In “Waiting for the Extraordinary,” a new site-specific installation commissioned by the U-M Institute for the Humanities gallery, Dion focuses his enquiry on Michigan Chief Justice Augustus Woodward’s territorial act of 1817, establishing a “Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania.” Woodward harbored a dream of classifying all human knowledge and had discussed this with his friend and mentor Thomas Jefferson. His plan would remain a blueprint for the university until 1872, when Henry Tappan became its first appointed president and instituted a German model of education more in line with the U-M we know today.

Woodward’s handwritten list from the period outlined thirteen different professorships, or “diaadaxiim,” which followed an idiosyncratic system of classifications. He invented outlandish words for these, mixing Greek and Latin, resulting in alliterative designations such as Anthropoglossica (Literature), Physiosophica (Natural Philosophy), and Latrica (Medicine), to name a few.

For the Institute for the Humanities project, Mark Dion imagines what objects would best represent these classifications and sets out to find them in the many departments and collections within the university. As he embarks upon this ambitious and idealistic quest, the result is as much an expedition as a scavenger hunt, in part Aristotle as well as Don Quixote. In a week’s time, he locates a magpie, a meteorite, a celestial globe, a flask, a bugle, and then a heart.

Each artifact is reproduced using 3D rapid imaging technology at the U-M Duderstadt Center, coated with phosphorescent paint, and then exhibited in a manner suggestive of post-nuclear hallowed halls.

But first, visitors to the gallery take a number, are seated in a waiting room, a carbon copy in itself. It is the familiar experience encountered in every institution, at the dentist’s office, or the DMV. We are waiting, just waiting”¦for the extraordinary.

Mark Dion’s work considers scientific method and museum practice and their influence on our understanding of history, the natural world, and what we know to be true. His work questions the hard line between rational thought and unadulterated subjectivity. Although conceptual, Dion’s projects serve as formal critiques, examining the relationship between the human experience as we know it and the institutions, museums, and galleries that predetermine it.