Panelists Osman Khan, Sarah Rose Sharp, and Paul Amenta, and moderator Amanda Krugliak, discuss "Waiting for the Extraordinary," a new iteration of Mark Dion’s 2011 U-M installation inspired by the academic classifications invented by 19th-century Michigan Chief Justice Augustus B. Woodward. This architecturally scaled installation presents a single room with thirteen plastic sculptures, each representing one of Woodward’s professorships. As viewers enter the darkened space and encounter these illuminated objects—reproduced using 3D imaging technology from original objects Dion found in departments and collections across the University of Michigan—they confront questions about the distinction between the rational and subjective in our construction of knowledge, as well as role of the museum and institutions that continue to determine it. Waiting for the Extraordinary serves as an archive of the original, as part of the Institute for the Humanities’ Year of Archives and Futures, and in celebration of the U-M Bicentennial.

Image: Mark DION
Waiting for the
Extraordinary
2013
mixed media
96 x 61 x 122
inches; 243.8 x
154.9 x 309.9 cm
Courtesy the artist
and Tanya Bonakdar
Gallery, New York
(TBG 14740)