A new exhibition at the Natural History Museum examines London’s biodiversity through art and science.
Matt Brown
When artist Mark Dion was asked to create an exhibition for the Natural History Museum, he was overjoyed. “I love the architecture, the history here,” he says. “It is the cathedral of science.”
His brief was left deliberately vague: to assemble some kind of exhibition for the tercentenary of Carl Linnaeus. It wasn’t an easy task. Many of the museum’s existing treasures were off limits for inclusion. Says Dion, “I was taken on several tours. I was like a kid in a candy store. Only I couldn’t have any of the candy.” His options were further limited by a worldwide demand for anything connected to Linnaeus, making suitable items scarce.
With time, an idea took shape. “The more I walked around, the more I realised that the great asset here is the people,” he says. “Researchers with 30 years experience alongside youngsters with technical know-how. I wanted to create something that involved them all.”
What emerged was Dion’s largest exhibition of new work to date.
Four experiments, five environments
Systema Metropolis presents four unusual field experiments in well crafted installations. Each one explores the biodiversity of an iconic London location, drawing heavily from the skills of the museum’s own staff.
Things open unexpectedly. Before reaching the fieldwork, the artist pays homage to traditional museum exhibitions. Ageing artefacts in wooden cabinets provide a historic perspective on the art of sample collecting. Multiple portraits of Carl Linnaeus cluster on a back wall, like a taxonomic medley of the great man himself. “This part I think of as the ‘fifth environment‘ of the project,” says Dion. “But instead of an examination of biodiversity, this section is an interrogation of cultural diversity…of museum collections themselves.”
We then move on to the four experiments. The first explores invertebrate biodiversity in the relatively undisturbed environment of a cemetery. Dion and his team of entomologists collected species from around the graves of three famous Victorians, whom he admires as ‘champions of the underclass’. The resulting installation reveals, amongst other things, why Thomas Henry Huxley’s grave is more biodiverse than that of Karl Marx.
The next piece of fieldwork collected samples from two locations at the site of the future Olympic park near Stratford. Turf and plants were taken from an area of low biodiversity (a football pitch), and a much richer riverbank environment. The museum waived strict rules about exhibiting live specimens, allowing Dion to incorporate the plants into the gallery. “This is something of an iconoclastic exhibit for them,” he says. “It was a bit of a fight to get this in.”
The third experiment analysed insect biodiversity along the A40 – the westbound route out of London that includes the Westway. The team drove an electric car along the route, collecting insects in a fly net and through adhesion to sticky tape on the car’s roof. Insects collected via the net were classified according to their morphology, while the rather more damaged samples from the tape were identified by molecular biology. The two techniques produced very similar results with regard to the types of insect identified, although the apparent detection of rice DNA raised some suspicions that the molecular techniques remain imperfect.
The final section takes the form of an extensive tent containing items recovered from the Thames. The team collected samples from the river intake filters at the Kingsnorth power station, as well as using trawl nets on the open river. Assorted fish are arranged within the tent according to a whimsical taxonomy. Inanimate objects are treated similarly, with bottles and cans grouped by type on one table, assorted bones laid in a box on the floor, and a skein of rubber ducks huddled in a corner.
Dion and Linnaeus
Unusual finds
It’s not all science for art’s sake. The Thames team found a seahorse, only the fifth ever reported in the river. Unexpected insect species were identified, including a parasitic wasp only recorded once before in London. And the project gave practicing scientists the chance to examine environments that they would normally ignore that are right on their own doorstep
For all the fascinating flora and fauna, it is clear that Dion rates working with these people as a personal highlight of the project. “You have the technicians, curators, scientists and librarians…the specialist who has devoted 20 years to one type of millipede, and the generalists who see the bigger picture.” The importance of diversity is universal.
Mark Dion: Systema Metropolis runs from 15 June to 2 September at the Natural History Museum. The exhibition is curated by Bergit Arends. Special praise also goes to the compilers of the accompanying handbook, which is an unexpected and well thought out bonus.