Mark Dion's Cabinets of Curiosity

Dion, Mark. 2014. Cabinet of Marine Debris. Installation. Natural Wonders: the Sublime in Contemporary Art: Rizzoli Electa.

Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of marine debris at Hampton Beach, December 2017.

Mark Dion is an American artist who works with issues related to natural history and the environment, with works often presented in a museological context.

The image accompanying this post is a photograph I took a few years back, of a navigational buoy, washed up on my local beach. This type of marine debris seems almost sculptural in isolation, until one considers the compounding effect of all this pollution in our oceans. Hence I found Mark Dion’s Cabinet of Marine Debris 2014 very poignant, with its thematic collection of bottles and flotation devices. The work is a symbolic representation of our disregard for the sea, as evidenced by the careless pollution of Dion’s flotsam relics, through to current-day attempts to strip-mine the sea floor (Bryan 2023).

This installation reminds me of the many, post-modernist ways a viewer can consider a work, from a superficial interpretation (e.g., this is a collection of marine artefacts) through to a more contextual consideration (e.g., these artifacts are indicative of mankind’s lack of care for the sea).

Bibliography:

• Bryan, Kenza. 2023. "Tipping point in global fight over seabed mining." Australian Financial Review, 10 July 2023, 2023. Accessed 13 October 2023. https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/tipping-point-in-global-fight-over-seabed-mining-20230710-p5dmz6.