record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00874
Thesis Title
Mediating Reality: Challenging the authoritative voice of the natural history museum through (bio)systems art
Author
Colin Clark
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
MA
Year
2020
Number of Pages
35
University
University of the Arts London/Central Saint Martins
Thesis Supervisor
Heather Barnett
Supervisor e-mail
h.barnett AT csm.arts.ac.uk
Other Supervisor(s)
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
MA Art & Science
Languages Familiar to Author
URL where full thesis can be found
Keywords
Abstract: 200-500 words
The modern natural history museum is an institution in epistemological existential crisis struggling to reconcile the objective hierarchical didacticism of its Victorian roots with the subjective pluralism of contemporary culture. Step into the natural history museum of any major city and this conflict becomes self-evident as centuries old glass vitrines of categorized specimens and accompanying text stand in sharp relief alongside modern bright wall graphics and interactive touch screen displays. This tension, I argue, is indicative of greater ontological changes in modern society as it has transitioned from an object-based to systems-based culture. This new paradigm in which “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (Burnham, 1968), has empowered artists to explore novel ways of interacting and collaborating with the natural world outside the mediating authority of the institution. This thesis explores the rise of a systems paradigm in science and art, and its implications on the natural history museum’s traditional epistemological authority over the truth. Beginning with the birth of modern scientific institutions in the eighteenth century, I recount the philosophical tensions between Victorian naturalists and the rise of a prevailing mechanistic, reductionist ontology. As a result the natural world came to be presented as a ridged hierarchical taxonomy of things, only knowable to the public through the didactic interpretation of the institution. I then consider the birth of a general systems theory in the 1950s and its subsequent influence on systems based artistic and technologic practices of the 1960s. With its procedural nature, emphasizing the interaction of individual entities and the subjectivity of the viewer; the systems approach was a rejection of the prevailing reductionist ontology with far broader epistemological implications. From this historical perspective I then construct a discursive framework by which to evaluate contemporary (bio)systems artworks and consider their pedagogical merits. While the contemporary natural history museum appears to have embraced a systems based epistemology by emphasizing subjective experience over discrete objects, it has failed to relinquish the didactic control necessary to render those experiences meaningful to the viewer. Given this failure, it is my contention that a (bio)systems art model is of increasing pedagogical value to our contemporary culture.