Physicists are poised to articulate a historic “theory of everything” that will tie together gravity, light, and all the rest of the stuff that makes up the universe as merely different manifestations of the same essential subatomic reality. Mark Dion is that rarest of artists whose body of work is arguing for a parallel aesthetic breakthrough: the revelation that not only are sculpture, painting, drawing, and the rest accepted forms of contemporary art, but so too are activities like historical research, interventions, publications, performances, relational aesthetics, collaboration, pedagogy, institutional critique, natural history, anthropology, cultural detritus, and satire, to name just a few cultural fields touched on in his impressive exhibition, The Marvelous Museum, at the Oakland Museum of California.

This mammoth project, put together in collaboration with San Francisco curators Marina McDougall and Chris Fitzgerald as Dion’s local representatives, and organized by Rene de Guzman, senior curator at the Oakland Museum, was organized into four sections and augmented by an enormous and enormously complex book. Visitors were greeted first by a show of magic lantern slides taken from a pair of nineteenth-century trunks discovered by Dion and his collaborators in the museum’s orphan storage area, which became Dion’s favorite storage area to explore. Apparently, the museum, which opened in 1969, was an amalgamation of three older museums of long standing, which was reflected in the tripartite structure of the resultant 1969 “new” Oakland Museum: art, natural science, and history departments were created without much thought given to cross-disciplinary exchange. One of the museum’s intentions during its recent remodeling was to begin to break down the divisions among these programs, and Dion’s residency was part of that process. What Dion and his collaborators discovered was that many thousands of objects ended up being retained but for a variety of reasons were never accessioned: poor condition; not being deemed of museum quality; or, most tellingly, not belonging in a clear way to art, science, or history.

It was at these cusps and vague borders that Dion reveled in his discoveries. The two trunks, for example, that belonged to a local traveling magic lantern exhibitor were packed with his slides and related paraphernalia. Dion showed the trunks behind a chicken wire enclosure and commissioned Courtney Lain and her Marvelous Museum Band (harp, cornet, accordion, percussion) to compose a soundtrack for the slide show. To the left stood a terra cotta, carved, half-scale California Bear, also in a (recreated) crate. Dion points out that while beautiful and skillfully carved, this too was an orphan because it was thought to be a historic artifact, not art. The oddness of such arbitrary labeling formed the crux of the exhibition. The crates were also important because Dion wants viewers to be reminded of the remove at which museum objects are almost always held when in storage. Ironically, when the artist and his collaborators rediscovered the trunks, the museum immediately accessioned them and their contents, greatly complicating their exhibition, i.e., the original slides could no longer be used and had to be duplicated for use.

The second station in the project was found some fifteen yards across the gallery in a plywood-fronted room constructed for Dion. Inside were three curatorial offices recreated from seventy-five years ago, thirty-five years ago, and today. Using Dion’s trademark excessiveness, the offices were packed with equipment, specimens, and artworks appropriate to their eras, and were kept away from visitor interaction by wire cage, elevated platform, and cordon. Notable objects I spied were a gorgeous, tiny Bierstadt painting of a bull (never shown because it is considered unfinished) on the wall of the oldest office, and a bicentennial Pepsi can in the 1976 office. The contemporary curator’s office, in which de Guzman periodically worked, was full of his personal mementos and work projects.

The third aspect of the exhibition consisted of some twenty interventions sprinkled throughout the galleries. These again were mostly orphan objects that Dion selected and positioned to enhance or contrast with the thematic rooms of the newly reorganized museum displays. He placed in a semi-open crate amid Gold Rush-era art an enormous stone coin (close to a yard in diameter) from Polynesia. In one room a William T. Wiley sculpture that is kind of a deconstructed sailboat or tent was adjacent to a gleaming Harley Davidson chopper motorcycle. Between them, Dion placed a wooden sled from the 1909 Peary expedition to the North Pole that the Oakland Museum has housed for a hundred years because of an unresolved (forgotten?) dispute with the Smithsonian. It formed a perfect visual bridge between the Wiley and the Harley. The collection included a seven-foot tall ceramic object of black disks, each one smaller than the one beneath it, as are commonly seen in large-scale electrical towers. Located by Dion in the ceramic-art section of the museum, the tacit argument was made that distinctions between commercial and industrial design and fine art can often be arbitrary and less than helpful. Along the same line Dion placed a rope object from the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 in the folk art section of the museum, where it sought to be an outsider artwork somewhere between a Judith Scott (the late developmentally disabled artist who wrapped all manner of found objects) and a Jackie Winsor (the Postminimalist sculptor best known for her wrapping of natural materials—i.e., logs—with rope). One of Dion’s signature styles is the use of drawers of specimens or found objects. In this exhibition visitors found one of his most concise iterations. A set of drawers contained from the top down: a set of vintage election buttons, including the suggestive six-inch I LIKE DICK (Nixon) button; a set of police Billy clubs; and a set of horrific prison-made weapons. One notable oddity from this selection of curiosities was a generic section of a telephone pole that was found in a storage space. It had been used as a floor barrier for an exhibition years ago and never discarded; its incorporation into the Dion show now renders it as a fine art object.

The final section of the exhibition was again found behind a somewhat makeshift plywood wall and roughly labeled Storage Room. While the door was open, many a wary visitor hesitated at the threshold, unsure of her or his welcome. This is the essence of the Dion project, of course, testing the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable, fine art and detritus, front room and back room. He assembled a miniature wooden city of crates in this concluding space—including one that housed a stuffed baby elephant—but the real point of this room was the three walls of shelves (behind a caged barrier) of miscellaneous found objects from the museum warehouse. Included were at least two taxidermied, crane-like, large water birds; an American Indian saddle made from buffalo bone; baby dolls; and a host of other unlikely roommates. Dion’s intention was to give visitors a hint of the ninety-five percent of most museum collections that are to be found in storage.

All these projects, as well as essays that fill out the intentions and background of the exhibition, are documented in the catalogue, with documentary images of key items on heavy cards by David Maisel, a noted Northern California photographer, as well as essays by the curatorial team, by Bay Area writer Rebecca Solnit, and by Lawrence Weschler.

At his talk for the opening of the exhibition Dion mentioned that if he had to make a choice, he would always align himself with the abject, the broken, the obscure, and the orphan object. We define ourselves by what we no longer valorize. A society is known by the art that it leaves behind, but a special understanding can be gleaned by looking at its own changing priorities, taste, and values with regard to that art. The evolving way it organizes the world and objects of material culture is a parallel and equally revealing roadmap of the communal territory of the mind.