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

MARK DION:
I'm very much

an artist who gets a lot from things.

I really love the world of stuff.

I am constantly out there buying 
things going to flea markets

and yard sales and junk stores

and I like to surround myself with 
things that are inspirational.

Some artists paint, some sculpt,

some take photographs

and I shop

and that's what I do.

Sometimes those things stay in the barn

and sometimes they enter into my every day life

and sometimes they become part 
of a sculpture, an installation.

I really identify with the mission of the museum

where you go to gain knowledge through things

and I think that that's a mission that's 
very close to what sculpture is about

and what installation is about

and what for me contemporary art is about.

I am not looking for the newest museum.

I am always looking for the oldest museum.

I'm looking for museums that are very much 
a kind of window into the past in a sense.

You really get an idea of what people thought 
about the natural world at a particular time.

Their obsessions, their 
sensibilities, their prejudices.

All of my ideas start here, with 
writing and drawing and sketches,

both conceptual and practical.

There are a lot of tools that the artist 
has that the scientist doesn't have.

Humor, irony, metaphor these are the 
sort of bread and butter of artists.

This work is about the introduction 
of rats to Puffin Island,

which is an island off the coast of Wales,

as people started increasingly 
to visit the island,

rats kind of tagged along

and soon the puffin colony was entirely destroyed.

Tar has been used as a kind of form of 
punishment and retribution since the Middle Ages.

It's this sort of natural material 
that has this history of a…

as a kind of expression of intolerance.

In the states, people used to tar 
the bodies of pirates and convicts

who were executed so the corpses would 
last longer to function as a warning.

In the middle ages, boiling 
tar was used to defend cities.

They threw it from the parapets

so there's all sorts of associations 
with tar and of history of intolerance.

I'm not one of these artists who is spending a 
lot of time imagining a better ecological future.

I'm more the kind of artist who is 
holding up a mirror to the present.

We're at this kind of moment in time where

we have a great test ahead of us

in terms of our relationship to the natural world.

If we pass the test, we get to keep the planet.

But I don't really see us doing a 
very good job of that right now.

I'm not really interested in nature.

I'm interested in ideas about nature.

That's really what my work is 
about, is examining those ideas–

where do they come from, what's 
the historical groundwork for them?

I think for myself and for a number of artists,

science really functions as our worldview.

I mean our relationship to 
science is very much like

a Renaissance artists relationship to theology.

That's really what I see as the 
primary job of contemporary art

is to function as a critical 
foil to dominate culture.

We're now outside of Seattle 
in protected watershed area

and this is where the tree is coming 
from for the SEATTLE VIVARIUM.

It's a very large hemlock tree which fell 
on the evening of February 8th, 1996.

In some way I want to 
acknowledge the wonder of just

the vast complexity and diversity 
within a natural system.

We'll have the real soil that 
came from around the tree.

We'll have some of the mosses, some of the ferns,

some of the simple plants, lots of the fungi.

There's all kinds of other stuff in here of 
course that's fallen from the forest canopy

and is trapped in here.

So we might have hemlock seeds,

or a whole variety of things 
that are already in this moss.

On the tree is the basis of the next forest.

The tree supports a living biosystem within it.

There is an aspect of this piece 
that is optimistic in a sense.

The tree is giving life through its death.

That's part of the excitement of piece:

once it's finished, it's just starting.

In a sense what I'm doing is,

I'm bringing a forgotten element of 
the environment back into the city.

I'm taking something that would have 
existed here a very long time ago

and I'm returning it to that site,

almost a kind of reminder.

In order to protect the tree 
from the heat of days like this,

we need to build a shelter for it.

That's going to be one of our big jobs,

not only putting the tree in place today,

but also we have to build a structure 
around is going to shield it from the sun

so we're not killing off all the communities 
that this place is meant to foster.

When you're working on a project like this,

it's really like directing a film.

We worked with advisors, with soil scientists,

with biologists, and with architects.

So there's a huge team of people.

I want to see here how it's going to line up.

Once we get it down, we're not 
going to ever move it again.

It has to fit the building perfectly so 
it's really necessary that we get it right.

This is a piece that really 
is in some way perverse.

It really shows that despite 
all of our technology,

despite all of our money, when 
we destroy a natural system,

it's virtually impossible to get it back.

It's an incredibly interesting hybrid 
space that we're putting this tree into,

which is something like a showroom,

something like a classroom,

and something like a laboratory.

It's really exciting to see the 
culmination of five years of research,

planning, compromising, and finally 
have some kind of triumph in a way.

I worked a lot on designing the building to 
have a particular kind of forced perspective.

It's a triangular building and you 
enter through the nose of the triangle,

the narrowest point.

When you walk through those doors,

you are in a very different kind of place–

a really fantastical place.

I wanted to have this Alice 
through the rabbit hole effect.

I'm trying to motivate through 
a sense of the marvelous,

through a sense of the wonderful.

This is not a natural space.

This is really a very particular 
kind of garden that we're making.

We have this incredible apparatus 
of a water catchment system,

and irrigation system, cooling systems,

panels to control the light levels.

The glass to replicate the color 
spectrum that you have under the canopy.

We've really tried to highlight the 
difficulty of replicating what nature can do.

A number of tiles have been produced 
by local wildlife illustrators.

On those tiles are the organisms that live 
in on and around the tree, lovingly depicted.

Here are some of the early drawings.

There's also one of the schemes for 
the rainwater harvesting system.

There are some of the tools that we 
used in our collecting expeditions.

I wanted to make something that would 
exist over a long period of time

that people could come to and they 
could bring their children to,

and their children could bring their children to.

Every time you walk through the door, you are 
experiencing something a little bit different.

That was really my goal in this piece, 
to emphasize nature as a process.

I really expect that you leave this place maybe 
with more questions then when you come in.

One of the interesting things 
about being part of the park

is that you know here there are 
these amazing masters of sculpture.

That's a lot to live up to.

For me it's a little bit of 
an intimidating situation,

but it also really did raise the bar for me

when I was thinking about 
what I wanted to do here.

This is a work of art dealing 
with a lot of the same issues,

but with a very different toolbox.

Making a piece like this, it's like having 
a kid this is a lifetime commitment.

It's a living artwork and we have 
to be responsive to that dynamic.

It's exciting.