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Two-color lithograph
Dion based his two-color lithograph Tree Scheme on the “figurative system of human knowledge,” or the tree of Diderot and d’Alembert. This classification system was developed to represent the taxonomy of human knowledge itself and appeared in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a general encyclopedia published in France in the last half of the 1700s. Dion literally adopted the idea of the “tree” and entitled it “The Representation of Nature” on the trunk. Its leafless branches bear words—terms, names, disciplines—that relate to our responses to, and knowledge and classification of, the natural world. Surrounding the tree on the ground are objects that can be taken as a warning: the watering can of “The Museum of Natural History,” which can nurture the tree, the axes of “capitalism” and “the art world,” which can cut it down, and the fungi of “inertia.”
