{"id":20691,"date":"2026-01-29T23:44:44","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T23:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/29\/interview-mark-dions-archives-and-the-politics-of-knowledge\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T23:44:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T23:44:48","slug":"interview-mark-dions-archives-and-the-politics-of-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/29\/interview-mark-dions-archives-and-the-politics-of-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Mark Dion\u2019s Archives and the Politics of Knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Installation view: \u201cMark Dion\u201d at Tanya Bonakdar in New York. Dan Bradica Studio<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since the emergence of conceptual and research-based practices, contemporary art has increasingly been shaped by what has been described as \u201cthe obsession of the archive.\u201d As Marco Scotini<\/a> framed it in his mid-2000s book Archivi impossibili<\/i>, this archival turn is as much a symptom as it is a response\u2014a structural fixation that surfaces when history, ideology and belief systems begin to fracture. Over time, the rapid evolution and expansion of technologies\u2014and of the digital realm that now filters, manipulates and reshapes much of our experience of the world\u2014have 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.<\/p>\n

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Following the collapse of grand narratives, many artists turned to fragments, documents, testimonies and administrative remnants, assembling what Scotini defines as \u201cimpossible archives.\u201d These structures rarely heal the fractures they expose; instead, they make them visible. They function as instruments that reveal a growing historical amnesia\u2014not merely a lack of awareness, but a more troubling detachment from the sociopolitical and natural realities that surround us.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the archival impulse\u2014and the act of collecting objects that has long characterized humankind\u2014can 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.<\/p>\n

Artist Mark Dion<\/a> 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\u2014transforming 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\u2014systems 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\u2014an ideology whose failures and fractures are now increasingly apparent.<\/p>\n

\"Black-and-white\"Black-and-white
Mark Dion. Photo: Jorge Colombo<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 \u201cobjective\u201d or \u201crational\u201d scientific methods and \u201csubjective\u201d or \u201cirrational\u201d influences, exposing the criteria through which authority, reliability and relevance are constructed.<\/p>\n

Dion\u2019s 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. \u201cI think I\u2019m really committed to materiality,\u201d Dion tells Observer. \u201cMaterial objects communicate in a way that\u2019s fundamentally different from everything else. They tell you so much\u2014not just about the maker, but about the material itself, the period, the conditions of their making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across years of sustained practice, Dion has spent extensive time in museums\u2014not 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. \u201cThey\u2019re incredibly inspiring environments for me,\u201d he says. \u201cSeeing how researchers engage with objects, and witnessing this ongoing struggle against entropy that takes place in archives, feels deeply important.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Dion acknowledges the advantages of digital representation\u2014particularly its ability to circulate images without transporting fragile objects across the world\u2014he emphasizes how fundamentally different it is from a sensorial encounter with physical matter. \u201cLooking 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\u2019s something profound about realizing you\u2019re holding something that someone else held 800 years ago. That creates a powerful connection with someone who came before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\"A
Dion uses found objects to create sculptures and installations, and his drawings feature straightforward figural representation and standard didactic graphic formats. Dan Bradica Studio<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dion\u2019s practice can be understood as a form of contemporary archaeology, through which he acts as both anthropologist and sociologist\u2014a 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. \u201cObjects can do that in a way images often can\u2019t. What Walter Benjamin<\/a> called the aura\u2014the aura of the actual object\u2014is incredibly potent, because embedded in it is the hand of the maker, the workshop, the entire history of its making and handling.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Dion describes his process, it unfolds through an intuitive encounter with materials and the stories they embody. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of footwork. I\u2019m constantly out there\u2014antique malls, junk stores, yard sales, flea markets. You really have to immerse yourself in the search,\u201d he says. \u201cI 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\u2026 the flea market really is my studio.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt requires too much intuition, too much sensibility. That\u2019s the one part of the process I have to do myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final work\u2014especially in his archival cabinets and museographic installations\u2014often takes on a kind of character through the stories these objects carry. \u201cI\u2019m constructing a persona through an accumulation of objects,\u201d he acknowledges. This is why objects need to carry a patina of use\u2014a visible history.<\/p>\n

This emphasis on material specificity also explains Dion\u2019s preference for site-specific projects. His approach is inherently contextual. \u201cThe 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\u2014it tells me what questions to ask.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most ambitious long-term installations Dion has created is The Field Station of the Melancholy Marine Biologist<\/i>, 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\u2014orderly, methodical, authoritative\u2014gradually reveals its fiction the longer one remains inside. \u201cI often think of these installations as crime scenes,\u201d Dion notes, \u201cwhere the viewer becomes the detective.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"An\"An
Since the 1980s, Dion\u2019s work has addressed the world we live in by adopting, and then subverting, its vernacular forms and institutional systems. Dan Bradica Studio<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With a similar logic, Dion inaugurated Mrs. Christopher Street House<\/i> 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<\/a>, the work is described by Dion as \u201ca mini-retrospective,\u201d connecting directly to the city\u2019s history through objects imbued with local meanings and to his earlier works. \u201cI visited Pittsburgh and was immediately seduced by the opportunity\u2014precisely because it would be permanent,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI wanted to construct a house that could function as a lasting introduction to my methodology and my way of working.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014a framework Dion is largely uninterested in revisiting. The challenge with a show like this, then, is how to plant a fulcrum within the gallery\u2014something around which the exhibition can cohere. In this case, that fulcrum is the animal realm. \u201cIt\u2019s a subject I\u2019ve been engaged with since the late 1980s,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Although Dion\u2019s work is not overtly political, it is important to him that each piece carries meaning\u2014whether 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\u2019s domination of nature.<\/p>\n

At its core is a sustained interrogation of representation itself. \u201cIt\u2019s all about what those representations tell us about how\u2014and why\u2014we\u2019ve developed this strange, almost suicidal relationship to the planet,\u201d Dion observes. This inquiry naturally extends to capitalism and colonialism, both grounded in extractive logics, as well as to deeper evolutionary factors. \u201cOur ability to transform the environment gave us a certain advantage over other species. Whether that\u2019s a long-term advantage is another question, because we\u2019re clearly creating conditions that may become intolerable for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

This time, works on paper occupy a central place in the exhibition, surprising many visitors who expected Dion\u2019s signature immersive installations. Historically, his drawings functioned primarily as preparatory studies. \u201cDrawings, on their own, are not something the New York audience associates with my work,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve shown them elsewhere\u2014in Paris, Germany, Stockholm\u2014but for New York, where people think they know my work best, this felt genuinely new.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201canatomy of a conspiracy theorist fantasy.\u201d Elsewhere, a life-size human skeleton is accompanied by terms related to natural disasters, tracing an \u201canatomy of global warming.\u201d These texts do not describe the image so much as destabilize it.<\/p>\n

\"Dion\u2019s\"Dion\u2019s
At Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, viewers initially engage with the artist\u2019s line drawings reminiscent of illustrations in books read in childhood, when learning was undertaken with joy and exuberance. Dan Bradica Studio<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2014what Dion himself calls \u201ccar crashes of different kinds of information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dion has long been interested in the history of scientific illustration, particularly in periods when artists and scientists were not clearly distinguished. \u201cThere\u2019s this clich\u00e9 that scientists don\u2019t know much about art,\u201d he notes, \u201cbut in my experience it\u2019s often the opposite. It\u2019s artists who don\u2019t know much about science. Many scientists\u2014especially in the natural sciences\u2014are incredibly skilled draftspeople.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early on, Dion imagined a different path. He studied art with the intention of becoming a dinosaur illustrator. \u201cI imagined myself illustrating the prehistoric world, and I even went to study with one of the most famous dinosaur illustrators at the time,\u201d he recalls. Encounters with figures such as Jack Goldstein<\/a>, Vito Acconci<\/a>, Allan Sekula<\/a> and Dan Graham<\/a>, however, shifted his trajectory. \u201cIt made me realize that what I was really interested in wasn\u2019t illustration at all, but ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014and often arbitrary\u2014linguistic and symbolic systems humans have developed to name, classify and control nature.<\/p>\n

Read through a Deleuzian lens, his recurring engagement with animals operates not as metaphor or allegory, but as a strategy of displacement\u2014what Deleuze and Guattari would describe as a refusal of hierarchical knowledge structures\u2014destabilizing 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a distance, you might expect them to be didactic,\u201d Dion reflects. \u201cThey do tell you something, but not what you expect. They stretch meaning rather than fix it.\u201d As associations loosen and sometimes veer into the surreal, the viewer is compelled to construct meaning actively. \u201cThat tension\u2014between what you see and what you read\u2014is always crucial.\u201d 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\u2019s work insists on slowness. \u201cIt\u2019s also a kind of trick\u2014a way of slowing the viewer down,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have to commit time. And committing time means committing thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Installed\"Installed
Dion\u2019s works on paper appear instructional, but upon closer inspection, the rationale for pairing particular terms with certain images remains elusive. Dan Bradica Studio<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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In this sense, Dion\u2019s approach to image echoes what Gilles Deleuze described as learning through signs rather than through instruction: knowledge does not precede the encounter but emerges from it\u2014produced in that precise moment of friction, delay and misrecognition. Meaning is not delivered but generated, as the viewer is compelled to remain with ambiguity rather than resolve it.<\/p>\n

That pause can open another level of cognition. Viewers must invest time, and investing time means investing thought. This combination of commitment to understanding, curiosity, discovery and critical interrogation of reality is what truly anchors Dion\u2019s entire practice. In this light, the drawings ultimately reveal the core of his artistic investigation and the kind of relationship he has always sought with the viewer. \u201cI think curiosity sets off a chain reaction: curiosity leads to wonder, and wonder eventually leads to knowledge,\u201d he emphasizes, noting how his work aims to re-trigger that sense of discovery that should be fundamental to being human, but which today feels dulled by overexposure. \u201cThere\u2019s perception, then curiosity, then wonder\u2014and the payoff is understanding. But that only happens through commitment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMark Dion<\/a>\u201d is at Tanya Bonakdar in New York through February 12, 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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