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Mark Dion - Neukom Vivarium

ART21: Can you say more about what you mean by not necessarily giving your audience what they want?

DION: My job as an artist isn’t to satisfy the public. That’s not what I do. I don’t necessarily make people happy. I think the job of an artist is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception, prejudice, and convention. A big flaw in some public art schemes is that they seem to be about trying to find an artist who’s going to please everyone. That’s not interesting to me. I think it’s really important that artists have an agitational function in culture. No one else seems to.

ART21: How does Neukom Vivarium politically engage your audience?

DION: I’m not sure there is a really succinct way to talk about how this piece politically engages people. In a sense, what I’m doing is bringing a forgotten element of the environment back into the city. I’m taking something that would have existed on that site a long time ago and returning it to that site. But, at the same time, I’m building a cultural framework around it.

One of the things that’s difficult about this piece is that it’s hard to locate where the work is. It’s not the tree, and it’s not the building, and it’s not the details like the tiles or the field guide. But it’s really the entire thing. Of course, people tend to focus on the tree, as though the other thing was just a frame, but it’s really an integrated work. It’s not a piece of architecture; it’s a work of art. It’s a total artwork.

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Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium

http://blog.art21.org/2011/11/02/thinking-about-interdisciplinary-teaching-with-mark-dions-neukom-vivarium/#.UlKYUijvO24

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Wellington Maps

http://wellington.govt.nz/about-wellington/maps/scaled-maps

City Service Centre 101 Wakefield Street

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TROPICOMANIA: “THE SOCIAL LIFE OF PLANTS” AT BETONSALON, PARIS

This exhibition at the Betonsalon Art Center in Paris tries to address the socio-economic, cultural and political implications behind the worldwide circulation of tropical plants since the 16th century.

Through anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s concepts of “social life” of things or “cultural biography” of objects, Tropicomania shows the implications of the expansions of tropical products from the local to the global scale.

Artworks, scientific illustrations, maps, films are showed to address “the interrelation between science, exoticism and commerce, and the power relations engendered by this very alliance.”

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Schematic for terrarium casing.