The Artist–Historian: Victorian natural history in the work of Mark Dion

Abstract

AbstractThis 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 ha...