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A Giant Cabinet of Curiosities Challenges Taxonomy Traditions | Liberal Arts

Artist Mark Dion mined Vassar’s archives to create a historical narrative free of nostalgia.

It’s Back to School season, so to honor your return to art class or design school, we've compiled some personal stories and projects in our Liberal Arts series to help you rethink or reshape your educated perspective.

A bewildering array of objects lines the shelves of an imposing, three-story cabinet at the entrance to the art gallery at Vassar College. New York-based artist Mark Dion is known for these cabinets, creating similar installations for the Tate Gallery, PS1, and the MoMA. As artist-in-residence at Vassar, Dion assembled this latest work, Universal Collection, culling all of the displayed objects from the college’s various archives.

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“An aspect of the work, overt or not, is the narrative of the treasure hunt through closets, attics, basements and hidden nooks,” Dion says.

Taxidermied animals, biological specimens preserved in jars, mid-century microscopes, and mineral samples populate shelves, some behind glass doors. Along the highest edge, stuffed birds of prey and masks stoically watch over the hall. Each object is familiar but in this context is twisted by a few degrees from reality.

Every object is placed meticulously, but the relationship of each set of objects to the next is oblique. The viewer is forced to wonder why these artifacts belong together. “If the rigidity of taxonomy is carefully undermined, interesting things begin to happen,” Dion tells The Creators Project. “These fantastical objects become even more uncanny when they become untethered to their function or narrative.”

With the staggering array towering overhead, the viewer accesses several drawers at the cabinet’s lowest section. The objects in each drawer have no apparent relation to those in the last. The viewer pulls the drawers, again and again, and with each pull comes a revelation: class rings, an old Vassar pennant, scientific illustrations, children’s blocks.

This “carefully constructed interactivity,” Dion says, “empowers the viewer and makes them feel a bit more mastery over their experience.” It also ensures that the piece cannot be experienced in images alone. The viewer must be present. “I do like to insist that unless you experience [Universal Collection] in person, you are not really getting it.”

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No object has come far—at most across this tiny college campus — to find a place in the Universal Collection. And so the dreamlike quality of the installation is reinforced.

This particular 32' tall cabinet and its abstrusely arranged collection of objects were pulled from the basements and closets of various departments: science, art, and drama. The Universal Collection begs the questions: Where were these objects before they were here? Where have they been? Who has handled them and why?

For each object there is an entirely different answer. That is the staggering quality of the installation. “I resist overly detailed accounts of what the objects actually are,” Dion says. “I want fresh associations and a rebus-like effect to take over the viewer’s reading of the work.”

It is remarkable to view such a broad assemblage of histories, to reflect on the histories of these objects, or to impose histories on them. The collection is not sentimental. “Sentimentality and nostalgia are the tripwires that must be carefully avoided when making art which employs the culture of things,” Dion says. There is a palpable sense of the historical in Universal Collection. But there is no clear commentary on that history and, according to Dion, no bittersweet vision of it.

“I think it is possible for artists to speak about history and memory without expressing longing for a lost past. After all, for most of us—women, the poor or working class, people of color, LGBT [people]—the past was not the good old days. It was a story of overt repression and stifled opportunity,” Dion says. “I think artists can be historians with a different material vocabulary.”

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Universal Collection is on display at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, through December 11, 2016. To learn more about the artist click here.

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