I am late, very late. The overhead lights have dimmed and the auditorium has already been filled with bodies beyond its capacity. I squeeze past a group of students blocking the doorway and find a space just large enough to stand without having to breathe down someone else's neck. Only partially visible from where I stand, installation artist Mark Dion approaches the podium. I had not comprehended his popularity at CCA, but the crowd's attention lingers on his every word. He begins with a slideshow of his most notable works, narrating about the relationships he made while researching and producing these pieces. Perhaps due to my naivety of the artist's history, I was surprised that Dion was particularity interested in collaboration and the production of knowledge. Why would an artist so entrenched in the objects of nature approach them through the lens of the scientific institution? Why would Dion use the language of the knowledge systems that he seeks to critique? Why is satire so effective at undermining the integrity of what is critiqued?
Art has an incredible capacity to change the moral and pedagogical fabric of a culture. It can become nonlinear. It can create relationships and experiences that re-contextualize how we interact with the world around us. Mark Dion can be used as a metaphor for the cultural archaeologist who excavates not the history of the natural world, but the history (and present history) of the society that constructs this knowledge of nature. Through his use of the techniques of the scientific researcher, Dion utilizes the discourse of the natural history museum to focus a critical light on these processes of accumulation and construction of information.
How information is constructed and disseminated dictates the dominant ideology of a culture. Religion and the institutions of scientific thought have served as the distributors of this knowledge, allowing for gross abuses of power. The most heinous of these abuses are, in part, attributed to attempts to reduce the world into binaries which, ultimately, create very distinct power relations between these divisions. Often religions, and therefore, science will build their foundations motivated by these tendencies to essentialize. As a result, the cultures that encircle these institutions come to conceptualize their world through the manipulation and taxonomic arrangement of the world around them. Perhaps, however, I should provide a reminder of the consequences of binary thinking.
WWII was a time when a culture's ideas about the world around them grew into a mass of cancerous hate/fear-induced propaganda, ending in the systematic extermination of millions of people. The film, Paragraph 175 narrates the rarely-told story of the persecution of homosexuals in the holocaust. It stands out as a zenith, a moment in recent memory when intolerance married the social and scientific institutions of knowledge. Even more shocking is that Paragraph 175, the law that outlaws homosexuality was upheld (in subsequently milder forms) until 1994 (Paragraph 175).
The Holocaust and its aftermath have served as reminders for the immense power of ideology and the tendency to forget history. To not recognize a culture's past in relation to its present beliefs is akin to forgetting that all chickens are hatched from eggs. One of any seeds that germinated and allowed for the targeting and mass execution of male homosexuals during WWII was planted by anti-Nazi groups themselves. Many Germans critical of the Nazi's depicted them as homosexual to degrade their political and moral integrity. The result? The Nazi regime targeted homosexuals at an increasing rate. It was tagged as a "contagious disease" by the institutions of science (Paragraph 175).
Heartbreakingly enough as the Holocaust is in its very existence, persecuted homosexuals who survived were not subject to the same reparations as Jews. They were still considered criminals under Paragraph 175 and their stories went unheard for decades, often taken to their grave. As one interviewee described, no one had wanted to hear it, the culture would not acknowledge the persecution of gays in the war (Paragraph 175). This forgetting the past allows for it to play out in the future.
Residues of Nazi extremist thought have been found in the US Christian right, such as in Evangelism. Yes, that religion. The film, Jesus Camp explores a Pentecostal summer camp for children, or what I refer to as a training camp for pint-sized preachers. The film explores the Evangelical, and increasingly American, tendency to entangle politics with religion.
"It's no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!"
-- Pastor Becky Fischer (Jesus Camp)
Declaring a religious war on anything carries with it so many historical residues that its almost unfathomable how a woman like Becky Fischer could be so naive. With "In the name of God" as their catchphrase, a tool used to validate their every whim, the religious group can disseminate disinformation without hesitance (Jesus Camp). This is where it gets volatile.
This phase inevitably arises for me feelings of unease (and a little nausea). Where have I heard this before? Louis Crompton refers to this type of validation in his book, Homosexuality and Civilization, in which he states that "all infidels, like all Christians, were subject to the judgment of the church" and that the pope has claim to the "power of life and death over all sodomites, not only in Christian Europe but in lands of other faiths as yet unknown beyond the seas" (294). Historically, this type of unquestioned power has produced such atrocities as the Spanish inquisition and the Holocaust.
The horrors of the documentary continue: the Evangelical children were adoringly referred to by Fischer as "usable" (Jesus Camp). Excuse me? "Usable?" The parallels to German's Hitler youth are frightening. Once again, we are witnessing the culmination of a religious regime of hate. The use of deceptive arguments and rhetoric, the absolute certainty and paranoia produce a climate of fascism. What's more, Evangelical Christians do not stand alone in their use of fear and disinformation as a apparatus of cultural manipulation. The abjection of homosexuals by the black community serves as another example to how malleable our edifices of knowledge actually are.
"When I hear 'gay,' I think white and feminine," states James Richardson in an interview for Tomika Anderson's article, "The Demons Behind the Down Low" (Anderson 45). Clearly, Richardson's identity has been shaped by the culture he is immersed within. For girlfriends and wives of men who are "down low," a term used to describe closeted bisexual or homosexual black men, the consequences can be unexpectedly dire. How one defines one's identity reflects on how they will interact with others. Can this explain the contemporary phenomenon of huge numbers of black women becoming infected with HIV? As with conservative Christians, there exists a well of negative stereotypes of homosexuals in the black community (46). By tracing the shifting conceptions of homosexuality throughout history one will find that it falls in and out of favor with the shifting of dominant ideologies. The rise of Christianity, the Spanish inquisition, and the Nazi regime all dictated the consumption of 'knowledge' through the dissemination of propaganda. These cultures did not accept a variance in ways of knowing; they were climates of fear. Unfortunately, these are the histories taught to our children. What of other culture's ideologies?
Historically, (pre-Communist) China has possessed a greater weight of tolerance for homosexuality than Western societies.The country perceived, what Christian cultures referred to as, "sodomy" from a less extreme perspective, "as an escapable fact of human existence," writes Louis Crompton (243). So it seems that extremist moral and conceptual viewpoints are a result of rigid ideological structures. More fluid perspectives, like that of some non-Western opinions on homosexual acts, reflect what can be referred to as queer.
This queerness is an essential component to artistic process and production, especially to artists who employ the use of irony. An artist's use of binary oppositions, an intricate part of the development of myth and cultural norms, that contradict those of a culture's tradition can be used as platform for which to build new modes of knowing and perceiving the world around us. In fact, these new ideas can mirror those of alternative scientific perspectives: "All life is a form of cooperation, an expression of feedback arising out of the flux of chaos" Briggs and Peat state in their book, Turbulent Mirror, a testament to a more autopoietic view of evolution (156). These ideas of flux and feedback loops between organisms challenge dominant hegemony and promote comfort in the blurring of boundaries. By embracing dissonance cultural essentialisms start to fracture and fall into disarray. Mark Dion, through his artistic practice, does just this.
After modernism, art has become increasingly difficult to classify. Blurring the boundaries between mediums and practices, artists now often explore non-art fields. Dion's work has acutely perforated the film that separates the institutions of knowledge from the messy hands of artists. Often suiting up in the guise of a researcher or natural historian, Dion utilizes the rhetoric of the natural history institution against itself (Dion 3).
In our culture, Nature is represented through heavily mediated guises. Presented symbolically and through the lens of ideology, Nature is our society's hand mirror, reflecting the conceptual limits we impose on the world around us. The materials Dion employs, how they are used, push back against these scientific and Platonic traditions. He creates work that explores these tensions by juxtaposing the human tendency to organize, to reduce, with the chaos - the excess - that exists in the natural world. By recreating these taxonomies and subjecting their research processes to public scrutiny, the artist asks us to question how we come to know the natural world through certain lenses. "I'm not really interested in nature. I'm interested in ideas about nature," asserts Dion (Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century).
In Dion's "Tate Thames Dig" he recruits a group of volunteers to help him collect objects by the Thames riverbed near the locations of the old and recently constructed Tate museums. Hundreds of thousands of items were amassed and carefully cleaned and categorized through this two week endeavor. Dion and his team appropriated the roles of archaeologists, except the histories that they concerned themselves with were of those with traditionally little value to the Tate. Pieces of ceramic, glass, bones, shells, spoons, coins, bottles, tools, were carefully segregated into increasingly specific taxonomies. The items were then displayed neatly in a mahogany chest, referencing the old 'cabinets of curiosities' of past centuries. However, Dion allows for significant variations from orthodox museum collections; many of the systems of classification are purely aesthetic with no relation to linear or cultural history (Dion 4-6). Through this, the artist displays alternate histories and new ways of assessing knowledge through objects.
Juxtaposed with Dion's work and process I am reminded of the American movie figure Indiana Jones as an idealized figure of Western imperialism. He is America embodied: masculine, righteous, adventurous. However, the xenophobic depiction of the cultures his conquests lie within serve to remind us that history is written by those who conquer. Predominantly, a culture's learned history is that of compartmentalized ideas, serving the interests of the few at the expense of others.
Dion's work serves as a beacon to those who want to find ways to undermine and critique our established systems of knowledge.
"That’s what I see as the job of contemporary artists: to function as critical foils to dominant culture. My job as an artist isn’t to satisfy the public [...] I think the job of the artist is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception, prejudice, and convention…I think it’s really important that artists have an agitational function in culture. No one else seems to"
-- Mark Dion (Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century).
Through his work as an artist, Dion directly challenges the hierarchies of scientific and institutional knowledge. Although he performs the task of the scientist, exhaustively segregating objects into allocated categories, by allowing the public is allowed to watch this process, Dion opens a discourse that encourages questioning of established knowledge. To visually see how we come to order things allows for fluid interpretation. Binaries have not yet been solidified.
Jesus Camp may offer an glimpse into a more extremist religion, but Evangelists are not the only ones who teach their children that global warming should be discredited on the basis that the earth's temperature has risen "only 0.6 degrees" in recent years (Jesus Camp). This type of thinking arises from the lack of questions like, 'where do these ideas come from?' and 'what are the motives behind taking these ideological positions?' If only Becky Fischer had met Mark Dion, but I don't take her to be the one to mingle with artists. Interestingly enough, like Fischer, Dion's work is often reliant on the participation and cooperation of large groups of people. His artworks create relationships and emphasize collaboration across disciplines (Dion 6). He allows for an embracing of new relations between objects and organisms in nature. Acknowledging that permanence is an illusion and the urge to preserve the chaotic flux of nature, though arguably innately human, allows for hierarchal relations that can result in gross abuses. Fear of the Other knows no bounds. This is why homophobia is often accompanied by sexism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and animal cruelty. By embracing dissonance and queerness as inherent in the activity of life, one can undermine the taxonomic prescriptive paradigms that have motivated the oppression of the Other.
Works Cited
Anderson, Tomika L. "The Demons Behind the Down Low." POZ Magazine. September 2004: 45-47.
Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century. Season Four. DVD. Directed by Susan Sollins. Alexandria, VA: Art21, Inc., 2007.
Briggs, John, and F. David Peat. Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Sciences of Wholeness. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.
Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003.
Dion, Mark, and Colleen J. Sheehy. Cabinet of curiosities: Mark Dion and the university as installation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Jesus Camp. DVD. Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. A&E IndieFilms, 2006.
Paragraph 175. DVD. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Narrated by Rupert Everett. Telling Pictures, 2000.
2009
