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Tree Scheme $800. |
Mark Dion
Mark Dion is an outstanding contemporary artist whose work in the visual arts is highly interdisciplinary, and whose investigations embrace museumology, science including its history and methodology, archaeology, environmental studies and other related fields. His explorations of museum practices and installation methodology often blur the line between artwork and museum exhibit. Dion’s research and exhibitions, often site-specific, have touched on such timely and critical issues as the philosophy and ethics of collecting, the diversity of museum collections, mediated approaches to nature through the lens of dominant ideologies, environmental politics and public policy.
Dion based his two-color lithograph Tree Scheme on the “figurative system of human knowledge,” or the tree of Diderot and d’Alembert. This classification system was developed to represent the taxonomy of human knowledge itself and appeared in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a general encyclopedia published in France in the last half of the 1700s. Dion literally adopted the idea of the “tree” and entitled it “The Representation of Nature” on the trunk. Its leafless branches bear words—terms, names, disciplines—that relate to our responses to, and knowledge and classification of, the natural world. Surrounding the tree on the ground are objects that can be taken as a warning: the watering can of “The Museum of Natural History,” which can nurture the tree, the axes of “capitalism” and “the art world,” which can cut it down, and the fungi of “inertia.”
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Copyright and Reproduction
The electronic images available on this site are subject to copyright and may be covered by other restrictions as well. The images are made available to the general public as a representation of work produced at USF Graphicstudio. Copy or redistribution in any manner for commercial use is not permitted. Anyone wishing to use any of these images for commercial use, publication, or for any purpose other than personal fair use must first request and receive prior written permission from the University of South Florida Institute for Research in Art. Please contact Director of Marketing and Sales Kristin Soderqvist at 813.974.5871 for more information.
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