“We’re taking a tree that is an ecosystem—a dead tree, but a living system—and we are re-contextualizing it and taking it to another site. We’re putting it in a sort of Sleeping Beauty coffin, a greenhouse we’re building around it. And we’re pumping it up with a life support system—an incredibly complex system of air, humidity, water, and soil enhancement—to keep it going. All those things are substituting what nature does, emphasizing how, once that’s gone, it’s incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system—to take this tree and to build the next generation of forests on it.” Mark Dion, in a 2007 interview with Art21
This project continues to powerfully inspire my perspective of systems even 10+ years later.
As a wildlife biologist and auto enthusiast, I had long thought about the complexity of relationships between simultaneously changing components of a system. This project allowed me to see how an artist expressed these concepts for public interpretation.
Mark Dion hit the nail on the head in his interview with Art21, back in 2007. When I started working on the project as author of the Field Guide to the Neukom Vivarium, I hadn’t yet met him. I knew the project aligned with what I wanted to know at the time. Insights obtained over the course of the installation changed my perspective as a scientist – I realized, after years in university, that science itself was art.
Dion, as an experienced artist, showed me that it’s quite normal to for an artistic piece to evoke numerous unintentional inspirations. He was comfortable with the idea that the Vivarium made a complex set of statements – what the audience would take from it wasn’t within his control.
This isn’t dissimilar from what a biologist or ecologist has to confront when trying to study or create an ecosystem. In the beginning, we do our best with what we know could work, and the unknown unknowns emerge over time.
The Neukom Vivarium coffin and it’s decaying, living contents reside at the corner of Broad Street and Elliot Avenue in downtown Seattle.
You might still be able to purchase the Field Guide in the Olympic Sculpture Park gift shop at the top of the hill. If not, you will have to contact SAM staff and make some demands to get additional copies. Alternatively, you can just visit the Vivarium and see the curiosity cabinet, which I spent several rainy Seattle weeks assembling.
Neukom Vivarium
