Book Review: “Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey To Nature’s Underworld”

When I was twelve, my grandfather lied about my age to get me a job on the golf course where he was the greenskeeper. I worked as a cart boy, cleaning, parking, and gassing up the golf carts every morning before the sun rose in advance of the first tee times — a child laborer in charge of gas-powered vehicles. Goose Creek Golf Course was beautiful and peaceful in those predawn hours before the first round of golfers arrived. 

The golf course is the subject of a collaborative centerpiece in the traveling exhibition Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld. Curated by Suzanne Ramljak, the show continues a decades-long dialogue between the artists. Dion and Rockman met while attending the School of the Visual Arts in the early 1980s, and in the subsequent decades of art making both have addressed, in different ways, the role ideology plays in scientific discourse. Drawing from a wide set of source materials, they use humor and imagination to communicate how nature is constructed through cultural channels.

Journey to Nature’s Underworld comprises individual bodies of work by both artists and culminates in the stunning collaboration American Landscape which brings the distinct styles of the two artists into a single piece. The work takes the form of a life-size diorama — one that might be found in a natural history museum, except this one is mobile: a large art crate on casters. It contains a glass front through which the viewer can see a golf course depicted in daylight on one side and nighttime on the other. In an interview with Patrick Jaojoco, Mark Dion noted, “The golf course is the landscape incarnate of class exclusion, privilege, old-boy deal-making networks, the suppression of biodiversity, and unwise land management; materialized by way of petrochemical fertilizers.” 

An array of animals populate the diorama. A coyote, a deer, an alligator, and others are depicted surviving and adapting to the human-engineered environment. Buried below the surface of the green we can see animal-related trash such as rat traps, insecticides, dog food containers, gummi bears, and more. Speaking on the ubiquity of trash, Rockman states “You can’t make art about ecology in the twenty-first century and not include it. It’s the reality of the planet.”

Will people in the future look back incredulously at the golf courses, car washes, landfills, and swimming pools of the present day? Culture can set the stage for political change. Can political change bring about a solution to the toxins, microplastics, and rising temperatures that beset the human animal?

Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld will tour through December 2025. The catalog documenting the exhibition contains an interview with the artists and essays by Lucy Lippard and Suzanne Ramljak. It is a handsome, hardbound book with full-color illustrations and a timeline of important dates in the work of the two artists.