98A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONBoth epistemic modalities constructed spatializations whose material
specificities defined the optics of natural history. The metaphorical and
technical flattening of animals and plants operated by these two epis-
temic spatializations enabled the transposition of the living organism
into the discourses of the new discipline. But at the same time, it set the
epistemic blueprint of the scientific modality for centuries to come—a
modality based on reduction, objectification, and commoditization of
the nonhuman. As is seen in the case of Fairnington’s paintings, some
contemporary artists are concerned with critically addressing this an-
thropocentric construction of knowledge for the purpose of dismantling
metanarratives and unhinging disciplinary discourses to move them
forward in new and challenging directions. Among the contemporary
artists who have engaged in a critical appraisal of these epistemic mo-
dalities, Mark Dion’s work provides an interesting problematization of
this chapter’s content.
Recent years have seen a symptomatic surge of interest in the notion
of curiosity.^87 Artists and curators indulge in the possibility of bypassing
the scientific rationalizations of the world, and they long for a momen-
tary return, at least in art, to a different ontological fluidity.^88 As the
Guardian reported in winter 2014:
You can barely walk into a museum these days without being confronted
by an eerie-eyed raven or a monkey’s shrunken head. From Margate to
Nottingham, from Hackney to Bradford, exhibition spaces are filling up
with a macabre menagerie of dead things—from bones and beasts to
stuffed birds. Indeed, next week the Milton Keynes Gallery will join the
trend, opening a modern “cabinet of curiosities” that will set paintings
by Gainsborough, Millais, Warhol and David Bowie next to taxidermied
pelicans, medieval maps, and even an Aston Martin DB4, much like the
one driven by James Bond in the 1960s.^89Mark Dion has been one of the earliest and most critically grounded
artists to seriously engage with cabinet of curiosities for the purpose of
operating a critique of the epistemological practices that have shaped our
relationship with nature. Dion is well aware that “nature is one of the
most sophisticated arenas for the production of ideology,”^90 and therefore
his practice most regularly targets the museum in its anthropocentric