by "John Muir Woods," aka Jackie McAllister,
and Marisa Bowe

Although Mark Dion is best known as an artist concerned with issues of ecology and conservation, he has said he considers himself to be first and foremost a political artist. As such, Dion has been interested since the beginning of his career in issues of popular media and representation. Using multidiscipinary tools, Dion embodies the artist as postmodern muckraker.

Dion's work owes a debt to Dorfman and Mattelart's How to Read Donald Duck, published in Chile in 1971. In Donald, a Situationist-inspired "detournement," the authors denounce and analyze the Disney comic as a weapon of cultural imperialism. Donald's strong influence on Dion can be seen beginning with some of his earliest mature work.

"Toys 'R' U.S.", for example, an installation staged by Dion for the exhibition "The Fairy Tale: Politics, Desire and Everyday Life," at Artists Space, New York, in 1988, explored that decade's international Smurf pheomenon. Smurf commodities, memorabilia, and paraphernalia of every type; from dishware to bed sheets to wallpaper, were stock-piled over a period of months and used to cover every square inch of a simulated child's bedroom. Playing on a television in the room were videotapes of Smurfs cartoons with their original audio band erased and replaced with a voice, sped up to mimic Smurf voices, delivering a sociological reading of the Smurf world: noting the existence, for instance, of the lone female in the land of Smurfs. This set-up allowed an analysis of the Smurfs in economic terms, such as their impact on the international toy market, as well as in ideological terms: viewing Smurf cartoons as a surrogate form of modern fairy tale embodying and transmitting cultural values.

(Eight years later Dion employed similar methodology for "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" (Toys 'R' U.S.), American Fine Arts, Co., New York, 1994, to examine the craze for dinosaurs, especially in the wake of Steven Spielberg's movie Jurassic Park.)

Dion's international reputation results from having successfully merged his critical and political interests with his childhood love of nature. Dion realized he could apply insights about the politics of representation and popular media to nature and the institutions responsible for educating people about it, such as natural history museums. Many of Dion's works explore the history and fantasy of natural science. In particular, he has been interested in the European explorer/naturalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose adventures in the "wild" became the basis for contemporary scientific systems of thought about nature.

A piece made in collaboration with William Schefferine, "Selections from the Endangered Species List (the Vertebrata), or Commander McBrag--Taxonomist" (1989) showed the desk of an absent person who had ostensibly been typing a critique of natural history museum procedures. The paraphernalia around the desk created a diorama-like scene of a 19th century naturalist/adventurer's scholarly habitat. But on closer examination these items indicated the contemporary world of dying nature, making the point that for the present-day explorer, discovery consists of realizing what has disappeared.

Another collaboration with Schefferine, "Survival of the Cutest" (1989) criticized environmentalists' habit of crusading on behalf of "charismatic megafauna" (large, attractive animals) rather than overall ecosystems.

For his exhibition "Extinction, Dinosaurs and Disney" at Galerie Sylvana Lorenz in Paris, 1990, Dion installed "The Desks of Mickey Cuvier." Responding to the then recent completion of Euro-Disney located outside Paris, and his own interest in Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a French zoologist, Dion melded together the personae of Mickey Mouse and Cuvier to produce a composite savant figure: Mickey Cuvier. In the gallery notes for the piece, Dion explains that Cuvier was the most renowned and influential scientist of his time. He revised the scientific classification of animals, founded the science of paleontology, and was the first to establish the fact of extinction.

Alongside these brilliant achievements however, Cuvier, a theological and political conservative, held certain beliefs scientists have long known to be false. The most important of these was "catastrophism," a theory which opposed Lamarck's pre-Darwinian theories of evolution by positing that species, rather than evolving, died out during violent natural events, and were then replaced. Cuvier, who was a powerful public figure, ridiculed and successfully discredited Larmarck's theories.

In Dion's installation, the stuffed, animated Mickey figures, with factory-installed voice boxes altered, expounded humorously with analyses, quotes, and comments on Cuvier's theories. Each Disney character, dressed in appropriate work garb, was seated behind or placed at different work desks cluttered with scientific diagrams and implements, stuffed animals, books, etc., as well as toy figures of cartoon characters preserved with formaldehyde in specimen jars. Objects strewn about the desks had been chosen to reflect, and were used and associated with, Cuvier's respective investigations and theories; the extinction of species, Deep Time (the vast geological timeframe first proposed by Cuvier), evolution and dinosaurs, and the control and taxonomy of the natural world. (Cuvier had prodigious work habits: an expert in various nascent scientific fields, he had set up a number of desks at which he could delve into different areas of scientific inquiry, and from which at regular intervals in his workday he would rotate from one to another, changing focus from one discipline to another as he went.)

While these pieces criticized Cuvier, they acknowledge his contribution to scientific understanding of geological time. But "Deep Time/Disney Time" suggested such knowledge is more or less moot in the face of the mass media's nonstop fantasy blitz. One of the desks, entitled "The Fixity of a Rodent Species," referred to Cuvier's theory that species do not evolve. Yet on the blackboard behind Mickey there was a diagram of his own evolution. (Mickey as product and corporate symbol was altered over the years to look more and more infantile, as natural history essayist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his 1980 book The Panda's Thumb.)

The contradictory figure of Mickey Cuvier embodies the hierarchical interpretations of culture and nature that Cuvier and Disney (both man and corporation) wished to project on man, history, geography, and even the future.

As part of an exhibition at American Fine Arts, Co., Dion organized "The Department of Marine Animal Identification of the City of New York (Chinatown Division)" and "The Upper West Side Plant Project." Continuing with practices of classification and taxonomy, the mission of this fictitious bureau was to scientifically classify the wide range of seafood and vegetables available in Chinese and Latino markets during two four-hour shopping trips. Dion performed as pseudo-naturalist, sitting in the gallery day after day classifying and preserving the fish, vegetables, and fruit he had bought.

Typical of Dion is the combined research, display, and performative aspect of these works: allowing him wide range to scrutinize convergences and divergences between ordered culture and unruly nature. Dion stages these collisions with whimsy and carries through the procedures with scientific rigor while exhibiting a marked situational wit.