Mark Dion's "The Library for the Birds of New York"

The following entry pertains to an artwork owned by Mr and Mrs Ptolemy and recently sold to a buyer in Germany. The sale was necessary, as it was time, but wrenching nonetheless:

Mark Dion’s “The Library for the Birds of New York”

We purchased the “tree” at American Fine Arts, the historic gallery owned and operated by the legendary Colin DeLand, in February, 1996. “Everyone” in the New York art world came to see the tree. On the day we bought it, Roberta Smith, the critic, Dennis Adams the conceptual sculptor and Mrs. Brice Marden, a painter, had come to the gallery to see the work.

At the time, Dion’s work was not widely known, especially in the United States. Dion’s work at that time was said to be made with a purpose not known in the art world. Dion had the goal of explaining the environment, science and the history of science to the general public, and he believed that much of such knowledge was better and more understandably transmitted by a knowledgeable artist in the form of artworks than by scientific discourse transmitted by technical people. The work is in this sense educational, even didactic.

Dion’s primary artistic innovation was to apply organizational techniques of science to the creation of artworks. The simple thesis is that all art is the organization by an artist according to aesthetic criteria to raw data and materials found in the world. In a painting, the artist takes ordinary materials like paint and canvas and arranges them on the surface of the canvas. Dion would walk through the fish markets of Chinatown in lower Manhattan, buy the fish, sort them by species, put them in jars and display them in a configuration that would be like that of a marine biologist had the latter arranged the jars. The rigorous method of organization would almost always result in a superior work of art.

In the case of the “Library,” Dion undertook to organize the collective knowledge, opinions, sentiments and mythology of the Western civilizations concerning birds. In short the work is an artist’s replication of what Michel Foucault might have called the episteme of the Western World about birds. Most of this is embodied in the books about birds, all meticulously chosen to mark the development and present state of the episteme. The work is organized according to categories, for example, the philosophy of nature shelf (on a separate limb of the three) at the top, because our culture privileges philosophy, which includes Foucault’s seminal work, “The Order of Things,” and other shelves devoted to history, mythology and ornithology. Other shelves are devoted to Rachel Carson, the first popular environmentalist, while others include works by authors such as Paul Ehrlich, an early alarmist about the growth of world population.

The work includes the physical accouterments of the bird culture, such as the bird cages, the English naturalist’s collection bag, for which Mark searched London shops for three years until he could find the “right” one, the shotgun shells, pictures depicting Audubon (who had a terrible reputation as a destroyer of many birds in the course of collecting specimens) and Alfred Hitchcock of the popular culture. The tree displays a snake and rat that have been tarred and feathered, an old punishment from the American frontier that preceded banishment. The snake and the rat are being punished for their destruction of birds, but the irony is that while human beings rarely harm birds directly we are responsible for moving rats and snakes into positions where they can harm birds – an aspect of unintended consequences. For example, there were no rats in the Western Hemisphere until they were brought over by European ships. The net bag of vegetable are there to remind us that there is nothing more environmentally destructive than vegetarianism because of the chemicals required to grow vegetables.

The tree itself is a cedar. It was felled and dragged out of a forest in northeast Pennsylvania near the farm where Mark lived at the time. The trunk was split vertically, and the entire tree was then soaked in fiberglass to strengthen it and to kill the remaining bugs. The books were collected over a five-year period.

As in the ending of “The Order of Things,” where Foucault looks forward to the death of “man,” Dion’s tree follows the Heideggerian principle that man’s Cartesian reckoning of himself as an “I” separate from nature outside is not only wrong but ultimately responsible for an unjustifiable exploitation, and often destruction, of nature. The bird episteme depicted in the tree is predicted by Dion ultimately to collapse and fail when man becomes sufficiently enlightened to see himself as one with nature and not separate. Just as the tree once lived but is now dead, so is the culture depicted on the tree destined to collapse. This is shown by the pile of secondary and simple books about nature and birds, all culled from college and high school libraries, scattered meaninglessly at the bottom of the tree.

In any event, the owner of this grand work must be prepared to allow birds flying overhead to alight on the tree, to rest and to read about what people think about them. The owner’s relishing of this irony is the prime benefit from owning it.