I must
admit that in Aleksandra Mir I’ve chosen a subject to write about that leaves
me scratching my head. She is an artist who for thirty years has used a variety
of media to delight the senses, ask questions, make you laugh, and make you
think. She enjoys collaborations with other artists, and with non-artists. She
carries out performances, gathers objects together, makes objects or oversees
their production, works with print media and with words. She has been called a
conceptual artist and a feminist artist.
She has
worked extensively with words and print-based media, and she has the good
conceptual artist’s skill of taking a small, simple idea and making from it a
big piece of work with a big idea. “Venezia” was a project for the Venice
Biennale for which she organized the production of 1 million postcards of
seaside or waterside vacation spots from around the world with the word Venezia
printed on them.
These were given away to visitors to the Biennale, with the intention of making
them think about the interconnections of place to place and person to person.
This
would seem to be a common theme in her work. She likes collaboration, and has
created works in which groups of people weigh themselves together, or help
build things, or help her draw things. She has carried out many projects which
involve words, too, and this brings me to the subject of that
artist-writer-artist cross-over, the point at which we see an artist working
extensively in another medium and we can ask questions about the written work.
Mir has
produced thousands of drawings in which she has transcribed the front pages of
newspapers using a Sharpie marker. Sometimes she has produced these drawings in
a gallery, working every day on a fresh batch of headlines, assisted by
interns.
She has made dozens of books consisting of collages of words and
texts. Here, we are very much in the world of the concept, similar to how Fiona
Banner works. The words, like the images, operate on two levels—the individual
meaning of the words, which is emptied out by the act of quotation and
transcription and replaced with the larger meaning imposed by the artist, the
meta-meaning, which is like a voice in the background whispering: “Don’t take
this at face value. Stand back and discern the power structures.” It’s work
that is meant to be admired rather than read.
This is
not the case with her “Living and Loving” series, which Mir describes as “an
ordinary man/woman’s extraordinary lives.” They are extensive interviews with
the subjects, or with people who know the subject, illustrated with pictures
from the subject’s family albums. Handsomely produced and printed, they are
indeed absorbing, often moving documents, akin to the transcriptions of
interviews from the great oral history projects of the past. I read them
looking for a hint of the patronizing, the suggestion of the grand artist
slumming it with the little people, but there isn’t a trace of that about them.
My only criticism would be that they could be edited more, the way a journalist
might arrange the material to emphasize the most dramatic incidents. However, this would probably contradict Mir’s aesthetic, one part of which is to present the
documents of human existence, whether they be objects, actions, or words, with
as little mediation as possible, in order to preserve for the spectator/reader
the sensation of realism, or at least a realism rooted in a distrust of mimetic
art.
This
leaves the field open, therefore, for a discussion of artists who drop the
“meta” when they write, or who do more than documentary work. In the next post,
I will present the first of a series of interviews with artists who do indeed
use writing as a means of reflecting on and extending their creative process.
Final
note on Aleksandra Mir: she is an extremely significant artist, with an amazing
website to match. And almost all of the texts and publications she has created
are available as free PDF downloads.
Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader