Mark Dion: Concerning Hunting

For over twenty years, the repertoire of American artist Mark Dion has included staged workbenches, dusty storage vaults, stuffed bears, and tarred birds. Ostensibly, his installations, interventions, performances, and photographs critique humankind’s often cruel treatment of nature. However, the artist also demonstrates that “nature” is a mere construct that is constantly being reshaped and reinterpreted. Dion’s current project, Concerning Hunting, examines hunting as a traditional, but controversial, cultural practice. One of the fascinating things about hunting is its fundamental contradictoriness: the sensitivity of the hunter and his profound knowledge about what nature requires are also expressed through the act of killing animals. Dion’s artistic examinations do not focus on nature as such, but rather on the hunt as a way culture deals with it.