Mark Dion's environments are a bit like art for geeks: a taxonomy of species (mainly insects) and objects found in urban spaces like the Brompton Cemetary, Highgate, and the Thames. In the latter, his research teams find way more plastic bags, balls of all sorts and other waste, but also a dozen species of fish, including a sea horse! And the probes have been taken in front of Battersea Power Station, not Henley.I do like these taxonomic, almost scientific apporoaches in the art world, being it Michael Landy's 'Breakdown' or Joseph Beuys' 'Wirtschaftswerte' - meticulously documenting, clustering, and clinically displaying whatever they chose to examine. Dion's projects have an archeological strand excavating living creatures as well as man-made objects from locations across the globe. His style of installation, however, reminds me of Damie Hirst's glass vitrines.
My favourite piece in this exhition is the stuff that he digged out of the Themse river, and put it into a translucent tent: you can see what's inside, including clay pipes from the 17th century, but it is all fuzzy and blur, just like the murky water where it rested for weeks or centuries. Only when you walk around it, you can gaze through a fine green moskito-like net, and out of a sudden the objects become clear and sharp - and, well, greener. A nice reflection of the fact, that the Thames is actually a clean river, ok, at least from Fulham upstream.
Until 2 September 2007 at the Natural History Museum
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