Aleksandra Mir (born 1967) is a contemporary artist. She was born in Poland, has American and Swedish citizenship, and lives in London.
"Hello" is pseudoscience. The only smart way to read it is not to believe in it, not to trust it, or to put yourself in it and imagine what's out there that you haven't been told or seen.
I'm so extremely well prepared for negative response, I've taken precautions.
I try to make that tension almost stupidly overt in my projects, almost ridiculously so. I keep coming back to the same obvious points again and again.
You pick people, and they pick you sometimes. It's especially great to connect with people you think you have nothing in common with.
There are ends, occasionally, with projects. That happens. But they are natural dead ends. It's usually the outside situation that demands an ending. I never really settle for one.
Stonehenge had an aura but it was also just stone. Then in the sixties, it became a great hedonistic, hippie, druid, rock-n-roll party site. There are amazing pictures of people up on the stones going wild and that's the image I recreated for my model of the project: full access to everyone. I even invented a Stonehenge soccer team that uses spaces between the stones as goals.
I've made a poster at home. You know the iconic image of Che Guevara, the black and red graphic of his face? I think it's the perfect graphic, the best graphic ever made. I cut a Concorde out and put it over his head so it's Che looking up and the Concorde going by. Both are dead, maybe obsolete.
I wouldn't say the anthropologists were making art, but they were definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning, passion, and they were also experimenting with form. There was a sense of trying to be as sincere as possible, whether you were investigating something far away from you or very close.
People get upset when Baghdad, the "Cradle of Civilization" is burning, or when the Buddhas in Afghanistan are falling. These are real concerns.
I'm depending on other people to take the work and run. And if they run in so many directions, they sort of cancel each other out. So the meaning is always open.
The moment right now, it's a tragically regressive time we live in, you know. We just grounded the Concorde. Where's the future? We've lost the future.
I'm completely uninterested in the origins of Stonehenge. I don't care about the real story behind it or whether it should be saved or not. What I'm interested in is this: in the Victorian era, you could go there as an early cultural tourist and you were given a chisel to chip off a bit of the stones and take it with you. That's what you did in Victorian times.
I follow these intimate connections of strangers and, surprise!, end up finding even myself in the work at some point.
In a way I am saying the nation-state doesn't exist, borders don't exist, you can try going anywhere. It is a kind of pre-Internet consensus I always had in me.
National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas - using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.
I'm very jealous of an era where people were inventing something so beautiful as the Concorde and thinking that's the next step. I'm jealous of an era when people thought, "Let's finally go to the Moon. "
My purpose isn't to be confrontational. My purpose is to find out about the world and play myself against it to the extent that it is even conceivable.
Of course, I'd welcome protest. Good criticism is hard to find.
I was a lousy academic. I spent most of my time in the cafeteria. But I met fantastic people from all kinds of fields; law, medicine, history, and they eventually dispersed all over the world to do their fieldwork. I liked the way these people committed to the long term in a sincere, visionary way. Their projects weren't about "next season. " They were ten-year commitments. They were lifestyle choices that had traditions of fieldwork built into them - moving around, living on location, discipline, a real rigor for research.
Really the moment I decided I wanted to do art seriously, I left art school. I wanted to be with people who were interested in the same things I was: popular culture.