Dion Wins Lucelia Prize With Edgy Pseudo-Exhibits

Organizing a career retrospective of artist Mark Dion wouldn't be easy. His work probes the whole idea of the museum show and sometimes even takes the form of pseudo-exhibitions. Put on a show of Dion's displays and you risk an infinite regress, like looking at a mirror in a mirror.

But such a show may need to come our way soon. Today, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is due to announce that Dion, 47, a New Yorker who also works in rural Pennsylvania, has won its eighth annual Lucelia Artist Award, worth $25,000. That means he is now, officially, an artist who has "produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity." (At least it means that Dion is notable as an American artist under 50 who has achieved such things, since that's the specific brief of the Lucelia award, one of the largest in the art world.)

As the five prize jurors put it in their statement, Dion's forays into pseudo-museology "celebrate the value of exploration and learning, and invite audiences to embark on their own journey of intellectual discovery. This approach, coupled with a prodigious commitment to visual creativity, has inspired a generation of artists and established Dion as one of the most innovative contemporary artists working today."

Actually, if you visited a Dion survey (one called "The Natural History of the Museum" is touring Europe now, with no stops planned for the United States) you might think that you'd left art behind entirely -- that you'd wandered into a science museum instead, or even right into a lab.

A project for the 1999 Carnegie International exhibition consisted of a perfect simulation of the messy studio of Alexander Wood, an 18th-century bird painter from Philadelphia. A 2005 piece called "Department of Tropical Research" included a tarpaulin covered with a zoologist's field supplies: tools, lights, nets, safari gear. In Chicago's Lincoln Park in 1993, Dion refitted an abandoned fly-fishing lodge as an ecological field station, to be manned by inner-city youths. Last year, he set out to retrace the southern travels of William Bartram, the 18th-century naturalist and explorer who founded the botanical garden that still bears his name in Philadelphia. The products of Dion's trip -- including seeds and journals and hand-painted postcards -- are now on display in traditional curio cabinets arrayed in Bartram's Garden itself.

Yet Dion's art is less about nature proper than about how we've thought of it, packaged it, studied it, displayed it, protected it -- even how we've made art about it. His goal, he has written, is to "interrogate the contemporary institutions which define today's official story of nature: science museums, environmental groups, wildlife cinema, zoos and national parks. . . . I'd like my activity as a visual artist to make an important contribution to expanding the discourse on nature and the question of the relation of aesthetics to science."

Of course, that also means that, as an artist, Dion has taken strides to expand the aesthetics themselves. He has broadened the kind of subjects art can broach -- he has made them include such things as the history of science-museum displays -- as well as how it broaches them.

That puts Dion in the thick of the Lucelia prize tradition. In its eight years, the award's independent jurors -- a changing mix of prominent artists, art writers and curators -- have almost always chosen artists on the edge. They've gone for creators whose "art" consists of serving curry to the public, or designing plush "escape pods" for collectors, or studying land use. One prize went to Kara Walker, whose art probes this country's racial wounds until its viewers hurt. Another went to Jessica Stockholder, whose found-object assemblages risk being shrugged off by doubters as a bunch of dolled-up junk.

So far, the museum that sponsors this prize has almost never shown the kinds of artists that it honors (except in its small survey of the first six Lucelians, which closed earlier this year). But since the Lucelia was clearly founded in part to attract attention -- the wall-to-wall coverage of the famous Turner Prize in Britain has been a clear model for all later awards -- it's hard to see why more substantial doses of its winners' out-there work couldn't be counted on to do the same.

As things stand, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has a reputation as one more place in Washington to see yet more rather nice art. Showing the Mark Dions of this world would more clearly make it stand out from the crowd.

For information about Mark Dion go to http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com and http://www.markdionsbartramstravels.com. For the Smithsonian American Art Museum go to http://americanart.si.edu.