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Abstract
This essay examines how the contemporary artist Mark Dion re-presents Victorian natural history in a number of key works. It considers the visualization of Victorian natural history across a variety of media including photography, installation, and site-specific activities. The artist’s interest in the historical narratives of this subject area is argued to be a significant, but thus far overlooked, element of his practice. By considering Dion’s practice in relation to the broader context of postmodernist historiographic enquiry, the essay presents the discussed works as visual forms of historiographic metafiction that seek to interrogate history’s content and forms through intertextual compositions. In this way, the artist’s representations of anonymous, amateur, and marginalized characters from the histories of Victorian natural history are argued to correspond with the late twentieth-century artistic tendency towards institutional critique in their focus upon how, and why, certain narratives have been historiographically favoured or commonly overlooked.
Notes
1. See Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. by John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts, ed. by Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016). Commonly discussed works include John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), television series such as Fingersmith (2005–) based on the novel by Sarah Waters of the same name (2002), and film productions such as Dreamchild, written by Dennis Potter and directed by Gavin Millar (1985).
2. On this trend, see Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, ‘Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism’, Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011), 1–23; Sonia Solicari, ‘Neo-Victorian Things: A Scrapbook’, in Victoriana: A Miscellany, ed. by Solicari, exhib. cat. (London: Guildhall Art Gallery, 2013); and ‘Introduction’, in Secret Victorians: Contemporary Artists and a 19th-Century Vision, ed. by Melissa E. Feldman and Ingrid Schaffner, exhib. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, 1999).
3. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the artists who work with such subject matter, but both Kiefer and Wall (and to some extent Gerhard Richter) have been frequently and explicitly discussed in relation to historiographic memorialization ‘after the event’. On Kiefer, see Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Andrew Weinstein, ‘From the Sublime to the Abject: Six Decades of Art’, in Absence/Presence: Essays and Reflections on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. by Steve Feinstein (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005); Andreas Huyssen, ‘Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth’, October, 48 (Spring 1989), 25–45; on Wall, see Paul Gough, ‘The Living, The Dead and the Imagery of Emptiness and Re-appearance on the Battlefields of the Western Front’, in Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance, ed. by James D. Sidaway (London: Routledge, 2016), 263–80; and Joanna Lowry, ‘History, Allegory, Technologies of Vision’, in History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art, ed. by David Green and Peter Seddon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 97–111.
4. On Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1974–1979), see Jane F. Gerhard, The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970–2007 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2014); Susan Havens Caldwell, ‘Experiencing “The Dinner Party”’, Woman’s Art Journal, 1:2 (Autumn 1980–Winter 1981), 35–7; and Carol Snyder, ‘Reading the Language of “The Dinner Party”’, Woman’s Art Journal, 1:2 (Autumn 1980–Winter 1981), 30–4; Wilson has worked in this way across a number of works, but here I am specifically referencing his curatorial installation Mining the Museum, at the Maryland Historical Society (1992–1993). On this work, see Maurice Berger, Jennifer A. González, and Fred Wilson, Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000, exhib. cat. (University of Maryland, MD: Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, 2001); Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, ‘Mining the Museum’, Grand Street, 44 (1993), pp. 151–72; and Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. by Fred Wilson (London: Ridinghouse, 2011).
5. The work of key theorists in this area, such as Roland Barthes and Hayden White, will be discussed later in this essay.
6. Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/University Press of New England, 2005 [1997]), p. 10. It is important to note that Iggers, and other historians and historiography specialists, such as Richard J. Evans (1997) and José C. Bermejo-Barrera (1993), have, in turn, highlighted the limitations and problematics of this literary view of the subject’s construction and signification.
7. Iggers, 2005, pp. 13–14.
8. Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Natural World (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 5.
9. The work was commissioned by curator Andrew Cross as part of the Arts Transpennine ’98 project and funded by the National Lottery Fund.
10. The photographs themselves were taken by a hired studio photographer before being framed by Puett. The objects that surround each subject had been collected over the course of many months by both Dion and Puett, including the antique backdrops in the scenes. I would like to thank J. Morgan Puett for this information.
11. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012.
12. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012.
13. For further reading on how the female self was viewed in relation to scientific practice in this period, see Jeanne Kay Guelke and Karen M. Morin, ‘Gender, Nature, Empire: Women Naturalists in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Literature’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26:3 (2001), 306–26; Julie English Early, ‘The Spectacle of Science and Self: Mary Kingsley’, in Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, ed. by Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 215–36; Stephen J. Gould, ‘Recuperating the Women’, in Gates and Shteir, 1997, 27–39; Evelleen Richards, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals’, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 119–42; George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Mary R. S. Creese, Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800–1900 (Lanham: MD, 1998); and Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007).
14. Julia Kristeva, Word, Dialogue and Novel, 1966, p. 85, cited in The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 37. Originally translated by T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. S. Roudiez, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
15. Heidi Hansson, Romance Revived: Postmodern Romances and the Tradition (Umeå: Umeå University Press, 1998), p. 117.
16. In her introduction to History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Kate Mitchell explores the concept of ‘nostalgia’ in relation to postmodern returns to the past as an effect with the potential to subvert rather than romance the reader’s understanding of the historical past. See pp. 3–7.
17. The models included Lisa Corrin of the Serpentine Gallery, Iwona Blaswick and Frances Morris from Tate Modern, and Gilda Williams, a commissioning editor for Phaidon Publishing.
18. Saskia Bos, ‘Selections from the Endangered Species List (the Vertebrata), or Commander McBrag Taxonomist’, in Natural History and Other Fictions: An Exhibition by Mark Dion. An Illustrated History of the Wonderful and Curious Things of Nature Existing Before and Since the Deluge, exhib. cat. (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1997), p. 19.
19. Solicari, 2013, p. 49.
20. See Polly Morgan: Psychopomps, exhib. cat. (London: Haunch of Venison, 2011), examples of works that use taxidermy include To Every Seed His Own Body (2006), Communion (2011), and Hanging in the Balance (2013); Mat Collishaw, exhib. cat. (London: Blain Southern, 2012). Collishaw uses the zoetrope in his 2014 work All Things Fall, and In Fairyland: The World of Tessa Farmer, ed. by Catriona McAra (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2016); see, for example, The Depraved Pursuit of a Possum (2013).
21. Wallace spent eight years (1854–1862) exploring the Malay Archipelago and it was where he conceived the theory of evolution by natural selection, writing down his ideas in a 4000-word essay that he sent to Charles Darwin. The theory was widely known as the Darwin–Wallace theory for much of the nineteenth century.
22. Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), p. 13. For examples of this trend in Victorian natural history writing, see Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860); Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Sea-Shore (London: Routledge & Sons, 1855); and Arabella Buckley, The Fairy-Land of Science (London: Edward Stanford, 1878).
23. Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1908 [1863]), p. 187.
24. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012.
25. Lisa G. Corrin, ‘Mark Dion’s Project: A Natural History of Wonder and a Wonderful History of Nature,’ in Mark Dion, ed. by Lisa G. Corrin, Miwon Kwon, and Norman Bryson (London: Phaidon, 1997), p. 124.
26. Roland Barthes, ‘Le discours de l’histoire,’ Social Science Information, VI, 65–75, in English, ‘The Discourse of History’, trans. by Stephen Bann, in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, Vol. 3, ed. by E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 [1967]), pp. 16–17 (his italics).
27. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 92.
28. Towards the end of his life, the precarious state of Wallace’s finances following a loss of income and the struggle to find work led to Thomas Huxley, William Spottiswood, and Joseph Hooker petitioning William Gladstone to provide Wallace with a £200 pension (which Gladstone granted).
29. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1990 [1987]), p. 42.
30. Andrea Fraser, ‘What is Institutional Critique?’, in Institutional Critique and After, ed. by John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2006), p. 305.
31. James Meyer, ‘The Functional Site’, in Platzwechsel, exhib. cat. (Zurich: Kunstahalle Zurich, 1995), p. 27, cited in Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 29.
32. Meyer, 1995, p. 21.
33. Kwon, 2004, p. 29.
34. On inheriting his brother’s surveying tools, Wallace was able to benefit from the explosion in railway building in the mid-nineteenth century, allowing him to earn and save a substantial amount of money over a relatively short period following his brother’s death in 1846.
35. Braine worked with Dion on several projects from 1989 to 2005.
36. Kwon, 2004, p. 28.
37. Corrin, in Corrin et al., 1997, p. 84.
38. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2006 [1966]), p. 147.
39. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, or the Wonders of the sea-shore (London: Routledge & Sons, 1904 [1855]), p. 24. For more on Waterton’s Nondescript, a fictional object that critiques taxonomical accuracies, see Brian W. Edginton, Charles Waterton: A Biography (London: James Clarke & Co., 1996).
40. Hutcheon, 1988, p. 106 (her italics).
41. Of course, for those periods that remain within living memory the task is problematized in entirely different ways.
42. Interview with Mark Dion, April 2012.