Mark Dion and the Politics of Knowledge

Since the emergence of conceptual and research-based practices, contemporary art has increasingly been shaped by what has been described as “the obsession of the archive.” As Marco Scotini framed it in his mid-2000s book Archivi impossibili, this archival turn is as much a symptom as it is a response—a structural fixation that surfaces when history, ideology and belief systems begin to fracture. Over time, the rapid evolution and expansion of technologies—and of the digital realm that now filters, manipulates and reshapes much of our experience of the world—have made this impulse even more urgent. What began with art has since spread well beyond it, feeding into a broader nostalgia-driven economy that emerges in reaction to the increasing dematerialization and depersonalization of our tools of experience.

Following the collapse of grand narratives, many artists turned to fragments, documents, testimonies and administrative remnants, assembling what Scotini defines as “impossible archives.” These structures rarely heal the fractures they expose; instead, they make them visible. They function as instruments that reveal a growing historical amnesia—not merely a lack of awareness, but a more troubling detachment from the sociopolitical and natural realities that surround us.

At the same time, the archival impulse—and the act of collecting objects that has long characterized humankind—can be read as an instinctive response to entropy, the governing principle of all physical existence. Condemned to a continuous cycle of birth, transformation and decay, matter is momentarily arrested through the act of collection, as if archiving itself could exorcize impermanence.

Artist Mark Dion stands among the most influential figures working within this archival paradigm. For more than three decades, he has treated the archive not as a repository of facts but as a critical device—transforming it into a theatrical stage that exposes how knowledge is constructed, classified and institutionalized. Long before contemporary anxieties around A.I., datasets and synthetic memory entered mainstream discourse, Dion was dismantling the authority of museums, natural history collections and scientific taxonomies, revealing how the very structures of display and visual illustration shape epistemological frameworks—systems through which we organize knowledge and memory, and through which we understand and describe reality. All of this unfolds within a long-standing anthropocentric ideology that places humans in a dominant position over the environment—an ideology whose failures and fractures are now increasingly apparent.

Rather than mining archives to recover marginalized voices and erased stories, Dion interrogates the intersection between epistemological mechanisms and institutional frameworks that determine what is worth archiving in the first place: who decides when an object or material presence becomes an artifact worthy of study? His encyclopedic approach draws intuitively from materials that allow him to probe the systems shaping our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. In doing so, Dion also challenges the distinctions between so-called “objective” or “rational” scientific methods and “subjective” or “irrational” influences, exposing the criteria through which authority, reliability and relevance are constructed.

Dion’s insistence on materiality feels especially urgent today, at a time when memory itself is being re-engineered into increasingly artificial and digital forms that often sever it from its original physical referent. “I think I’m really committed to materiality,” Dion tells Observer. “Material objects communicate in a way that’s fundamentally different from everything else. They tell you so much—not just about the maker, but about the material itself, the period, the conditions of their making.”

Across years of sustained practice, Dion has spent extensive time in museums—not only in front-of-house galleries, but also in back-of-house storage spaces, where much of the institutional collection remains hidden from public view. “They’re incredibly inspiring environments for me,” he says. “Seeing how researchers engage with objects, and witnessing this ongoing struggle against entropy that takes place in archives, feels deeply important.”

While Dion acknowledges the advantages of digital representation—particularly its ability to circulate images without transporting fragile objects across the world—he emphasizes how fundamentally different it is from a sensorial encounter with physical matter. “Looking at images or scans of things is not the same as holding an object in your hands, feeling its weight, seeing the marks left by its maker. There’s something profound about realizing you’re holding something that someone else held 800 years ago. That creates a powerful connection with someone who came before.”

Dion’s practice can be understood as a form of contemporary archaeology, through which he acts as both anthropologist and sociologist—a method of collecting traces of physical existence to interrogate, both emotionally and cognitively, what they can still reveal about human evolution and the construction of our shared dominant narrative and worldview. “Objects can do that in a way images often can’t. What Walter Benjamin called the aura—the aura of the actual object—is incredibly potent, because embedded in it is the hand of the maker, the workshop, the entire history of its making and handling.”

As Dion describes his process, it unfolds through an intuitive encounter with materials and the stories they embody. “It’s a lot of footwork. I’m constantly out there—antique malls, junk stores, yard sales, flea markets. You really have to immerse yourself in the search,” he says. “I spend a huge amount of time out there. And the more time you put in, the more you start to understand value in a very different way. You develop a sense of what things are rare, what they are worth, and what you should pay for them… the flea market really is my studio.”

Although he collaborates with carpenters to build structures and works with assistants to fabricate objects and produce watercolors, Dion cannot outsource the act of searching itself. “It requires too much intuition, too much sensibility. That’s the one part of the process I have to do myself.”

The final work—especially in his archival cabinets and museographic installations—often takes on a kind of character through the stories these objects carry. “I’m constructing a persona through an accumulation of objects,” he acknowledges. This is why objects need to carry a patina of use—a visible history.

This emphasis on material specificity also explains Dion’s preference for site-specific projects. His approach is inherently contextual. “The context tells me what to do. The site visit is crucial, as is the research that happens during and after it. The site always determines the methodology—it tells me what questions to ask.”

One of the most ambitious long-term installations Dion has created is The Field Station of the Melancholy Marine Biologist, a semi-permanent work on Governors Island that crystallizes many of the core concerns of his practice: classification, ecological grief, institutional authority and the quiet violence embedded in systems of knowledge. Conceived as the working environment of a fictional marine biologist, the installation stages a research station filled with specimens, instruments, charts, notebooks and vitrines resembling those found in natural history museums or field laboratories. What initially appears rigorously scientific—orderly, methodical, authoritative—gradually reveals its fiction the longer one remains inside. “I often think of these installations as crime scenes,” Dion notes, “where the viewer becomes the detective.”

With a similar logic, Dion inaugurated Mrs. Christopher Street House last year in Pittsburgh, after several years of work. The new permanent site-specific installation transforms a three-story domestic structure into a layered narrative intertwining American history, nature and social ideology. The project begins with a meticulously reconstructed 1961 Christmas Eve living room that captures the aspirations of a blue-collar family and refracts the mythology of the American Dream. Realized as part of Troy Hill Art Houses, a long-term public art initiative launched by Pittsburgh art collector Evan Mirapaul, the work is described by Dion as “a mini-retrospective,” connecting directly to the city’s history through objects imbued with local meanings and to his earlier works. “I visited Pittsburgh and was immediately seduced by the opportunity—precisely because it would be permanent,” he recalls. “I wanted to construct a house that could function as a lasting introduction to my methodology and my way of working.”

As becomes clear from his approach to these manifesto-like projects, the gallery remains the most difficult context for Dion, as it does not inherently pose questions beyond its own institutional logic—a framework Dion is largely uninterested in revisiting. The challenge with a show like this, then, is how to plant a fulcrum within the gallery—something around which the exhibition can cohere. In this case, that fulcrum is the animal realm. “It’s a subject I’ve been engaged with since the late 1980s,” he says, explaining how this exhibition feels both like a continuation of that investigation and a return to the kinds of work he was making in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Although Dion’s work is not overtly political, it is important to him that each piece carries meaning—whether as a question or a message. This is why another recurring aspect of his practice is the staging of tension, and sometimes even friction, between the human-made and natural worlds. Yet this never reads as simple pessimism, but rather as a critical examination of the supposedly objective, rational and scientific frameworks that have historically justified humanity’s domination of nature.

At its core is a sustained interrogation of representation itself. “It’s all about what those representations tell us about how—and why—we’ve developed this strange, almost suicidal relationship to the planet,” Dion observes. This inquiry naturally extends to capitalism and colonialism, both grounded in extractive logics, as well as to deeper evolutionary factors. “Our ability to transform the environment gave us a certain advantage over other species. Whether that’s a long-term advantage is another question, because we’re clearly creating conditions that may become intolerable for us.”

This time, works on paper occupy a central place in the exhibition, surprising many visitors who expected Dion’s signature immersive installations. Historically, his drawings functioned primarily as preparatory studies. “Drawings, on their own, are not something the New York audience associates with my work,” he says. “I’ve shown them elsewhere—in Paris, Germany, Stockholm—but for New York, where people think they know my work best, this felt genuinely new.”

Among the first works visitors encounter is a series of drawings depicting animals, each paired with unexpected and often paradoxical textual frameworks. In one, a pterodactyl is surrounded by the names of major Western philosophers; in another, a cricket is encircled by attitudes toward society and politics, mapping what the title calls the “anatomy of a conspiracy theorist fantasy.” Elsewhere, a life-size human skeleton is accompanied by terms related to natural disasters, tracing an “anatomy of global warming.” These texts do not describe the image so much as destabilize it.

There is no explicit explanation of how these words are chosen or what they are meant to signify in relation to the image. They feel like collisions between different layers of information—what Dion himself calls “car crashes of different kinds of information.”

Dion has long been interested in the history of scientific illustration, particularly in periods when artists and scientists were not clearly distinguished. “There’s this cliché that scientists don’t know much about art,” he notes, “but in my experience it’s often the opposite. It’s artists who don’t know much about science. Many scientists—especially in the natural sciences—are incredibly skilled draftspeople.”

Early on, Dion imagined a different path. He studied art with the intention of becoming a dinosaur illustrator. “I imagined myself illustrating the prehistoric world, and I even went to study with one of the most famous dinosaur illustrators at the time,” he recalls. Encounters with figures such as Jack Goldstein, Vito Acconci, Allan Sekula and Dan Graham, however, shifted his trajectory. “It made me realize that what I was really interested in wasn’t illustration at all, but ideas.”

What ultimately matters is how these works undermine the expectations attached to scientific imagery, problematizing the very notion of illustration and documentation. More broadly, they expose the conventional—and often arbitrary—linguistic and symbolic systems humans have developed to name, classify and control nature.

Read through a Deleuzian lens, his recurring engagement with animals operates not as metaphor or allegory, but as a strategy of displacement—what Deleuze and Guattari would describe as a refusal of hierarchical knowledge structures—destabilizing the anthropocentric epistemology, interrupting the human as the central measure of meaning, and opening perception toward other modes of existence that resist classification, domination and instrumental reason.

“From a distance, you might expect them to be didactic,” Dion reflects. “They do tell you something, but not what you expect. They stretch meaning rather than fix it.” As associations loosen and sometimes veer into the surreal, the viewer is compelled to construct meaning actively. “That tension—between what you see and what you read—is always crucial.” This fracture between image and language draws attention to the process of signification itself. In an era defined by continuous information flows and rapid visual consumption, Dion’s work insists on slowness. “It’s also a kind of trick—a way of slowing the viewer down,” he says. “You have to commit time. And committing time means committing thought.”