Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who, in making his art, metamorphoses into explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists - following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment artefacts, like walk-through Wunderkammers and life-sized cabinets of curiosity. Lias Graziose Corrin, Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, surveys Dion's most significant works and his ongoing investigations into natural history's obsession with categorizing nature. Critic and theorist Miwon Kwon talks to the artist about the interface between ecology and culture and the phenomenon of site-specific art. Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, makes an iconographical analysis of The Library for the Birds of Antwerp, an indoor sculpture Dion constructed for 18 live African finches in 1993. The artist has selected a text by novelist Jon Berger, one of the first post-war thinkers to analyze the position of animals in a capitalist society. The book also features Dion's own provocative, witty and often lyrical writing on nature and his role as an artist engaged in environmental issues.

In 1981, The Stuart Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to funding experimental public sculpture, and the University of California, San Diego formed an extraordinary partnership to create a major public, site-specific sculpture collection with works throughout the campus. This collection has played an important role in the arena of public art. Instead of asking artists to create an object, without reference to the site, they ask that each artist explore the campus carefully, and create a site-specific piece that could be integrated into the beautifully landscaped, 1,200-acre UCSD campus in La Jolla. The collection now includes 20 works by some of the most important contemporary artists, including William Wegman, Bruce Nauman, Kiki Smith, Robert Irwin, Do Ho Suh and Mark Bradford, among others. Landmarks is an updated edition of the only book focused on this premier collection of site specific public art. The catalogue features an essay from an interview with the collection's founding director, Mary Beebe; an essay on the importance of the collection by Rob Storr; and in-depth interviews with the 20 artists featured in the collection and two artists whose work is underway. Published in association with the Stuart Collection.

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.