabling us to reflect on our environment. But this is abuse – we see, for instance, an Orange Roughy, a Patagonian Toothfish, not a joyous celebration: from the perspective of Timothy Morton’s ‘dark a Bluefin Tuna. Were these fish caught in a commercial or a recreational ecology’ we are part of a dying world.15 Nevertheless, rather than grief or context? Are their bodies genetically altered or polluted? Where do they sentimental Bambification, artworks such asRhinoceros Horn and The Salmon come from, and what about the millions of people depending on these of Knowledge Returns generate melancholy. And this is not a fatalistic view animals for food? What is the story of our co-evolution? The Salmon of but a very productive perspective. Seen in this light, we should be reminded Knowledge Returns (2015; see pages 38–41) may help us to understand the of Sigmund Freud’s dictum – if we manage to process a thing, we lose function of these replicas. During a research residency at Ormston House, it forever.16 Limerick, Dion made a fish out of epoxy resin; this body is hovering over a bed of trash again embedded in tar. The minimalist plinth recalls Robert Smithson’s art and his dystopian view of entropy and pollution, but the work also signposts more activist strategies such as Raffael Rheinsberg’sCod in Tar (1978), where the artist hung fish covered in tar on a rope in order to denounce ecological grievances. The Salmon of Knowledge Returns is at the same time a memorial to the depleting salmon population in Ireland’s rivers as a result of the blocking of pathways by which wildlife migrate and along which the water, sediments and nutrients required for their survival travel. Additionally, the title of the work points to the Irish myth of the Salmon of Knowledge (bradán feasa). This creature, figuring in the legend of Fionn MacCumhail, ate hazelnuts that fell into the well of wisdom. In this way the fish gained all the world’s knowledge. This knowledge, as well as the power to predict the future, was transferred to whoever ate of its flesh.13 Nowadays this narration is more likely to call to mind the title of a posthumous collection of writings by Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002). Mark Dion’s artworks evoke yearning for the magic of a lost wilderness and its myths, but salmon today are no longer the heroic symbols of unfettered freedom, conjuring up instead the aquatic equivalent of battery 13. See Peter Coates, Salmon (London: 2006), 153 ff. farming.14 We encounter live animals almost exclusively as pets or livestock; 14. Coates, 10. the only wild and untameable ones, at least in our urban environments, 15. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics seem to be the insects and spiders onto which we project our phobias and (Cambridge, MA / London: 2007), 181 ff. 16. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), in James Strachey et al. (eds.), prejudices. Mark Dion’s exhibition Our Plundered Planet addresses our The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 relationship with animals and what we make of the world, rather than what (London: 1955), 243–258.

22 23 Between Voltaire and Poe, 2016

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Patrick Jaojoco The Anthropocene, a now widely known neologism,1 is perhaps too broad as a term for this situation. Some consider the Anthropocene to have started when we began to hunt megafauna to extinction (and thus began Science as Ritual: a process of anthropogenic alteration of ecology) hundreds of thousands of years ago.2 However, the Great Acceleration has without a doubt given (Re)Uniting Myth and us the ruinous planet we know today; thinkers such as Donna Haraway and T.J. Demos mark this helpfully with the proposed alternative of Capitalocene.3 This shift in focus from all of humanity to the forces behind Rationalism in the ruinous extraction is useful in that it productively addresses the inhuman apparatus of environmental degradation. In other words, to declare all of Capitalocene humanity at fault is a farce; rather, there are a few select agents developing the modern world on the basis of capital flows and ‘progress’. Amidst the new and complex entanglement of nature, culture and technology, deeply rational human societies ache for utopias organised by, yet transcendent Then, follow but the heavy body of clay, from, the rational. And clinging mortal hope must fall from you; And so enters Mark Dion, among the first of the artists working to For we who ride the winds, run on the waves, rearrange our understanding of Enlightenment science in the midst of And dance upon the mountains, are more light planetary decline. Dion accomplishes a balancing act of wonder and science, Than dewdrops on the banners of the dawn. broadening the scope of rationalism to include – and rely on – rigorous W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, 1894 and even reverent curiosity as the foundational force of human action. This curiosity might even be described as deeply ritualistic, re-enacting scientific methodologies while also mythologising the roots of the Capitalocene with The ideal represented by Yeats’s ‘land of heart’s desire’ has been a crux for a museological and yet future-minded gaze. humanity since humans began to triumph over nature, especially since The museological in much of Dion’s work is represented by the the philosophical Modern Project began roughly six hundred years ago. visual vocabularies of the Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) of the Concurrent with the global plundering of landscapes by the societies 16th century. The Wunderkammer was a means of organising small objects they housed – to the benefit of European capitalists – the philosophy and specimens, and was coincident with the rise of zoology, biology and of individualism and rationalism evolved to lay the groundwork for the other natural histories. It was fed by, as historian Werner Muensterberger Great Acceleration, a period of unprecedented human impact upon the environment that began about 1950. The industrial boom following World 1. P.J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature, No. 415 (2002), 23. War II brought the now-familiar rise in ocean plastics, carbon dioxide and 2. See Felisa A. Smith et al., ‘Body Size Downgrading of Mammals over the Late Quaternary’, Science, Vol. 360, Issue 6386 (2018), 310–313. surface temperature, and also the loss in biodiversity – among other changes 3. Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: that continue to accelerate and define the state of the environment today. Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6 (2015), 159–165.

28 29 illustrates, ‘a fascination with the discoveries of new territories. Indeed, many paintings of curio-cabinets show a globe, as a symbolic representative or a substitute for the real earth.’ 4 Early taxonomy teaches us that to create and institutionalise knowledge, we must de-network objects from their active place in the world, placing them as curated objects on a shelf for Western understanding. The framework of the Wunderkammer is therefore an inherently colonial one, lumping cultural objects from the Americas and Africa and selections from the so-called Orient into a definition of ‘the wild’ as anything that is outside European culture. Science itself was an essential component of a vast and inhuman apparatus of knowledge linked to bourgeois Western understanding of the natural world, creating and perpetuating the metonymic Other so as to uphold an imperial sense of self. The roots of modern science are undoubtedly problematic and yet, without its contemporary forms, we would be blind to the ecological and climatic processes that define the Capitalocene. What frames of knowledge, then, are we to use if both decolonial – non-Western, proliferating and, as Macarena Gómez-Barris terms it, ‘submerged’ 5 – understandings of the world must be activated alongside reified and institutional frameworks of knowledge? If we must trust science, yet also extricate it from its historically applied power through industry, what new epistemologies can we accept? We might take Dion’s An Archaeology of Lost Objects (2013; see pages 31–33) as a starting point in an earnest exploration of the fragmented ruins of modernity. The work is a collection of discarded bottle caps, cigarette cartons, toy parts and more, housed in beautiful wooden cabinets with taxonomic drawers, and created in collaboration with a flock of volunteers who scoured the streets of Madrid in 2013. It imbues new historical value in waste, reminiscent of Susan A. Crane’s description of the Wunderkammer’s original use: ‘the recovery of objects that in themselves were “of little historical value” could be valorised as an effort to show how any object could be made to

4. Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Legacy Library, 2016), 190. 5. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). An Archaeology of Lost Objects, 2013

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reveal its historical nature by being part of the museum’.6 In Dion’s case, this museology functions to point beyond discarded objects to a collective machine of humanity, whose production is unlike any natural process that has come before it. An Archaeology of Lost Objects thus distances the viewer temporally from the present by way of a dilettante and participatory science, enabling new readings of contemporary culture. Dion’s requirement of public participation further makes for a kind of collective ritual, where embodied scientific practices stand in contrast to the institutional dominion over nature that similar cabinets evoked in the past. Enlightenment science, and its implications for dominion, may be traced to Francis Bacon’s 1620 publication Novum Organum. While truly an achievement, Baconian science has been based on invasive and extractive modes of observation in an attempt to control and direct nature. Science’s evidential – rather than faith-based – framework imposed the triumph of human reason over the unknown, whether that be nature or religion. While science and religion, for the most part, now coexist separately and relatively peacefully, their tenuous relationship may not withstand the questions of our current age. Humanity requires, and is capable of, their comprehensive unification, as Ellen Meloy emphatically articulates:

our essence as a species binds us to explore and affiliate with all life. We are lovers who can add up glucose, amino acids, water, fragrant oils, pigments, and other tissue and call it both a flower and a mystical gesture. We can also decimate pollinators with an unloving tonnage of pesticides, precipitating the extinction of entire populations of those mystical gestures, once and forever.7

Dion’s recent glow-in-the-dark works such as The Wonder Workshop (2015; see page 11) make this point clearly, displaying mythic curiosities in sculptural form contained in a more monumental set of compartments than that of

6. Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-century Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 81. 7. Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky The Medicine Cabinet of Mystery, 2013 (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008), 244.

34 35 the ‘lost objects’. The work functions to question and query natural histories while renewing the strangeness and intimacy of our relationship with the unknown. Recalling a time of monsters, the work embraces early scientific work by natural historians such as Ulisse Aldrovandi, often referred to as the father of natural history and also a channel for wonder at the unknown. Aldrovandi’s book of mythic creatures, Monstrorum Historia, was published posthumously in 1642; it depicts a catalogue of strange beings reportedly sighted around the world, with detailed descriptions and fantastic drawings Illustration suitable for any scientific publication. Taxonomies of the mythological from Ulisse feature in later scientific work, too, and include those by the canonical Aldrovandi, scientist Peter Artedi, whose Ichthiologia (1738) ‘[which] still listed sirens Monstrorum Historia, 1642 next to seals and sea lions, and Linnaeus himself, [who] in his Pan Europaeus, classifies sirens … together with man and apes’.8 The Wonder Workshop is, indeed, a practice in provoking awe, and yet also proves quite paradoxical, assuming that scientific drawing has required of it as ‘scientific’ as Aldrovandi’s mytho-zoology. The glowing representations of a commitment to objectivity and accuracy. And yet this relationship between animals in Dion’s cabinet instil an awe that Hal Foster describes as ‘more wonder and science, as well as the entangled relationship between human “institutive” than “destructive”, more “legislative” than “transgressive” ’, and and non-human, may be an essential aspect of human interaction with the that ‘underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, non-human world, as so poetically stated by Meloy. factual yet fictive, public yet private’.9 The fantastic creatures of The Wonder The reunion of the human and non-human is thus deeply important Workshop are based on a conception of the natural world as entirely Other; to a critical understanding of industrial apparatuses of knowledge. Dion’s and yet also, in their hybridities, they represent and reflect our fear, desire The Salmon of Knowledge Returns (2015; see pages 38–41) and The Fisheries and desperation to picture the unknown. As many of humanity’s great stories (2016; see pages 20–21) juxtapose scientific model, industry and mythology to do, the work ultimately establishes a definition of humanity in relation to consider complex notions of animality that – in the context of science, waste the unexplainable, hybrid, animal–human and otherwise ‘unnatural’ Other. and extraction – reflect new modes of interspecies transference, suggesting Scientific drawing – and, in Dion’s work, sculptural representation – functions a modern, post-animist epistemology. not only ‘as an important general model for the systematic observation and The tale of the Salmon of Knowledge, featuring in the Fenian cycle representation of natural phenomena’,10 but also as a mode of establishing of Irish mythology, tells of the making of the cycle’s great hero, Fionn a newly embodied relationship with the unknown. Aldrovandi’s catalogue MacCumhail, by way of his chance consumption of the eponymous fish. Several versions of the story exist. In short, it begins with King Cormac 8. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Taxonomies’, in Documents of Contemporary Art: Animals, wishing to seize the wealth of a more powerful neighbouring king. Cormac ed. Filipa Ramos (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 81. is told by a druid that a magical salmon contains all the knowledge and good 9. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, No. 110 (2004), 5. 10. Alex Potts, ‘Natural Order and the Call of the Wild: The Politics of Animal fortune in the world, and that its consumption will lead to Cormac’s success. Picturing’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1990), 12. Cormac naturally sets out on an excursion to catch the salmon and eat it.

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During a concerted search for the supposedly most magical-looking salmon, Lowenhaupt-Tsing’s work in framing the re-networked life of matsutake MacCumhail, then a young peasant, catches a fish that, to the king’s eyes, mushrooms. The mushrooms, which thrive in clear-cut landscapes and are could not possibly be the one. The fish, of course, turns out to be the Salmon foraged around the world to be shipped to, primarily, Japan, where they are of Knowledge, and MacCumhail becomes one of the greatest heroes of Irish a delicacy, ‘instead of … alienated commodities … become trophies of the mythology, thanks to a single animal imbued with supernatural power. hunt – even as they are sold. Foragers beam with pride while showing off Dion’s interpretation of the myth in his work reveals the uncanny their mushrooms; they can’t stop narrating the pleasures and dangers of relationship between human and non-human bodies in the Capitalocene. the search. The mushrooms become part of the foragers, just as if they had The Fisheries directly refers to the industrial fishing economy (mirrored in eaten them.’ 11 King Cormac’s prototypical fishing efforts), with each fish strung up in a The foragers in Lowenhaupt-Tsing’s account consider the picked mode of display similar to that of a fish market or the trophy displays on mushrooms to be a constituent part of their identity, as the Salmon of a dock. Vertical and extracted from their habitats, the fish are translated Knowledge was for the great Fionn MacCumhail and may well be for us into commodity objects valued in terms of size and weight. The Salmon in Dion’s invocation of the myth. The habitats for each of these examples of Knowledge Returns, meanwhile, depicts an enormous salmon sculpture are culturally complex: the matsutake mushroom somehow thrives in supported horizontally, as it would be in a natural history museum. And post-industrial ruins; Fionn’s rise to greatness begins with a land dispute yet, imbued with a mytho-poetic past, the work evokes a history rich between kingdoms; and Dion’s focus on fish is presented in a context of with alternative modes of both literal and metaphorical consumption of fish farming, commodities trade and ocean trawling. The matsutake and the the natural world, unconnected to the workings of the modern industrial salmon both hold immense cultural value, and yet must also be understood economy. The salmon of the sculpture is connected to, and yet posed in relation to their broader implications for how the Capitalocene operates triumphantly above, a bed of tar and miscellanea of the kind found in An today. Uniting vocabularies of myth, industry and science, Dion’s works rejig Archaeology of Lost Objects: detritus of commodity culture such as watches, contemporary orders of being to accommodate a broadened sense of wonder jewellery, bowls, rope and mugs. This toxic bed metonymically represents at networked existences that transcends the industrial. They highlight the an industrial culture of trade reliant upon extraction for the production of strange intimacies of knowledge production around our environment, and objects imbued with capital value; Dion’s Salmon of Knowledge emerges ultimately construct new frameworks for being as potential paths to the from the muck to gaze into an odd, anthropocentric world restructured by ‘land of heart’s desire’ that the fairies of Yeats’s play allude to. This utopian an invisible and inhuman economy. humanimaland, never fully defined by Yeats, is similarly elusive in Dion’s The sculpture’s presence is complex: the lifelike, albeit enlarged, salmon practice. His drawings, sculptures and cabinets single out elements of a denotes centuries of observing, drawing and sculpting scientific models wider, commoditised world without fully describing it, perhaps provoking of the species, while also conjuring up the pre-Christian, pre-scientific us as viewers to reimagine it. significance of the fish in Irish mythology. Confronting the contemporary A small drawing by Dion, SOS (1998; see page 44), depicts a fishing uses and understandings of the fish with its folkloric resonances, Dion boat sinking, with its lost contents (‘55-gallon steel drum, wine bottle, plastic creates fault lines in our reading of the salmon’s value as both inclusive and transcendent of physical satisfaction. This post-economic view of consumable 11. Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of commodities has wide implications in modernity, as is detailed by Anna Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 121.

42 43 fish box’) listed beside it. The scene is one of loss and pollution, recalling increasingly ubiquitous stories of fishery collapse as much as accounts of the garbage patch now occupying more than 600,000 square miles of ocean surface.12 The drawing is a small apocalypse, a vignette of the ruins of capital. Yet we must ask, as in relation to all of Dion’s work: what lies beyond apocalypse? Armed with an embodied, mytho-scientific view, we might imagine the boat’s crew as having eaten the Salmon of Knowledge and survived in a Yeatsian utopia. We might also re-envision Aldrovandi’s hybrid ‘monsters’ not as far-away Others – to be feared – but rather as inspirations for intimacy and provocations for which, as Gómez-Barris notes, is required an ‘epistemological unmooring … for the settler to think differently about our relations to social and ecological worlds as we peer into the muck of the extractive zone’.13 This unmooring is begun in Dion’s work, which turns science on its head to illustrate the very ‘muck’ (be it tar, jewellery, lost objects or the way we conceive of the natural world) that defines modernity. We can adopt Dion’s curious eye – as activated in rituals of scientific drawing, meticulous categorisation and scientific method – to peer critically into the mechanisms of contemporary ruin with a respect for those that live within it. These rituals, unified with respect for the mythological, result in an epistemology that is both scientific and non-extractive. Given the ever- increasing spread of commoditisation of nature through applied science and capital-inflected legislation, these rituals might counteract ruin, or at least lead to an escape – as Yeats’s heroine does, through physical death but spiritual rebirth – from the throes of industry into the ‘land of heart’s desire’. At this point, we as a society had better make that space a reality, and quickly.

12. Doyle Rice, ‘World’s Largest Collection of Ocean Garbage is Twice the Size of Texas’, USA Today, 22 March 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/ science/2018/03/22/great-pacific-garbage-patch-grows/446405002/ [accessed 23 November 2018]. SOS, 1998 13. Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 138.

44 45 Field Station Honda – A Project for FLORA 3, 2013 Heron, 2017

46 47 The Old Crow, 2016

48

List of Exhibited Works

SOS, 1998 Africotropical, 2014 Bookstall – The Natural World, 2015 The Old Crow, 2016 Grey and blue pencil on paper, Screen print on paper (Griffelkunst Wood, metal, lacquer, books, postcards, Stuffed crow, books, costume jewellery 23 × 28.5 cm Edition), 40 × 30 cm prints, drawings, cord, clothes-pegs, and objects on wooden plinth, p. 44 187 × 183.5 × 90 cm 158 × 35 × 35 cm (with plinth) Nearctic, 2014 pp. 51–53 front cover, pp. 49, 50 Mark Dion and Robert Williams Screen print on paper (Griffelkunst Phylogenetic Trees, 2004 Edition), 40 × 30 cm The Salmon of Knowledge Returns, 2015 The Young Ichthyologist, 2016 Four lithographs on bread and butter Epoxy resin, steel, tar, wood, foam, Screen print on paper, ap 1 /3, 24 × 24 cm paper, 69 × 57 cm (each) Neotropical, 2014 paper, aerosol enamel, acrylic paints, pp. 2, 50 Screen print on paper (Griffelkunst adhesives, glass eyes, mixed media, Trouble with Jellyfish, 2016 Edition), 40 × 30 cm 200 × 300 × 90 cm Printed wallpaper Sea Life, 2011 pp. 38–41, back cover pp. 20–21, 38–39, 50 Wooden furniture, plastic objects, jars, Palaearctic, 2014 170 × 147 × 25 cm Screen print on paper (Griffelkunst Wunderkammer, 2015 Heron, 2017 pp. 13–15 Edition), 40 × 30 cm Digital print on paper, 35.5 × 27.2 cm Blue and red pencil on paper, 26 × 13.7 cm An Archaeology of Lost Objects, 2013 Rhinoceros Horn, 2014 Between Voltaire and Poe, 2016 p. 47 Archive cabinet, various found objects, Rhinoceros horn replica, bitumen, Wood furniture, cigar box, 100 × 109 × 63 cm flea‑market objects, 60 × 64 × 64 cm figurine, plastic, jars, bric-à-brac, Shark Barr, 2017 pp. 31–33 p. 19 208 × 147 × 25 cm Screen print on paper, ap 1 /5, 23 × 33 cm pp. 25–27 Field Station Honda – A Project The Aerial Realm, 2014 For Comparison of Scale, 2018 for FLORA 3, 2013 Screen print on paper (Griffelkunst Brontosaurus, 2016 Two-colour etching, 29.6 × 37.8 cm Print on paper, 35.5 × 27.2 cm Edition), 40 × 30 cm Screen print on paper, 26.5 × 32.5 cm p. 46 p. 8 The Fisheries, 2016 The Medicine Cabinet of Mystery, 2013 The Aquatic Realm, 2014 Paint, Aqua-Resin, rope, string, wood, Wooden shelf with door, various Screen print on paper (Griffelkunst nails, 250 × 496 × 90 cm objects, key, ribbon, reproduction Edition), 40 × 30 cm pp. 20–21 on cardboard, 70 × 47 × 20 cm p. 9 p. 34 The Miscellany Portfolio, 2016 Against the Current, 2015 Portfolio of 8 prints, 26 × 32.5 cm Resin, paint, baize, wood and glass display case, 108.5 × 44.5 × 116 cm pp. 4–5 (foreground)

54 55 Published on the occasion of the exhibition Photography credits: Ruarí Conaty: front cover, pp. 4–5, 13–15, 20–21, Mark Dion: Our Plundered Planet 25–27, 32–33, 38–41, 49–53, back cover Hugh Lane Gallery Simon Vogel: p. 19 4 April – 1 September 2019 Paco Gómez: p. 31 Bert Janssen: p. 34 Curated by Michael Dempsey, Raphael Fanelli: p. 44, 46, 47 Head of Exhibitions All rights reserved. No part of this publication Hugh Lane Gallery wishes to thank the may be reproduced or transmitted in any form following individuals who in various ways have or by any means, electronic or mechanical, helped to bring this exhibition and publication including photocopy, recording or any other together: Mark Dion for participating in our storage and retrieval system, without prior exhibition programme with Our Plundered permission in writing from the publisher. Planet; Prof. Dr Petra Lange-Berndt and Any copy of this book issued by the publishers Patrick Jaojoco for their illuminating catalogue is sold subject to the condition that it shall not texts; Janice Hough and the IMMA Residency by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, Programme; Tony Waddingham; Guillaume hired out or otherwise circulated without Blanc at AVF Production; Candy Stobbs the publishers’ prior consent in any form of at Whitechapel Gallery; Fabienne Leclerc binding or cover other than that in which it and Steven Daly at Galerie In Situ; Isabelle is published and without a similar condition Erben and Denise Moser at Galerie Nagel including these words being imposed on a Draxler; Michael Liebelt; Brandy Carstens at subsequent publisher. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Mary Conlon at Ormston House. Hugh Lane Gallery Charlemont House Copy Editor: First Edition Translations Ltd Parnell Square North Designer: Tony Waddingham, Oblique2 Dublin 1, D01 F2X9 Printed in Poland Ireland isbn: 978-1-901702-56-9 www.hughlane.ie

© 2019 Hugh Lane Gallery © The authors and Hugh Lane Gallery All artworks © Mark Dion, except p. 2 © Mark Dion and Robert Williams