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Mark Dion in "Ecology" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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    MARK DION:
    I'm very much
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    an artist who gets a lot from things.
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    I really love the world of stuff.
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    I am constantly out there buying 
    things going to flea markets
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    and yard sales and junk stores
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    and I like to surround myself with 
    things that are inspirational.
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    Some artists paint, some sculpt,
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    some take photographs
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    and I shop
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    and that's what I do.
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    Sometimes those things stay in the barn
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    and sometimes they enter into my every day life
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    and sometimes they become part 
    of a sculpture, an installation.
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    I really identify with the mission of the museum
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    where you go to gain knowledge through things
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    and I think that that's a mission that's 
    very close to what sculpture is about
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    and what installation is about
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    and what for me contemporary art is about.
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    I am not looking for the newest museum.
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    I am always looking for the oldest museum.
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    I'm looking for museums that are very much 
    a kind of window into the past in a sense.
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    You really get an idea of what people thought 
    about the natural world at a particular time.
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    Their obsessions, their 
    sensibilities, their prejudices.
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    All of my ideas start here, with 
    writing and drawing and sketches,
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    both conceptual and practical.
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    There are a lot of tools that the artist 
    has that the scientist doesn't have.
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    Humor, irony, metaphor these are the 
    sort of bread and butter of artists.
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    This work is about the introduction 
    of rats to Puffin Island,
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    which is an island off the coast of Wales,
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    as people started increasingly 
    to visit the island,
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    rats kind of tagged along
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    and soon the puffin colony was entirely destroyed.
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    Tar has been used as a kind of form of 
    punishment and retribution since the Middle Ages.
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    It's this sort of natural material 
    that has this history of a…
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    as a kind of expression of intolerance.
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    In the states, people used to tar 
    the bodies of pirates and convicts
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    who were executed so the corpses would 
    last longer to function as a warning.
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    In the middle ages, boiling 
    tar was used to defend cities.
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    They threw it from the parapets
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    so there's all sorts of associations 
    with tar and of history of intolerance.
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    I'm not one of these artists who is spending a 
    lot of time imagining a better ecological future.
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    I'm more the kind of artist who is 
    holding up a mirror to the present.
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    We're at this kind of moment in time where
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    we have a great test ahead of us
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    in terms of our relationship to the natural world.
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    If we pass the test, we get to keep the planet.
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    But I don't really see us doing a 
    very good job of that right now.
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    I'm not really interested in nature.
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    I'm interested in ideas about nature.
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    That's really what my work is 
    about, is examining those ideas–
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    where do they come from, what's 
    the historical groundwork for them?
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    I think for myself and for a number of artists,
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    science really functions as our worldview.
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    I mean our relationship to 
    science is very much like
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    a Renaissance artists relationship to theology.
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    That's really what I see as the 
    primary job of contemporary art
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    is to function as a critical 
    foil to dominate culture.
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    We're now outside of Seattle 
    in protected watershed area
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    and this is where the tree is coming 
    from for the SEATTLE VIVARIUM.
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    It's a very large hemlock tree which fell 
    on the evening of February 8th, 1996.
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    In some way I want to 
    acknowledge the wonder of just
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    the vast complexity and diversity 
    within a natural system.
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    We'll have the real soil that 
    came from around the tree.
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    We'll have some of the mosses, some of the ferns,
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    some of the simple plants, lots of the fungi.
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    There's all kinds of other stuff in here of 
    course that's fallen from the forest canopy
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    and is trapped in here.
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    So we might have hemlock seeds,
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    or a whole variety of things 
    that are already in this moss.
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    On the tree is the basis of the next forest.
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    The tree supports a living biosystem within it.
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    There is an aspect of this piece 
    that is optimistic in a sense.
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    The tree is giving life through its death.
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    That's part of the excitement of piece:
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    once it's finished, it's just starting.
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    In a sense what I'm doing is,
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    I'm bringing a forgotten element of 
    the environment back into the city.
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    I'm taking something that would have 
    existed here a very long time ago
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    and I'm returning it to that site,
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    almost a kind of reminder.
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    In order to protect the tree 
    from the heat of days like this,
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    we need to build a shelter for it.
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    That's going to be one of our big jobs,
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    not only putting the tree in place today,
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    but also we have to build a structure 
    around is going to shield it from the sun
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    so we're not killing off all the communities 
    that this place is meant to foster.
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    When you're working on a project like this,
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    it's really like directing a film.
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    We worked with advisors, with soil scientists,
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    with biologists, and with architects.
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    So there's a huge team of people.
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    I want to see here how it's going to line up.
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    Once we get it down, we're not 
    going to ever move it again.
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    It has to fit the building perfectly so 
    it's really necessary that we get it right.
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    This is a piece that really 
    is in some way perverse.
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    It really shows that despite 
    all of our technology,
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    despite all of our money, when 
    we destroy a natural system,
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    it's virtually impossible to get it back.
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    It's an incredibly interesting hybrid 
    space that we're putting this tree into,
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    which is something like a showroom,
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    something like a classroom,
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    and something like a laboratory.
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    It's really exciting to see the 
    culmination of five years of research,
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    planning, compromising, and finally 
    have some kind of triumph in a way.
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    I worked a lot on designing the building to 
    have a particular kind of forced perspective.
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    It's a triangular building and you 
    enter through the nose of the triangle,
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    the narrowest point.
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    When you walk through those doors,
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    you are in a very different kind of place–
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    a really fantastical place.
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    I wanted to have this Alice 
    through the rabbit hole effect.
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    I'm trying to motivate through 
    a sense of the marvelous,
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    through a sense of the wonderful.
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    This is not a natural space.
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    This is really a very particular 
    kind of garden that we're making.
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    We have this incredible apparatus 
    of a water catchment system,
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    and irrigation system, cooling systems,
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    panels to control the light levels.
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    The glass to replicate the color 
    spectrum that you have under the canopy.
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    We've really tried to highlight the 
    difficulty of replicating what nature can do.
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    A number of tiles have been produced 
    by local wildlife illustrators.
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    On those tiles are the organisms that live 
    in on and around the tree, lovingly depicted.
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    Here are some of the early drawings.
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    There's also one of the schemes for 
    the rainwater harvesting system.
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    There are some of the tools that we 
    used in our collecting expeditions.
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    I wanted to make something that would 
    exist over a long period of time
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    that people could come to and they 
    could bring their children to,
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    and their children could bring their children to.
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    Every time you walk through the door, you are 
    experiencing something a little bit different.
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    That was really my goal in this piece, 
    to emphasize nature as a process.
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    I really expect that you leave this place maybe 
    with more questions then when you come in.
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    One of the interesting things 
    about being part of the park
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    is that you know here there are 
    these amazing masters of sculpture.
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    That's a lot to live up to.
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    For me it's a little bit of 
    an intimidating situation,
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    but it also really did raise the bar for me
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    when I was thinking about 
    what I wanted to do here.
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    This is a work of art dealing 
    with a lot of the same issues,
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    but with a very different toolbox.
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    Making a piece like this, it's like having 
    a kid this is a lifetime commitment.
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    It's a living artwork and we have 
    to be responsive to that dynamic.
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    It's exciting.
Title:
Mark Dion in "Ecology" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
Art21
Project:
"Art in the Twenty-First Century" broadcast series
Duration:
14:50

English (United States) subtitles

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