This post was originally published on artnews.com
Mark Dion, an artist who has long worked with archives as a motif, recently established one of his own. The work, titled Mrs. Christopher’s House (2024), is one of four houses comprising the Troy Hill Art Houses in Pittsburgh; each residence constitutes a single work of art. Dion’s name is bringing new attention to the project that, since 2013, has remained discreet, with little to visually distinguish the “art houses” from other homes in the neighborhood.
Inside, Dion finds a permanent home in which to gather a number of his signature strategies, especially his engagement with the ordering and arrangement of collections ranging from the natural historical to the truly eclectic. Almost all the displays can be traced to past exhibitions. An attic filled with hundreds of small boxes, available to the visitor to open and peruse, harkens back to Memory Box (2015). A 2012 installation in New York’s Explorer’s Club becomes Pittsburgh’s own “Extinction Club”—visitors are made members upon entering the small room, where they are invited to sit down in the clubby chairs among half-smoked cigars and illustrations of extinct species papering the walls. A taxidermied bear was brought from Dion’s work at Storm King Art Center (2019).
Even an office is labeled with the title of one of his volumes, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism And Its Legacy (2005). Here and throughout Dion’s work, the real and the fictional blur. Taxonomic charts on the walls borrow the aesthetic of science but are populated with terms from the history of art and absurd twists: a bird is labeled with the names of 20th-century avant-garde movements, a shark is juxtaposed with a rolling pin and a cola bottle.
In the project’s self-referentiality, the way it archives Dion’s own career, Mrs. Christopher’s House echoes the concerns of another Troy Hill Art House, that of the Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski. In Kunzhaus, Kuśmirowski combines excerpts from his exhibition history with the history of the house’s past inhabitants, namely the Kunz family who rented rooms in the building beginning in the late 19th century. (Dion’s own project is likewise named after his house’s most well-known inhabitant).
Kuśmirowski’s practice engages Cold War legacies and retrofuturism, two aesthetics that today have a decidedly nostalgic feel at home in this domestic environment. Think a basement filled with transistor radiators and darkroom equipment, and a kitchen-cum-science lab, with text-based computer systems installed on countertops and coils of recording tape retrofitted into an electric stove. The ties to history here are evocative but thin, loose gestures at lost pasts. The same can be said for Darkhouse, Lighthouse, in which Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis reflect on a far more distant past—the Mesoproterozoic-era inland sea where the city of Pittsburgh now stands.
All of the Troy Hill Art Houses are filled with thrifted and gathered things, found objects that retain their own histories even as they are incorporated into fictional new ones. The first to be constructed, Thorsten Brinkmann’s La Hütte Royale (2013), made liberal use of Pittsburgh’s Construction Junction, a reuse shop that yielded such treasures as a massive bronze bell, standing in the entryway as a surrealist doorbell. Though the houses differ wildly, they share what the critic and art historian Hal Foster has called the “archival impulse.” Like actual archives, the installations are subject to entropy, their records wearing away—literally in the case of Brinkmann’s, where vinyl records set spinning for the past 12 years are worn down to emit only a wheezing gasp of sound.
Moving through the spaces, I found myself tempted to try and piece together clues, to puzzle out relationships between things. In alluding to history without providing a secure narrative, the installations put the visitor in the position of the historian, wading through the available records and trying to construct some plausible version of truth out of the many interpretive possibilities.
Destabilizing truth once felt like a revolutionary tactic, and later a fashionable theoretical move; today it is a dangerous political strategy. Training the visitor in discernment, then, becomes a political project of its own. The exercise is sometimes overly literal: Kuśmirowski’s house includes two mirrored rooms identically furnished, the visitor challenged to identify subtle differences between them. It is also sometimes overwhelming, as in Dion’s hundreds of treasure-filled boxes. But the feeling of overwhelm is worth sitting with, as increasingly, we outsource the task of sifting through large quantities of information to machines. In the Art Houses, where data is material and experiential, looking closely and carefully is presented as a profoundly human, urgently essential task.