Today it just so happened that I finished reading WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn on the subway as I was riding the subway to the Upper East Side to see Mark Dion’s The Phantoms of the Clark Exhibition at the Explorers Club. Interestingly, both works refer to a trip and in both pieces history, colonialism, and loss are among the subjects. It was a bit of serendipity but the book and the show together made me think about the acts of collecting, classifying, and creating (art) as efforts to keep a grasp on that which will inevitable slip away from us.
Sebald’s book follows a melancholy ramble in Suffolk county in eastern England. The narrator, through a collection of conversations, historical narratives and contemporary stories, evocatively stitches together a dreamlike book about fleeting vitality, monumental destruction and enduring loss.
Around 1900, the only Dunwich Church that remained was the ruin of All Saints. In 1919 it, too slipped over the cliff edge, together with the bones of those buried in the church yard… Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air.
On the 5th floor of the NYC headquarters of the Explorer’s Club, the artist Mark Dion has installed new work in the Club’s trophy room. The room is home to the club’s exotic taxidermy trophies, animal skin rugs, fossilized ancient elephant tusks, a whale phallus, and a First Edition of Napoleon’s Egyption Expedition. This is a fitting spot for Dion’s white Paper-maché renderings of camping gear and other objects inspired by texts and photos of a 1908 scientific expedition to the Far East. In this case no actual objects or specimens remain from the expedition. Dion’s objects are, in his words,
the sun bleached bones of these expeditions past