Mark Dion (at right) looking through the glass bottle of his public artwork, Ship in a Bottle, at its official unveiling last Tuesday. courtesy: port of los angeles
On Tuesday morning, February 22nd, the Port of Los Angeles unveiled an unusual new public art sculpture: a colorful 8-foot-long container ship resting on a bed of crushed glass and encased within a 12-foot-long clear glass bottle. Entitled Ship in a Bottle, it is the work of contemporary artist Mark Dion, who designed his permanent installation to engage the public while tying together the mercantile history of the port and the tradition of model-ship building. Ship in a Bottle is one of several planned public art installations underway as part of an L.A.-waterfront redevelopment project. Dion, whose work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, among other major museums, is known for installations that function as a cabinet-of-curiosities in which he methodically organizes the debris from a specific site. He is known for calling into question methods of categorization and blurring the line between natural history, art, and science, while at the same time invoking a sincere appreciation of each subject he chooses to explore.
In April 2010, GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet sat down with Mark Dion and his assistant, Bryan Wilson, to talk about the process and challenges in fabricating Ship in a Bottle. On the occasion of this provocative work’s official unveiling, we present a wide-ranging discussion on art in the public realm, and how Dion approached his project for the Port of Los Angeles.
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: What are you working on right now?
Mark Dion: Like a lot of artists, I’ve got a kind of mix-and-match economy of how I do things, which involves some studio work that ends up in a gallery, some large-scale projects with museums, and then, occasionally, a big public art project, which is normally such a logistical nightmare they never feel like they’re worth it. However I’m working on one the Port of Los Angeles, which is really exciting .It’s a very large ship in a bottle. The Port of Los Angeles is one of America’s biggest ports and so there are constantly container ships coming in and out, and the city across from there is called San Pedro. which is very linked economically and culturally to the port. San Pedro is redeveloping a new marina area a and commissioned me to do a project there.
The piece consists of a massive bottle, which will end up being about 12 feet long and will contain a very large container ship. I just went up to RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] with Bryan, and he helped me blow a very large, super-long bottle that we used as a model along with building a standard kit plastic container ship. Its been a really interesting experience
GLASS: What has the process of working on this project been like?
Mark: With this particular project there was of course, a whole acceptance process you have to go through to get public artwork done, which is very laborious, complicated, bureaucratic and had virtually nothing to do with the art whatsoever. However, I responded to San Pedro’s incredibly strong link with nautical history and nautical vernacular arts like ship-painting, model-building, and things like that. Originally I thought this ship in a bottle project was a pretty easy idea, that this wouldn’t be such an incredibly complicated thing, and it wasn’t until I began working with Bryan and talking to some glass people that I realized just how incredible difficult it is to build a 12 ft long (originally it was 20 feet long, then down to 15 feet, then down to 12 feet long) glass bottle. It became incredibly complicated.
The original concept involved having a the ship in a variety of liquids; different kinds of oils that would separate, creating water line. Like many people that work in public art you build in all the bells and whistles into the first part of the proposal, knowing that you’re going to have to give up a few things logistically for budget reasons here and there. Finally, what we have is a pared-down essential version of the piece, which is the ship in a bottle, but finding the “how” to make this bottle was an incredibly complicated process.
GLASS: Could you talk about some of the steps in discovering how to make the bottle?
Bryan Wilson: At first it was a matter of just finding other projects like this. The first idea was just to find some giant Pyrex tubing because essentially a bottle is just a big tube. Then quickly, Charles Parriott came up, he was a person who had done some huge bottle fabrication. He had sent us pictures of some amazing stuff that was done in the Czech republic regarding what was, at the time, was the world’s-largest glass bottle, which he was responsible for overseeing. Ours was going to be larger by a factor of about 5 feet, which didn’t seem to be such a huge task for them. The only problem was the fact that the bottle has to cross an ocean, and the cost became too much.
Mark: We started looking at places here that do industrial fabrication in the states, and some of them came back to us with prices so absurdly inflated that we couldn’t deal with them. Other people we hoped would be interested, like Corning, were just not at all interested. We finally ended up finding this company called Creative Teknologies in L.A., and they do a lot of glass work for Frank Gehry at a more architectural scale. They seemed pretty confident that this could be done more or less on budget — or, more or less with the entire budget.
Bryan: The original idea was to have a single piece, that was the real comprise we had to accept. Instead we started going through the idea that this might be multiple pieces.
Mark: There will be a piece that is the heel, so that we can insert the ship into it. Also, the base of the bottle is one piece. Unfortunately it is public art, so we need a way to reverse the kinds of things that happen with public art that you can anticipate like people messing with it, people getting cigarette butts in it, or algae growth from condensation. We have to have a way of getting back into the bottle, should anything happen. You would be foolish not to build into it a way to get back in if you need to.
Mark Dion, Ship in a Bottle, 2011. courtesy: port of los angeles
GLASS: Can you tell me more about your interest in the ship in the bottle?
Mark: A big part of the project is the site itself. Whenever I embark upon a project, I get very excited about the location. For me as an artist that travels all the time, I feel much more at home and comfortable when I’m in Europe than when I’m in California. It’s harder for me to really understand the culture there than it is to understand the culture in Europe in a way. But in going to San Pedro, I found something very familiar, partially because I’m also from a seaside town, an industrial, gritty town, so there was a lot there for me to identify with. They have a very funky maritime museum, which is extremely charming and old school and hasn’t been ruined by renovations. They also have a hobby shop in the middle of the town. This is a town without a lot of functioning businesses, but it has a thriving community of model-builders, particularly ship-model-builders, there. That gave me a clue as to what people where interested in, what kinds of things resonated in that site. Where I come from in New Bedford, Massachusetts, some of those things are very similar in a sense.
I think the interest in nautical vernacular arts and public art is interesting because I think that, making art of this kind, there’s an obligation to meet the public halfway and not to work with a level of abstraction or conceptual sophistication that is going to alienate people. You don’t make work that has a complicated relationship to the history of art in a public venue. You make work that really has that can be approached for a wide variety of positions. So the ship in the bottle is something that everyone can recognize as a sort of discursive thing, and, at the same time, the ship in the bottle is almost always this tall-masted ship. When people think of tall-masted ships, they think about ships like the Endeavor, or the Discovery, the kind of ships that have a noble purpose. However, most [tall masted] ships traveling at the beginning of the 19th century were moving property and goods, whether that be coal or grain or wood or slaves or whatever. They were moving commodities around the world and creating an international marketplace. This is very parallel to what container ships are. There are very few inventions which have had such a significant change in social practices. The containerization of shipping has changed the way that goods move around the world, and what kind of goods move around the world and have created a kind of globalization that we, for better or worse, we are faced with. And I think that it [container shipping] is much more parallel to the history of tall ships rather than the Battle or Tralfalgar or Darwin’s Beagle landing on the Galapagos. That is such small percentage of what these ships are actually about.
GLASS: Is it a specific ship in the bottle?
Mark: It cannot be a specific ship because we cannot promote one shipping line over another, especially in the port itself. So we can’t promote China Shipping or Evergreen or any of these other line so we have to be very careful about that in the way were designing a very generic ship. So we have to arrive at a certain neutrality that recognizes a container ship. Also because so much of the budget goes into the bottle itself we don’t have a ton of money to make a nerdy tricked out ship. So it will be more generalized and less specific.
GLASS: In terms of the compromises that have to be made around public art, how do you feel about the outcome?
Mark: I think it’s important for artists that work in public art and all art forms to know when to push back and to know when to your work has been compromised to the point that its no longer what you wanted. I feel like we made certain material compromises based on the realities of budget, but I don’t feel like we made conceptual compromises. So I feel like I’m getting what I want, and it just wouldn’t be interesting for me, otherwise. I feel that, conceptually, it is still a very tight work that frames something that is common in this world to the point of being invisible. And I think this is one of the things that is very important about the work is that you not so much heroicize, but reframe the everyday, and to put it into a historical context. This ship, in someways, creates a continuity to the original port of Los Angeles, and that’s where the goods that built Los Angeles came in, and the goods that came from Los Angeles entered the world. And it came through tall-ship sail craft in the 19th century.
—Kim Harty