A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON99epistemological essence. Far from indulging in the ostentatious theatri-
cality of some recent apparitions of cabinets of curiosities in art, Dion’s
work seriously reimagines epistemological processes, questions authorial
practices, blurs ontological categorizations, and promotes multidisciplinar-
ity. That the critique is allowed to take place within the institutions toward
which it is directed simply enhances the sharpness of such operations. But
perhaps most interestingly, Dion’s work also strikes a peculiar balance be-
tween the idea of pure pleasure, or wonder, and scientific curiosity.
The tension between these two poles emerged at the end of the Middle
Ages, when natural philosophers began to interpret wonder as unsuited
to true philosophical inquiry. They conceived wonders as praeter natu-
rae, outside the regularities of nature and therefore bearing no substan-
tial importance in analysis.^91 St. Augustine had complained that some
men were far too enthralled by “all manner of sights and sounds and
smells that afford novel pleasures”—a diversion from faith and the prin-
ciple of sin.^92 In 1240 Franciscan friar Roger Bacon identified wonder with
ignorance, perhaps not surprisingly if one considers that the beginning
of the revival of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy had already set
the foundations for causal knowledge and a model of natural orderli-
ness.^93 Thereafter, Francis Bacon noted that classical mythology also
gave wonder a negative connotation, and by the seventeenth century,
John Locke firmly assessed scientific curiosity as the best antidote to
the ignorance of wonder and as the principle of education during the
Enlightenment.^94
Most of Dion’s cabinets of curiosities have attempted to strike a bal-
ance between the ontological restrictions of scientific epistemology and
the wonder that characterized the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities,
aiming in a way to create discursive and practical overlaps that transcend
the separation of art and science that took place during the Enlighten-
ment. Aiming to generate critical awareness of the ideological structures
that underpin institutional power, Dion’s artistic proposal is highly po-
litical, as his cabinets directly question the means by which epistemic af-
firmation is produced, validated, and disseminated as truth. The artist’s
work clearly acknowledges that nature is a construct constantly reinvented
by humans and that representational acts are imbued with repercussions
of an ethical kind. It is for this reason that representation and the pro-
cesses that construct it are usually rendered visible by Dion through the