A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects
Mark Dion: Excavations is experienced in a 1,600-sq-ft gallery featuring one 10-foot-long pack rat sculpture, two site-specific installations and six new anatomical drawings. Artist Mark Dion’s new works are interspersed by La Brea Tar Pits museum masterpieces including the Time Ribbon mural, and a long hidden diorama. Visitors encounter the immersive installation as though they have trespassed into a behind-the-scenes staging area for a new exhibition only to slowly discern that they are surrounded by a mischievous blend of artifice and reality. The focus of the installation is the larger-than-life (~1000% larger) sculpture of a fossilized pack rat (Neotoma sp.) skeleton. For Dion, the (normally) tiny pack rat is the ideal symbol for the Tar Pits, a sort of mascot for museum collections. Though often overlooked by visitors in favor of the much larger and more charismatic saber-toothed cat or dire wolf, the pack rat is important to scientists because it produces coprolites (fossilized dung) and middens (nests), which can preserve organic material dating back tens of thousands of years. These middens can show which plants and animals were present and even what the climate was like. In other words, like the tar pits, a cabinet of curiosity, or a museum, the nest of a pack rat is its own idiosyncratic collection, accumulated over hundreds or in some cases thousands of years. As a reference to a pack rat midden, the sculpted skeleton in Dion's installation stands atop a mix of cultural detritus from the history of paleontology and the history of Los Angeles itself.
Adding to this fantastical mashup of art and science, six new anatomical drawings by Dion of megafauna found in the tar pits like the extinct camel and dire wolf are installed in the gallery. The drawings resemble informational pull down charts or chalkboard diagrams. On close inspection, visitors ascertain the text refers not to the names of bones, but to a surprising listing of Los Angeles artists, historical figures, bands and other categories. Dion has produced artwork engaging the history of natural history and the topic of extinction for over thirty years. These anatomical charts highlight his often humorous, subversive methodology.
Dion's drawings and sculpture are intermingled with classic museum displays and artwork from past decades, including Time Ribbon (c. 1980). A floor-to-ceiling mural on the gallery's north wall, Time Ribbon depicts the history of life from the Big Bang to the Space Age, with the transition from the age of mammals to the first person in space occupying no more than a couple of inches. It was designed by paleobiologist J. William Schopf and painted by artists Jerome and Elma Connolly. Adjacent to Time Ribbon and east of the pack rat sculpture, a previously walled-off diorama featuring a vulture, coyote, and juniper tree fossil will be partially exposed, leading people to question whether the diorama is being installed or deinstalled. Finally, the exhibition features reproductions of maquettes created by paleoartists Charles Knight and Herman T. Beck, including maquettes Beck made for the ground sloth and short-faced bear sculptures still found in Hancock Park today.
The exhibition is the result of Mark Dion’s experiences during a long residency at La Brea Tar Pits and museum. Dion spent time with many members of the Tar Pits team from paleontologists to educators and volunteers. He describes his time at the Tar Pits as “inspirational, productive and thoroughly joyful. I had no idea so much death could be so intellectually stimulating”.
La Brea Tar Pits
5801 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
MON-SUN:9:30am-5:30pm
CLOSED FIRST TUE OF EVERY MONTH
Discussion Questions
- In art museums, Dion’s installations are clearly experienced as works of art. However, in Excavations, his intervention is seamlessly woven between museum displays in an existing gallery. Visitors could easily perceive the giant pack rack skeleton as one of the many Ice Age fossils displayed at the Tar Pits. What responsibility does a science museum have towards visitors in identifying Dion’s installation as a work of art? How does labeling it (or not labeling it) as an artwork change how visitors think about science, and art, at La Brea Tar Pits? How does Dion’s approach differ from the tradition of Paleo-Art?
- Museums derive, or rather exert, authority from the size, breadth, and completion of their collections. Yet increasingly, attention is directed towards the biases inherent in these collections due to individual personalities, sexism, racism, colonialism, and the desires of wealthy donors. The Tar Pits museum is unique in that its collection is entirely dependent on an idiosyncratic natural process: entrapment in asphalt. And it is completely based on the site itself: nothing has been taken from one location to any other. How does Dion’s pack rat collector highlight the idiosyncrasies and biases inherent in the collections of “authoritative” cultural and scientific institutions? What more should museums be doing to reveal and counteract these biases in their own collections? Or rather, does the value of a collection actually derive from the idiosyncrasies of the collector? Many would make this case for small, independent museums that hold collections ignored by large institutions.
- With Excavations, Dion posits that while art and science are not the same, they are allied practices, and that sometimes a piece of art can do as much to inspire and inform a museum audience as more literal didactics. Science is usually described as influencing or directing the art on display at natural history museums. But, what tools do science and art share in common? And how does the art on display at museums like La Brea Tar Pits influence the science being done there?
- The Tar Pits museum is a maverick in the history of museum display. It is the first institution that allowed visitors a view into the back room, giving them a glimpse into the process of collecting, preparing, and storing specimens. Dion’s installation is inspired by the museum’s “fishbowl” Fossil Lab, where the process of science is on display rather than static specimens. In some way Dion’s tableaus are actually dioramas of the investigative process itself. How is this different from viewing actual processes themselves? What processes is Dion trying to highlight?
Bibliographic References
