What Does Aleksandra Mir Represent

What Does Aleksandra Mir Represent?
Ken Davidson
Submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of
Masters of Research in Creative Practice
The Glasgow School of Art
2008
p2-101 Thesis
p102-115 Additional Illustrations
p116-117 Abstract
p118-121 List of illustrations
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1. INTRODUCTION

I am using Dada. I am not using this term, Dada, as
something to say Fluxus or Neo-Dada. I am not saying that
this is socially-engaged practice1, littoral art2, or relational
hobby-horse
aesthetics3. Dada is a word for « ».4 Dada is nothing.5
FLUX is FLUX. In part, my work is your attention.

Aleksandra Mir’s Dada is the subject of this thesis. Let’s start
there.
Have you noticed Antarctica is not in the map above?
1 As Beuys’ social sculpture. See for example Beuys, Joseph, Energy Plan for the Western Man : Joseph Beuys in
America : writings by. New York: Four walls eight windows, 1990 .
2 See Kester, G, Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art in Variant 9, Winter 99/00. Available
from <http://www.variant.randomstate.org/pdfs/issue9/Supplement9.pdf>
3 Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: la presses du réel, 2002.
4 Hartley, M, The Importance of Being ‘Dada’. From Adventures in the Arts: informal chapters on painters,
vaudeville and poets. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921. Pages 247 – 254. <Available from
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Dada>[Accessed 20/8/8].
5 Francis Picabia. Quoted in Hartley, op. cit.
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2. Алэксандра Мир
Let us say that, to use a term from Deleuze and Guattari,

Aleksandra has a conceptual persona,6 and from Eco, a fictional
identity.7 With Mir, as with Dada, everything is important.
Everything is reflexive. “DADA DOES NOT MEAN
ANYTHING.”8 We will get to this. Yet, if not more, Aleksandra’s
career is as peripatetic as any artist of her generation and
Aleksandra herself, emphasises that she has achieved what she has
as a woman9. Now resident in Palermo, Sicily since 2006, after 15
years based in New York,10 Aleksandra’s work is product of her
own collecting, creation, curation, and social play. It is also a
product of her communication with and through others, her
appropriation. This communication and appropriation involve
complex trajectories. That is why I am writing about Aleksandra
Mir. I recognise how she behaves, how she works. I recognize her
voice. I understand her fictions.11
6 Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari, trans. G. Burchell and H. Thomlinson, What is Philosophy? (Verso:London and
New York, 1994), Chapter 1.3, pp61-83.
7 Umberto Eco, Umberto, The Limits of Interpretation. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1990, Chapters 4,5
and 9.
8 Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 1918. In Tzara, Tristan, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. Wright, B.
London: John Calder, 1992. p4.
9 “As a young female artist, you start out tragically with all odds against you, and everyone needs to know that so
that they can help you.” Aleksandra Mir. Quoted in Silvia Sgualdini, How To Do Something With Nothing, UOVO,
Torino, Dec 2006. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/sgualdini.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
10 Ibid.
11 As a press release from 2006 puts it “Aleksandra Mir [ … ] presents her ongoing dialogue with old friends and new
acquaintences (sic) as she performs her life of a stranger in constant confrontation with foreign Societies (sic), where
her negotiations, trials and errors continuously create new forms of cultural expression.”Press Release for
Aleksandra Mir Organized Movement, Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris, 2006 <Available from
http://www.artnet.com/galleries/Exhibitions.asp?gid=424465892&cid=86813>[Accessed 4/8/8].
Or Lars Bang Larsen in 1998: “Mir connects ideas about leisure culture and labor life in a situation, which is both
metaphor and productive circumstance.”Lars Bang Larsen, MOMENTUM catalogue, 1998. Quoted in Aleksandra
Mir, CV. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/cv.html>[Accessed 22/8/8].
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3. A BRIEF HISTORY
It is not polite to mention a woman’s age, but Aleksandra Mir is an

artist, and albeit elite, artists are servants.12 Let’s have another look at
this servant.
Aleksandra Mir was born on the 11th September 1967 in Poland.

[9/11]. Aleksandra has Swedish and USA citizenship. She studied at
Gothenburg University briefly before following a BFA in Media Arts
at the School of Visual Arts, New York and graduate studies in
Cultural Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New
York — finishing in 1996.13
Let us note here quickly also that Мир is ambiguous. To Russian

speakers, Mir means <world>; <world> and <peace>.14 We need to add
that the Soviet Мир (Mir) space station crashed to Earth and,
additionally, that Alexander the Great conquered the World, adopted
Persian ways and commanded his men to take Persian wives.15 I mention
these points because of Alexander, a fold within the name, <everything –
turned away, protected — from man>, Aleksandra as Alexander:
ἀλέξω ‘I defend’, ἀνήρ ‘man’. So, this Aleksandra Mir then?
12 «I think that artists are the elite of the servant class», Jasper Johns. Quoted in Crichton, Michael, Jasper Johns.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977, p17.
13 Aleksandra Mir, CV. Op cit.
14 As <red> is <red> and <beautiful>.
15 Margarita Del Giudice, Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran, National Geographic, August 2008. <Available from
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/08/iran-archaeology/del-giudice-text>[Accessed 18/8/8].
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4. Publishing
Aleksandra Mir has herself authored many publications — and self-

published since she was 11, before she knew what art was.16 In this
sense, Aleksandra Mir’s practice is also part of her? As with many
artists now, limited edition catalogue-style books professionally
produced with her galleries also document specific exhibition and
project work — such imprints do. Nonetheless, publishing and self-
publishing are, for Mir, also other routes to dissemination and equally
part of her practice.
Characteristically, Aleksandra has also “published” pro-choice posters,

baby-portrait shot glasses, a silk scarf,17 a placard for love,18 fruit prints
of re-imagined flowers,19 t-shirts,20 postcards,21 Greek souvenirs22 and a
newspaper marking her birthday.23 Mir does seem to enjoy seriality.
Nonetheless, Mir’s seriality is peculiar and connects others within and
around her work. Is Mir simply one voice at the front? Or a
repository? Let’s summarise a few of Aleksandra’s “books”.
16 “I am interested in self-publishing, ephemera, and other forms of popular distribution, things I have been involved
in since I was 11 years old, before I even knew what art was.” Sarah Douglas, Newsmaker: Aleksandra Mir
www.artinfo.com, Sept 20, 2007.<Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/douglas.html>[28/8/8].
17 For New Designs, 2005 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/new
%20design/index.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
18 You Can’t Hurry Love, 2003 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/canthurrylove/canthurrylove.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
19 The Meaning of Flowers, 2006 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/meaningflowers/meaning.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
20 I Love Love, 2004 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/ilovelove/ilovelove.html>{Accessed
18/8/8].
21 Bremen, 2005 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/postcard/postcard.html>[Accessed 18/8/08]
22 Gentlemen, 2007 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/gentlemen/gentlemen.html>[Accessed
24/8/8].
23 Daily News, 2002. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/dailynews/dailynews.html>[Accessed
27/8/8].
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5. Some More Books
Corporate Mentality, (2001) was edited with John Kelsey and published by Lucas
and Sternberg in New York., The book documents the emergence of recent
practices within a cultural sphere occupied by business and art.24 There are
multiple contributors. And therefore voices?
Living and Loving is a series produced since 2002 with curator, Polly Staples.
Here, Mir presents as biographies her interviews and the personal photographs of
3 individuals on the periphery of the “art world”. Her subjects? A security guard,
the daughter of an art collector, and an art student. The resulting fanzine type
magazines were distributed free through galleries and arts centres within different
group shows and art fairs — in editions of thousands. Mir continues working on
the series.25
A booklet, How to be a Joshua Tree, (2003), was produced for participants of the
High Desert Test Sites, Spring Event 2003 (a laser-printed edition of 125, 12pp).26
Here, in the video stills forming the pages, Mir climbs on a graffitied rock. The
video is the first instance of a longterm project, Home Road Movies.
Carrying on, A Voyage Towards South Pole and Round The World (2005)
constitutes, in effect, Aleksandra’s sketchbook and records of fragments of
conversations on a group trip to Antartica 2005 with Pierre Huyghe. Mir originally
produced this for the group as a present and in a limited edition Xerox publication
(17 copies). A copy is now held in the library of the Explorers’ Club, New York.27
24 Aleksandra Mir and and John Kelsey, Corporate Mentality, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2003 and online:
<Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/corporatementality/corporate.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
25“We continue working on the series but we are only able to put a new issue out every two years or so.” Aleksandra
Mir , How To Do Something With Nothing, An interview by Silvia Sgualdini, UOVO, Torino, Dec 2006.<Available
fromhttp://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/sgualdini.html>[Accessed 8/8/8]
26 How to Be a Joshua Tree, 2003 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/zips/pdfs/joshua.pdf>[Accessed
18/8/8].
27 A Voyage Towards South Pole and Round The World , 2005 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/antarctica/voyage.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
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6. NAMING TOKYO
Let’s say that Aleksandra’s aesthetics are open. DIY? But here while we are
noting Aleksandra’s publishing, let’s note also Naming Tokyo 28 as a central
work. Commissioned by Nicholas Bourriaud for the Palais de Tokyo, Paris,
2003, Aleksandra invited street names from curators, artists, gallerists, friends
and acquaintances. Tokyo, famously, has no street names;29 Aleksandra has
never been to Tokyo.30 Aleksandra assigned her new names to her map. The
Palais printed the maps free for visitors. At the New York Swiss Institute, for
Naming Tokyo II, 30 favourite names were turned into New York-style street
signs: CUT & SLASH, MY WAY, NOBO-PUNKATURE.31 32 33 What does it
mean to give a street a name?34 Is Tokyo different?35 And New York? Can
we say that Mir is attempting to deterritorialise.36 But let’s note, Mir’s books
are also on the internet, on her site, <http://aleksandramir.info>.
28 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/pdfs/pdfs/NamingTokyoII.zip>[Accessed 27/8/8].

29 Bennet Simpson,, op. cit.
30 Aleksandra Mir, DESIGNATIONS <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/tokyo/tokyo.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
31 SI Exhibitions – Mir Monk. <Available from
http://www.swissinstitute.net/2001-2006/Exhibitions/2003_Mir_Monk/mir_monk.htm>[Accessed 27/8/8]
32 “For ‘Naming Tokyo’ , dozens of acquaintances inside and outside the art world pitched in with thematic lists of
suggested street names‹Italian swear words, Vivienne Westwood’s couture collections, New York City drag
queens‹which were published on a large handout map with a blank Tokyo city grid on one side and selected re-
christenings on the other. For the Swiss Institute, some favorites were made into actual New York-style street signs,
turning the front half of the gallery into a forest of improbable intersections.” Kastner, Jeffrey, Aleksandra Mir,
Swiss Institute, Artforum, February 2004. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/kastner.html>[26/8/8].
33 All moved and reinstalled to the ICA, University of Pennsylvania, Naming Tokyo III followed the month later.
34 “Mir’s city is defined less by otherness, a figment of the colonial mind, than by arbitrariness, a collision of
individual hypotheses on what it means to know a place at all.” Bennet Simpson, Aleksandra Mir: ‘Naming Tokyo
(Part III)’, ICA, Ramp Projects, ICA, Philadelphia, Jan 2004. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/simpson.html>[Accessed 27/8/8].
35 “It’s easy in America to forget one’s feelings, to change one’s mood, to think like everyone else, because there is an
ever-present representational reflection of ‘what everyone else’ is feeling, thinking, doing. That this refelction is
itself a reflection of a reflection only serves to secure its power.” Peggy Phelan, Warhol: Performances of Death in
Americ. In ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, Performing the Body/Performing the Text, London:
Routledge, 1999.
36 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London and New York: Continuum, 2004, p149.
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(1) Daily News, New
York, 2002
8/121
(2) Plane Landing (Zurich), helium inflated balloon, 2008
(3) Collage from Aim at the Stars, collages on board

with gold leaf frames, dimensions variable, 2008.
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6. 2008
Let’s go on.
This year, 2008, Aleksandra has shown her Plane Landing at Zurich
airport,37 shown icons collaged with images of satellites and rockets for
Sao Paolo, Brazil,38 and with Lisa Ann Auerbach, made marzipan repairs
to classical statuary in Naples39.
In October, 2008, the Mary Boone Gallery, New York will host a new
solo show, The White House.40 And November 2008, Lisboa20, Lisbon,
another solo, Mandalas and Incense holders.41
【】
37 Plane Landing, 2008 <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/planeswitzerland/plane.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
38 Declaration for Space , 2007 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/declaration/vilaca.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
39 Marzarama, 2008 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/marzarama/marzarama.html>[Accessed
28/8/8].
40 See Mary Boone Gallery site. <Available from
http://www.maryboonegallery.com/artist_info/mir_info.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
41 See Mir’s Shows and Events, <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/events.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
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(6) Installation view from Newsroom, 2007
(7) Installation view from Newsroom, 2007
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(8) Mandalas, 2007
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(9) Marzarama, 2008
(10) Marzarama,
2008
(11) Love Stories, 2007
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(12) Narvik Superstars, 2007
(13) Gravity, The Eternal

Countdown, 2007
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(14) Sicilian Pavilion, 2007
(15) Accident (with Lisa Ann Auerbach), 2007
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8. 2007
In 2007, at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, a live studio of assistants produced giant
hand made pen drawings copying archived covers from the New York Post and Daily
News.42
The year includes other drawings. Giant hand drawn mandalas for Lisbon,43 giant hand
drawn maps of the Mediterranean,44 drawings of roses;45 designs for souvenirs.46 A busy
year? But this was not all! In Cadiz, Spain, one thousand couples’ and lovers’ initials
were completed on 1000 trees.47 In Narvik, Norway, a small port city on the edge of the
arctic circle, a thousand Hollywood-style stars were set on the dockside in her project,
Narvik Superstars.48 A present from Aleksandra Mir?
And other art work in 2007? A booklet on the art scene in LA (after Harold
Rosenberg),49 a calendar documenting the 2006 project, Gravity,50 a marzipan car
accident51 (with Lisa Ann Auerbach); and going to Venice in a vintage Rolls Royce.52
42 Newsroom (1986-2000), 2007. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/news/news.html>[Accessed

18/8/8].
43 Mandalas, 2007 <http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/mandalas/mandalas1.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
44 Mediterranean, 2007 <http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/mediterranean/mediterranean.html>[Accessed
18/8/8].
45 The Rose Sisters, 2007 <http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/rose/rose.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
46 Gentlemen, 2007 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/gentlemen/gentlemen.html>[Accessed
28/8/8]
47 Love Stories, Fundacion NMAC, Montenmedio Arte Contemporaneo, Cadiz, 1000 trees carved, 2005-2007.
<Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/lovestories/lovestories.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
48 The next 1000 children born in Narvik will each have one assigned their name. ‘For her biggest commission yet,
New York-based artist Aleksandra Mir has proposed a homegrown replica of Hollywood’s walk of fame in the
Norwegian port city of Narvik. Instead of honoring movie stars, however, Mir will give a star to each of the next
1,000 babies born in Narvik. For those looking down on the Narvik Superstars from the surrounding hills during the
sunlit polar night, Mir hopes this living monument will appear as a ‘galaxy of glittering stars through a night they
don’t have’.’Peter Eleey, Curator, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, for Public Art Review, vol 16, no 1, issue 3,
2004. Quoted in Narvik Superstars, 2004-2007. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/narvik/narvik.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
49 LA: A Geography of Modern Art, 2007 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/LA/LA.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
50 Gravity: The Eternal Countdown, 2007 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/gravity/calendar.html>[Accessed 20/8/8].
51 Accident, 2007. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/accident/accident.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
52 “an uninvited participant and an invited guest, equal in prestige to the biennale”Sicilian Pavilion, 2007 <Available
from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/sicilian/sicilian.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
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(16) Installation view,
Mouvement Organisé, 2006
(17) Installation view,

(18) Installation detail,

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(19) Asteoridus Svizzerus, marker on paper, 360 x 400 cm, 2006
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(20) Treasure Island, marker on paper 150 x 180 cm, 2006
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9. 2006
2006? A rocket called GRAVITY, built out of scrap — old boilers,

fan silencers, big pipes — 20m tall, with smoke coming out of its
windows, for the reopened London Roundhouse — the piece’s
construction as much the exhibit as the ‘work’.53 Giant hand drawn
maps of Switzerland in Switzerland.54 An installation of work in
Mexico City in Paris.55 Collages of Che Guevara with Concorde.56
The Living and Loving series continued with the biography of an art
student.57 Fruit prints of flowers in Palermo.58 A show with Lisa Ann
Auerbach, Miss America in LA— one of Aleksandra’s USA drawings
with a manifesto Stars and Stripes by Lisa59.
Is this Aleksandra Mir? Always flitting like a bee from project to

project?
53 Gravity, 2006 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/gravity/gravity.html>[Accessed 20/8/8]

54 Switzerland and Other Islands, 2006 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/switzerland/switzerland.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
55 Mouvement Organisé, 2006 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/organized/godin.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
56 The Concorde Collages, Galerie Laurent Godin, 2006 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/organized/che.html>[Accessed 21/8/8]
57 Living & Loving No: 3, 2006 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/livingandloving/living.html#l&l3>[Accessed 18/8/8].
58 The Meaning of Flowers, 2006 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/meaningflowers/meaning.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
59 Miss America, 2006 http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/missamerica/miss.html and
http://www.lisaanneauerbach.com/projects/MissAmerica/MissAmerica.html[Accessed 28/8/8].
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10. Perruque
Clearly an artist with several projects on the go at the same time,

our Aleksandra Mir’s perruque60 is that of an activist’s. Her
processes of making are nonetheless, reflexive. Like facets of
diamond? Let’s take our overview from here. To understand Mir, it
is necessary to look beyond single works. Works form partial
expressions, paradoxes that escape single containment.61 Hers are
polyvalent, serial appropriations of popular culture. Her various
threads twist and twist as she proceeds. Her practice develops
conceptual themes. Techniques develop: mime, sculpture, video,
installation, drawing. Public works, gallery shows; New York, Paris,
Mexico City, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Palermo, Venice,
Antartica, around the world; relationships develop.
Aleksandra Mir’s first document is a single B&W photograph,62

Lonesome Cowboy (1994). Let’s say that Aleksandra Mir starts
with that, in that photograph. Do you notice the tramline, the
public transport — that Mir might be said to be awaiting
transport, somehow? Like Yves Klein, leaping into the void?
◑
60 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp24-30.
61 “My ideas are constructed as paradoxes that will always evolve around themselves, so as far as my philosophy
goes, it can't really be corrupted or fail. I can easily let other people project their desires, engage their opinions, use
their economies and form their own meaning through individual or local relationships to the work without ruining
my intentions. In fact, I completely rely on all these relations to be able to pull anything this complex off at all.”
Aleksandra Mir in conversation with Claire Doherty, 2003. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/doherty.html>[Accessed 24/8/8]
62 Lonesome Cowboy : a 1994 performance on Gothenburg tram tracks; Aleksandra is lying with her head on the
tracks, a stetson over her face, — she is a cowboy resting. There is a passer-by.
<http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/cowboy/cowboy.html>[Accessed 26/8/8].
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(21) Lonesome Cowboy, 1994
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(22) Hostesses by the Ullevi sports
arena, Life is Sweet in Sweden, 1995
(23) cd cover, Bingo Blues, 1998
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(24) Homeboys, snowmen, 2001.
(25) Smileys, fenders and snow, 2005.
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11. Before
So this Aleksandra Mir, then, what else has she done?
Aleksandra Mir has organised hostesses to welcome visitors to

Gothenburg (1995).63 In Copenhagen, she has played recordings of
male wolf whistles from hidden speakers,64 cordoned a courtyard
gallery entrance with rope and guard dogs65 and made a ticketed bar
(1996).66 She painted two houses, one in New York State (2005) and
one in Roskilde, Denmark (1996) , gingham with a scrawled ‘Smash
Patriarchy’ graffito.67 She has released a vinyl ‘45 of a Glasgow
Bingo caller (1998).68 Her Cinema for the Unemployed in Norway
showed Disaster Movies (1998)69 She learned to dance in Mexico City
(2004),70 made snowmen in New York (2001),71 drew snow smileys on
pink fenders on a ship in the Antarctic Ocean,72 stood on an iceberg in
Antarctica (2005)73 and had an iceberg melting ceremony at Pierre
Huyghe and Francesca Grassi’s apartment in the East Village, New
York (2004).74 Let’s start again now, we’ll go to 2002. We’ve touched
on Lonesome Cowboy (1994), already.
63 Lif e is Sweet in Sweden, Gothenburg, 1995. <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/lifeissweet/life.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
64 Pick Up (Oh Baby!), Copenhagen, 1996. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/pickup/pickup.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
65 Welcome, Copenhagen, 1996. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/welcome/welcome.html>
66 Welcome (Stereobar), Copenhagen, 1996 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/sterobar/sterobar.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
67 Smash Patriarchy!, Roskilde, Denmark 1996 and New York State, 2005. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/smash/smash.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
68 Bingo Blues, Glasgow, 1998. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/bingoblues/bingo.html>
69 Cinema for the Unemployed, Moss, Norway, 1998. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/cinema/cinema.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
70 Organized Movement, Paris, 2004. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/organized/organized.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
71 Homeboys, New York, 2001. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/homeboys/homeboys.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
72 Smileys, Antartica, 2005.<Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/antarctica/antarctica_home.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
73 Ibid.
74 Icebergs, New York, 2004. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/icebergs/icebergs.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
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12. 2002
In 2002, Aleksandra published a newspaper on her birthday. This was called

the Daily News. And its purpose? To reclaim her birthday, 9/11, the 11th
September. The banner headline was Happy Birthday!75 Let’s divide
Aleksandra’s work around here, 2001-2002, before HELLO and then after,
the Daily News.76
In 2002, but before The Daily News, Aleksandra had begun working with
Cameron Balloons in Bristol to build a 20m long helium balloon in the
shape of a jumbo jet. Plane Landing, the project, is just that: a 20m long
helium balloon in the shape of a jumbo jet. First inflated as a temporary
installation at Compton Verney Trust, Warwickshire in 2003, it appeared
again “in public” at Zurich airport in 2008.77 The plane is inflated and
deflated two or three times at each site. Any photograph can thus only catch
a moment. Mir had worked on the project for two years previous.78,79
75 Daily News. Op cit.
76 May 11, 2002 Dear Friend,/September 11th is my Birthday, but to celebrate it this year will be a double effort. So to
mark and reclaim the date, I am publishing a tabloid newspaper and organizing a party./ Everyone I know is invited
to contribute articles and images to this. Gavin Brown in New York and Cornelia Grassi in London are the
publishers, and I am the editor, with the policy of printing ANYTHING you send me, in the manner of accepting a
gift and to simply celebrate that we are around still working. / I am not looking for any rehash of what the media has
produced and served us, but for stuff that fell through the cracks or took off on its own: The personal, the strange
and the beautiful, changing, maybe not, our lives this past year./ Stories can come in any form, and on any subject
you see fit, not to be addressed to me, but as in a real paper, to the world. Texts of 1–500 words, b/w drawings and
photographs are welcome, everything to be arbitrarily combined and set in a tabloid newspaper format. Think: The
Daily News with columns, notices, ads, local and international letters, gossip, classifieds (see categories in any
newspaper), news and reviews, lots of pictures and with a headline that reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Ibid.
77 Plane Landing, 2008 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/planeswitzerland/plane.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
78 “The balloon, when fully blown up, depicts a plane frozen in a permanent state of landing. I am trying to make this
thing stand still, floating in the air. This defeats so many principles of sculpture, ballooning, and aviation. They told
me for two years, "No, you can't do this," and finally Cameron Balloons in Bristol did it. The perfect balloon is a
sphere. We built a cross. A plane is designed to carry 5,000 tons of steel. We filled it with helium.” Bollen,
Christopher, Interview with Aleksandra Mir, THE BELIEVER, San Francisco, December '03 / January '04.
<Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/bollen_believer.html>[Accessed 27/8/8].
79 ‘I had the idea here in England, when one hazy morning on the train from London to Bristol, I saw several back-lit planes at a
distance, appearing one by one, seemingly suspended, completely motionless in the sky but obviously in the process of landing.
They made me think about physics, illusions, places, non-places, transitions, travel, tourist cultures, leisure economies, the
behavioral patterns of the art world, kite flying, ballooning, park games, escapes, exiles, states, stateless-ness. I could talk about
ALL of that while simultaneously further the proud tradition of women in aviation.’Jetzer, Gianni: Interview with Aleksandra
Mir, Let's see what happens and who will be there, invitation brochure, 2003. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/jetzer.html>[Accessed 21/8/8].
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(26) Plane Landing, 2003
(27) The Big Umbrella, Copenhagen, 2004

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13. The Big Umbrella
Also around now, 2002, after HELLO, before the Daily News, Mir
was beginning work on another project, The Big Umbrella. The Big
Umbrella was to be an umbrella twice the size of the largest man’s. It
was produced with Jousse Entreprises, a gallery, in Paris.80 Across
2003-2004, Aleksandra travelled with her Big Umbrella. She had her
photographs taken — in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Dresden, New
York and Martinique81. The umbrella finally blew up in on itself on
Martinique, broken. Mir didn’t mind. For her, either way, it was a
sculpture82.
14. Unrealised projects
In her archive online, Mir includes models and sketches from

proposals. These, characteristically, have their own traces. For
sake of brevity, let’s say we have noted these and try to pick
out Mir’s methods and approaches beyond them. But this
said, Aleksandra’s work is also physical. You can buy it. Last
year, her newspaper covers were selling at $10,000 apiece.83
But of course, art ownership is also something which is
negotiated. Isn’t it? And if so, is Aleksandra inextricable from
her work? The collector? And those who help form it?
80 Mir, Aleksandra, The Big Umbrella. Paris:onestarpress, 2007, p155. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/pdfs/pdfs/umbrella_low_res_web.pdf>[Accessed 27/8/8]
81 Ibid. p3.
82 Jamaldin, Sharifa, Aleksandra Mir, ReadBABY SurfBABY, Amsterdam, 2004. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/jamaldin.html>[Accessed 23/8/8]
83 Smith, Roberta ‘New York Stories: Art Torn Screaming From the Headlines, Then Hung on Walls’. In New York
Times, 20th October 2007. Available from <http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/smith_roberta.html> [Accessed
7/8/8].
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15. Conceptual Machines
Yes, Aleksandra uses some conceptual machines. These machines,

these assemblages and viruses are everywhere!84 Aleksandra
engages discrete, several discourses which her viewers decode. Her
persona itself is, in part, fictionalised? — And plural, ephemeral,
present and absent? Blended with those around her? Jeremy Deller,
Nicholas Bouriaud,85 Toby Webster,86 the children of Narvik,87 the
Icelandic Love Corporation,88 the lovers in Spain?89 Aleksandra’s
works are also part of her processes of becoming Aleksandra Mir,90
They spring from her desire and creativity.91 Her approach has
coherence, peculiar contemporaneities — common territory;92
matrices;93 identities; irony. She proposed a seed bomb Wildflower
Meadow for Glasgow as part of its Gorbals Regeneration.94 Is
Aleksandra a seed bomb?
84 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p1; Op Cit.

85 Contributors to the Daily News . Op cit.
86 Her host in Glasgow, 1998. See Bingo Blues, op cit.
87 Narvik Superstars, op cit.
88 Sometime collaborators.
89 Love Stories, op cit.
90 “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” de Beauvoir, Simone The Second Sex(Vintage Books, 1973), p.
301
91 “Sexuality is already specified as sex, caste, forms of sexual practice, sexual ritual. But creativity and desire are for
me the same thing, the same formula.” Guattari, Felix, A Liberation of Desire (1979). In In Genosko, G ed., The
Guattari Reader. London: Blackwell, 1996; p209.
92 Felix Guattarri, Chaosmosis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp98-118
93 A matrix is a word for womb. (See below).
94 Wildflower Meadow, 2001. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/wildflower/wildflower.html>[Accessed 20/8/08]
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16. ∴
☠
A few glimpses of what is happening, and then keeping in mind to
rotate our subject a little: since 2006, Aleksandra Mir lives in
Sicily, Palermo.95 This is 2008. Is it not Virillio who talks about the
suppressed accident? For a while, let’s call Aleksandra Mir, ∴.
This is a stratagem of performance art, body-based art: to shift
identities, to question character.96 We can pretend ∴ is also .
We are discussing reflexive practice. We need to look a little wider

to make out what is going on here. ∴’s most famous work is The
First Woman on the Moon, 199997. Let’s go back there now.
95 Sicilian Pavilion, 2007. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/sicilian/sicilian.html>[Accessed

24/8/8].
96 For example Monty Cantsin is a name anybody can use. Or for women, Karen Eliot. Stuart Brisley, similarly, once
performed using his UK National Health number as his identity.
97 First Woman on the Moon, 1999. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/moon/moon.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
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17. THE FIRST WOMAN ON THE MOON
The First Woman on the Moon (TFWOTM) was a land art and
performance event taking place across 10 hours on 28 August
1999 on the man-made beaches of Wijk aan Zee in the
Netherlands. In the morning, ∴ makes a rough, model crater in
the sand at the feet of assembled plant operators. Ten bulldozers
then improvise a dozen odd lunar craters across a 200 x 300m²
section of the beach. Across the day, — alongside the excavation
— participants and public collect broken glass and garbage
revealed in the sand. This collection is laid out on tables as an
impromptu “Museum of Lunar Surface Findings” — examples
from which Mir also later preserves. Children, passers-by,
workers, crew, journalists, 4 companion women astronauts and
artist attend as excavation continues. 10 hours after the start, at
sunset, to an accompaniment of drums, a ring of children around
her, ∴, TFWOTM, ceremonially fixes the Stars & Stripes on the
ridge of a crater. ∴’s 4 companions have uniform-styled, short,
white astronaut dresses — just as ∴ is dressed — only∴ has a
Hasselblad around her neck. From the crowd, others ascend the
ridges, “The First Black Man on the Moon”, “The First German
on the Moon”, &co. The site is returned to its prior state for the
next day (after performance). Once again, Wijk aan Zee is a man-
made beach on the North Sea.98 Let’s note the doublings and
dislocations, our obstacles: the lunar surface, the Hasselblads,
and ∴’s fragmentation — her companions in self-same uniforms
like Life is Sweet (in Sweden)?99 The video is available on the
internet.
98 Ibid.
99 Life is Sweet in Sweden, 1995 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/lifeissweet/life.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
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(28) The First Woman on the Moon, 1999
(29) The First Woman on the Moon, 1999

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18. ♀❍
♀
❍
19. Land Art
A New York artist raises an American flag on a Dutch beach. Is

this closure to the Dutch claim on Manhattan — New Amsterdam?
And the earthmovers? Because they make the Moon are they part
of the art? Is this feminism today? Activism? Because no woman
has ever set foot on the Moon? Have you? Or was The First
Woman on the Moon something only in the lenses of the
journalists and official photographers? Does the idea of Land Art
mean Land is Art? And Sicily? Poland? Sweden? TFWOTM was
advertised in Artforum two months previous100. Is this
advertisement ∴’s artistic legitimacy? News coverage?
Memories? The promise? And this beachcombing? Is this also not
like forensics? Like, particularly, airline crash investigations? If
cameras never lie, neither do they speak, do they? An index is not
a speech. Is ∴? Is the body not political? Were people queuing?
How did what happen happen? Has this happened yet? Is
TFWOTM a kind of accident?
100Artforum, Summer 1999.
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20. ♬
You can see the Moon during the day some times, but you can’t always
see it better in the dark. Do you see it in photographs? Are these not
simply records? Indexical? This is one of the ways with ∴. It’s necessary
to turn what she does around in one’s mind.
♬
21. VIRUSES
A foot on the Moon, a sole in the dirt, barefoot on moon dust, ∴’s work
opens continually to questions. ∴ becomes ∴. Is Art not now produced
increasingly as temporary, site-specific events, serial programmes of
such?101 And this Bourriaudian notion of relation? Around the German
concept of the artist? And the French of Spectacle? Is it not more
institutional? Kultur and Civilisation?102 Within a continuum? A plateau?103
Was this not always so? What does going to the beach mean? A holiday?
What is a holiday?104 In visualising are we not between languages? I am
using questions because our answers are open: unclosed. All the events at
the beach, all the connections the work makes, these all are part of the
work. Aleksandra’s plateaus? Her rhizomes?105 Her academicism?
101Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October, Fall 2004

102Vogt, E.A, Civilisation and Kultur: Keywords in the History of French and German Citizenship, Ecumene 3,2, 1996;
pp125-45
103 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit. p24
104 Vilem Flusser, Celebration (1985). In Flusser, Vilem, Writings. Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 2002;
pp165-71
105Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op.cit,
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22.☭
☭
Let’s carry on, in the Netherlands, outdoor and site-specific
theatre are one visible and continuing legacy of the Tomato
Revolution106. Can The First Woman on the Moon not be read
within existing histories of this107? Does it not also extend the
gaze? So, let’s quickly also acknowledge parallel other histories
not only in New York, but internationally.108 And let’s also note
the presence of Theatre Anthropology as a discipline, notions of
social sculpture and historical schools of artists. Things are
complex, histories are multiplicities. We need to be quick. There
is some difficulty here, in the legacies of the artefact. Aleksandra
uses universal references. Her work is often as much an event as
a record.
106See for example, Rudy Engelander, The Theatre in the Netherlands: From Crisis to Crisis, or Peter Eversmann,
Theatre on Location in the Netherlands.Both in Western European Stages, Summer 1994, Vol6 No2. pp5-9 and
35-48
107 A Utrecht cultural office producing contemporary art projects, Casco Projects, produced alongside Inaxi, a sand
scultpure organisation in The Hague. Advertisement, The First Woman on the Moon, Artforum, Summer 1999.
108For example Philomena Mariani, ed. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s. New York: Queens
Museum of Art.Or Ferguson, Russell, ed. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-79. Los
Angeles:MOCA, 1998.
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23. Broadcasting to the world
In the 90s, then, it is enough to say that ∴’s approach shares

other legacies beyond visual art — theatre, Happening, Event,
Spectacle, her interventions. Yes, Aleksandra produces artefacts
but her work also explicitly takes place variously, as
phenomenon, experience, and relation. It has different multiple
nexus: public, social, geographic, formal and informal relations.
∴ is conceptual. So is Dada. And is Fluxus not also live? Are

these overviews we want? Global? Multipolar?109
Let us say that Aleksandra’s course is matrixial. That everything

has traces. But now? Is the message not communicated in the
medium?110 How can relationships be a medium? And Mir’s
media? Is her work not also about collecting? Archiving? Is this
not what ∴ does? But we have moved on. Perhaps this is the
feedback within ∴’s systems: appropriating the mass produced?
Re-presenting the personal? No?
☢
109For example: Thom Shanker and Mark Landler, Putin Says U.S. Is Undermining Global Stability. New York Times,
February 11 2007. <Available from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/world/europe/11munich.html>[Accessed
27/8/8].
110To alter McLuhan slightly: every medium contains every other.
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24. Space. Budget. Valentina Tereshkova.
〷
The entire project budget for TFWOTM was spent on a half-
page advertisement in Artforum.111 If all the money was spent,
how was the performance produced? Let’s note here,
Aleksandra’s successes in identifying and securing successful
commercial partnerships — with Cameron Balloons for Plane
Landing,112 as with Hasselblad for TFWOTM.113 Does art not
thrive on philanthropy? Power? The state apparatus?114
Advertising? Is this the elephant in the room? That we can’t see
what Art is?115 But this is one of the ways with art, isn’t it?
Representations and structures as contemplations?116
Experiences shared among people? Questions? To extend the
gaze?117 To see beyond polarities? Propaganda? The Nomos?
One invests time. Time itself marks other flows. (Some pictures
here).
111 “The project budget, $2,000, is spent the first day on a half-page ad in Artforum:‘To announce the news of this
historic event to the world’.” First Woman on the Moon, op cit.
112 Plane Landing. Op cit.
113Hasselblad supplied the original cameras used on the moon landings. The First Woman on the Moon, op cit.
114 Louis Althuser, ‘Idealogy and Idealogical State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’, Lenin and
Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books, 1971, extract pp120-140.
115 Jacques Ranciere, trans. G. Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible. London:
Continuum, 2004, pp12-34 .
116The Council of Trent, The Twenty-Fifth Session, Ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 232-89.
<Available from http://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct25.html>[Accessed 18/11/7]
117 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, New York: Vintage, 1995, pp207-208.
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25. Peggy Guggenheim & Henry Tate invite you
♨
If TFWOTM is now represented in the Guggenheim and Tate
Museum collections, as it is,118 does this accession translate ∴’s
work on the Wijk aan Zee beach from M.I.M.E.119 to art —
because the museum is the domicile of art?120 Or the discourse
of the page? Is this not to remove the object? Haven’t ideas
shifted? From one thing, performance, to another, exhibit? No?
Doesn’t theatre advertise in advance of performance? Ahead of
completion? A promise of a play? Isn’t theatre about character?
And the actors? Is accession validation? Absorption?
Appropriation? Completion? By whom? The Institution? The
event? The artist? The audience?121 When?
Is it not that events have chronologies? And these themselves

are representations in turn, of other chronologies? Other
structures? Other reproductions? Like words, are these not also
open? Nonetheless, this First Woman on the Moon has become
part of Mir’s identity and as video accompanied her for a few
years after. We have noted Mir involving people locally.
118 S. Gualdini, Op cit.

119 “M.I.M.E. … is the undiscriminating ability to produce oneself in and transcend any given condition or
framework.” Mir, Aleksandra, MIME. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/mime/mime.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
120 Douglas Crimp argues that Robert Rauschenberg “enacts a deconstruction of the discourse of the museum, of its
pretensions to anything we could possibly call knowledge’. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, October
vol13., summer 1980. Does Mir not personalize knowledge? Construct her own ephemeral personal museums?
121 See Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity, October, Vol. 80, (Spring, 1997), p101.
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26. Call Collect.
Critical language distinguishes cultural artefacts and practices

within criticism — as philosophy endeavours to interpret real
operations through language. It does this to unparcel multiplicities,
to match observation with reality.
The Museum accedes? The performance is over? Every museum

will have a representative collection? ∴ is herself, a collector.
How many people does collection represent? One? Two? A city?
∴? And a video?
∴ puts her documentation online for independence.122 She

knows about the differences between art and life. Is the motion of
visitors not a theatre? For a visitor? For a Museum without
Walls?123 And commissions? Is the Museum not a machine? A
democracy? Social sculpture?
122 “Self publishing is an excellent complement to an ephemeral practice. The more I document and make information
about my work freely available, the more independent I am and the more risks I can take in my actual projects.”
Aleksandra Mir, Interview with curator Mirjam Varadinis <Available from http://www.vernissage-
tv.com/06/mag/VTV_magazine_092206.pdf>[Accessed 28/8/8].
123 André Malraux, Museum Without Walls, New York: Doubleday, 1967.
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27. ☏
Is ∴’s Architecture — her film project of Coney Island
sandcastles being washed into the sea by the tide124 — is that not
also an extension of The First Woman on the Moon ? A kind of
collecting? Tides are made by the Moon, aren’t they? And again
there is doubling. From where do we look? From the fictional
Suarez Miranda’s story of the tattered map?125 What is the
philosophy running through this? Aleksandra shifts her media,
develops her themes, approaches, becomings, doublings. ∴
effects the incident of her art within broader chronotopal126
situations. ∴’s approach is holocratic127; subjectively plural128,129?
Isn’t ∴ also concerned with mapping? How far does mapping
go?130 To see the whole one must also see oneself, ergo
schizoanalysis. And to see the world? From the Moon? As a form
of the Carte du Tendre?131
124 Architecture (2001), ongoing. <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/architecture/architecture.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
125 J. L. Borges, On Exactitude in Science. In Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Hurley, H. London; Penguin
Books, 1998, p. 325,
126 Mikhail Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Emerson, C. & Holquist, M.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981
127 Arthur Koestler The Ghost in the Machine. London: Arkana, 1967
128 “In fact, subjectivity is plural — polyphonic, to borrow a term preferred by Mikhail Bakhtin. It is not consituted by
a dominant determining factor that directs other factors according to a univocal causality.” Felix Guattari,
Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse (1990). In Genosko, G ed., The Guattari Reader. London: Blackwell, 1996;
p193.
129 “Patently, art does not have a monopoly on creation, but it takes its capacity to invent mutant coordinates to
extremes: it engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being.: Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis,
op cit., p106.
130 Gregory Bateson has an allegory of beautiful lady and a track inspector suggesting our pictures of ourselves are
themselves maps. Bateson, Gregory, Allegory. CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1978, pp. 44-46. <Available from
http://www.oikos.org/batallegory.htm>[Accessed 7/7/08].
131See for example: Gloria Feman Orenstein, Journey Through Mlle. De Scudery’s Carte de Tendre: A 17th Century
Salon Woman's Dream/Country of Tenderness, in Femspec 3.2. , 2002 < Available from
http://www.femspec.org/samples/salon.html >[Accessed 20/8/08]
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28. Le cirque
There is an old word, «cirque». A «cirque» is a kind of natural

amphitheatre.132 A crater? Is Mir’s work not also a kind of
«cirque»? An impaction she transforms? Her impaction?
29. Spectres
We will need to look to spectres of feminism, Oedipus’

spectres, equally. These also are here. ‘Land Art’ is a male
quest133 and a public presence for art by women is a modern
turn.134 ∴ is a woman, isn’t she?
Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, demands equal burial rites for

her brothers, to Polynike (many victories) as Eteokle (truly
glorious).135
Is not the search of novelty part of the baroque? These folds,

curtseys — plis, plier.
132 The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979
133 Aleksandra Mir in Sgualdini, op.cit.
134 See for example Carol Duncan, ‘The Modern Art Museum’, in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums,
London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp115-28.
135 Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Humphrey Davy Findley Kitto,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
43/121
30. Organizado
Let’s pick out a couple more projects here. Organized Movement,

2004 and New Designs, 2005. To some extent, these are at polar
extremes from each other — one being more improvised — but
comparison proves salient.
Organized Movement developed from a residential workshop and

resulting exhibition project in Mexico City, Localismos at Perros
Negros. Here, working with local materials and craftsmen in the
historical centre — part of the mandate set — Mir produced
variations on Yo No Hablo Español — “I do not speak Spanish”.
At this time, Mir also shot and edited video depicting her attempts
to connect with the city around her through dance and body
language. Mir does not speak Spanish.136 So is that mime?
Can we note the variations, the shop window, and local

engagement137? How Mir effects her presence? As play?
The Uncanny138?
136 Organized Movement, 45 minute documentary. <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/organized/organized.html>[Accessed 22/8/8].
137 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity, October, Vol. 80, (Spring, 1997), pp. 85-110
138 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Art andLiterature, Penguin Freud Library, vol 14. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
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(30) Yo No Hablo Español, Letterpress Businnesscard, 2004
(31) Yo No hablo Español, cast bronze sign installed at the

offices of Perros Negros, Localismos, Mexico City, 2004.
45/121
(32) Yo No hablo Español, window display, Mexico City, 2004.
(33) Yo No hablo Español, welded metal sign and flower pots installation, Mexico City, 2004
46/121
(34) Installation view, Mouvement Organisé, 2006.
(35) Installation view, Mouvement Organisé, 2006.
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(36) Collaged poster from Mouvement Organisé, 2006.
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31. Mouvement Organisé
In Paris, in 2006 at Galerie Laurent Godin, for Mouvement Organisé,139 Mir

showed her video and ephemera from Mexico City. Collages of Che Guevara
with Concorde accompanied. The catalogue, the Concorde Collages (2006),140
documented these latter.
A skeleton sat at a desk. There were pages in Spanish on the walls. As with
TFWOTM in Rekjavik (video and installation, 2000)141 and in London (the
TFWOTM video with a model replica Stonehenge, 2003),142 in New York with
New Designs (2005); indeed any of her gallery shows, Mir occupies her
gallery. Her work fills the spaces afforded. Death. Time. What does Che
Guevara have to do with (the obsolent) Concorde? Stonehenge?
In 2003, Mir conducted her own interview with the original designer of the
iconic Guevara poster, Jim Fitzpatrick — now living in Ireland.143 Mir’s
interview was after carried on the flip side of her poster for Communism, a
group exhibition in Dublin in 2005. For the face, Mir collaged Fitzpatrick’s
Guevara with Concorde. Repurposing? Re-Appropriation? Development?
Shifting? The collaging of the human, Che, with technology, Concorde? And
the gallery as a quasi-documentative environment? Incomplete? Finished?
139 Mouvement Organisé, 2006. <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/organized/godin.html>[Accessed 27/8/8]
140 Ibid.
141 Top Secret, 2000 <http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/topsecret/topsecret.html>[Accessed 27/8/8]
142 Stonehenge II, a reproposal of a 1998 submission to Artangel. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/stonehenge2/stonehenge.html>[Accessed 27/8/8].
143 Che and Concorde, 2003-2005 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/hello/hello.html>[Accessed 27/8/8]..
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(37) Reincarnations '05, shot glasses, 2005
(38) New Designs pro -abortion bags, 2005
50/121
(39) Reincarnations '05, installation view, 2005
(40) New Designs, installation view, 2005
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(41) Reincarnations '05, Invitation card / designs for shot glasses.
52/121
32. New Designs.
It is worth taking note of these continuing concerns with presentation,

theses installation-/museum-styled environments. Clinical?
Capitalistic? Yet, as with the boutique styled New Designs,144
(Reincarnations 05) 2005, ∴’s installations afford simultaeneous
discussion.
New Designs had shot glasses with babies pictured as reincarnations

of public figures. Shopping bags carried the legend, in blue and pink,
‘KEEP ABORTION LEGAL’. A silk scarf was printed with the legend
‘Please Be Gentle in Fallujah’, its details: warships and fighters.
Almost as a shop, and also as a campaign HQ, ∴’s signature upward

reaching red, white and blue hands sat on shelves, like her shot
glasses, as if for sale. On her walls were prochoice posters with the
images of a cervix as background, and another with George W Bush
as an embryo and the question, ‘WHAT WOULD YOU DO?’
The scarf design appeared as a poster. Mir speaks on a number of

levels. She accommodates reading. Is Mir’s dialogue between life and
death? War and Peace?
144 Op cit.
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33. Hello
ﬖ
So, to move on, our global overview. ∴’s HELLO is several
collections of hundreds of photographs playing six degrees of
separation to its partner — from Edinburgh Fruitmarket Gallery, 2000
to Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002145. Aleksandra
published several — one a corporate report, Hello Ringier, 2003.146
Let’s note these shifts — place and people. HELLO can be realised just
as any Fluxus instruction. Mir allows her work to occupy folds of
possibilities. Only those realised by Aleksandra are hers? But let’s note
the lifespan of the project as realised. Let’s also note Aleksandra’s
physical presence in these places — she works with galleries and
networks to assemble her collections. Is this what you have to do to
work as an artist today? Go to all these places?147 From Edinburgh to
Sydney? It’s like a game. You match one person in one photograph
with another person in another. Aleksandra collects the pictures, she
does not take them. Aleksandra is not a photographer. The pictures are
of people. (And, in the photographs, the people are all in different
places).
Here’s Aleksandra’s HELLO. We carry on. Our territory is mapping.
145 Hello, 2000-2002. Mir lists versions for Sydney, Paris, Bern, San Francisco, New York, Trapholt, London, and
Edinburgh. The 2004, Hello - from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to Whitney Houston, Whitney Biennial, NYC was
cancelled. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/hello/hello.html>[Accessed 27/8/8].
146 Hello Ringier, 2003. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/hello/hello_ringier.html>[Accessed
27/8/8]
147 See Carol Duncan, op. cit.,
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34. Bremen: You
BREMEN, 2005.
This (BREMEN) was a series of 8 postcards set up for print by a

local graphic designer in Bremen. The (generic) images on the
postcards were bought royalty-free online. They show places
clearly not Bremen. Doubling or absence? A total of 300,000 were
available free in Bremen.148 Are postcards not about the same size
as photographs? Mir’s chosen the pictures. Can you see how
Aleksandra’s made her relations virtual, by allowing arbitrary
links? How relations in HELLO can extend beyond any existing
socius to include the deceased, to include those who are not the
subject. To include you?149 Is HELLO not like a collage? And
Bremen? Aleksandra comments that her work with photographs is
“the creation of the spaces in between photographs.”150 What does
that mean? The spaces in between photographs? Here we are now
again, in the middle of things. Through example will come
illumination — we are unpacking Aleksandra’s identities. And we
are seeing these criss-crossed and reified across artforms, media,
people and places. Does HELLO not take place in different places?
Easily constructed? And Mir’s Aviation Archive ?151
148 Ed. Frauke Ellbell, A Lucky Strike, Art Takes Place, GAK, Gabriele Mackert, Bremen, 2006.<Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/pdfs/pdfs/GAK_Lucky_Strike.pdf>[Accessed 28/8/8].
149 ‘The Dadaist exploits the psychological possibilities inherent in his faculty for flinging out his own personality as
one flings a lassoo or lets a cloak flutter in the wind.” Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada (1920). In Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory: 1900-2000. London: Blackwell, 2003. p261.
150 Mir, Aleksandra, Finding Photographs. Ikast: Socle du Monde <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/zips/pdfs/Catalogue.pdf>[Accessed 27/8/8].
151 “…made up of 101 books with skies and airplanes on them, on any subject and arranged in gradation from dark
blue to turquoise and purple.” Aleksandra Mir, Welcome Back to Earth, 2003. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/welcomeback/welcomeback.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
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36. WELCOME
We’ll backtrack now again, to 1996 and Mir’s WELCOME. This took
the shape of two events within Copenhagen’s programme for 1996
European City of Culture. One, in Radhusplatse, central Copenhagen
was a cordoned labyrinthine path with guard dogs and handlers present
securing a shin-high ribbon of path to first night attenders of an
exhibition, Update96 — i.e., it was a queuing system to get in152. The
other, the second, WELCOME took place in within the same season at
Stereobar, a busy club in downtown Copenhagen, again one night
only. Here, the bar dispensed drinks according to printed tokens from a
machine — i.e. another queuing system.153 Access?154 These, in turn,
let’s say genetically, inherit from her work, Life is Sweet in Sweden,
where local girls in central Gothenburg could sport uniforms from
Mir’s free ‘guest bureau’ —Gothenburg then hosting the World
Athletic Games. Conversely can these also be ancestors to the
performance event, Tune In, Turn On, Drop By, a reading of Timothy
Leary texts with sitar accompaniment and a stripshow afterwards at
Gavin Brown Enterprises in 1998. Why is nudity involved in so much
Art? Is this all about relationships between galleries and art and the
outside world?
  
152 Welcome, 1996. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/welcome/welcome.html>[Accessed
24/8/8].
153 Welcome (Stereobar), 1996. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/sterobar/sterobar.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
154 A public access proposal by Mir to embelish the Lutheran Cathedral on Senate Square with wheelchair access,
1995; workshop with Helsinki Arts Academy; Access, 2001. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/access/access.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
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37. NO SMOKING
Let’s note Aleksandra’s simple, catchy titles as we carry on. Hello!

Welcome! Gravity! The reflection, the intentionally refractive, the
plays of her own unparcelling? Work and leisure? Spending time?
Social connections? Does ∴ not make play manifest?155 When she
introduces 16 plastic No Smoking signs (from the US stationers,
Staples) into the Whitney Biennial?156 How do you know they are
hers? These 16 identical to many tens of thousand others? They cost
$30 total. What does No Smoking mean? Is one kind of whistle not a
way of saying FOR FREE? Or NOTHING? And another, for men to
distract women? And if a woman records these, the wolf whistles, and
plays them unseen, from invisible speakers to unsuspecting girls
walking by in a square in Copenhagen, is that music? A collection?157
▦▨◎ ↂ �
155 JC Freiderich Von Schiller, Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794.(Project Gutenberg). <Available
from http://worldlibrary.net/eBooks/WorldeBookLibrary.com/lettschi.htm#1_3_3> [Accessed: 13 April 2008]
156 No Smoking. 2004
157 Pick Up (Oh baby), 1996. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/pickup/pickup.html>[Accessed
27/8/8].
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38. Oriel (Mostyn)
There is a Welsh word that found its way into English:

←oriel→. An oriel is a gallery with 360º views.158 Dada.
Dada
oriel
What a web ∴ weaves. ∴ uses the everyday. Yet she allows the
perspectives of the gallery, this oriel, to include her own actions,
and the actions of others. ∴ has reflexive relations. Her metaphors
surround us. Like an umbrella? Do Mir’s postcards and
publications not themselves queue for dissemination? Is this what
we are doing? So, in its linking “and also…, and also…” structure
is HELLO not similar to Aleksandra’s Aviation Archive— her
collections of books all loosely to do with the idea of aviation as
taken from the cover? Like HELLO? Is this not part of what Mir is
doing? Establishing links at their points of absurdity?
Phenomenological readings from the body? A random other body?
Subjectivity? Politics? Feminism?
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39. Fashion Hats, 1997
Let’s pick up a couple more threads, weaving backwards and forwards as

we are. The first work in New York which Aleksandra documents is her
window installation for The New Museum, Fashion Hats, 1997.159 Here,
Mir copied a 50s style window display in the window of Fashion Hats, an
old, established milliner’s next door to the museum. The copy was onto
the neighbouring (larger) Museum window. Visitors to the Museum, and
customers for the shop would confuse the two and enter one looking for
the other. Is this not a play of art and commerce? Does what is in the
museum not also come from the market? Let’s note though that
Aleksandra’s duplication is not simply copying. It is always additionality:
the world and her, our ‘and also…’ linkage.


159 Fashion Hats, 1997 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/fashionhats/hats.html>[Accessed
31/8/8].
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(42) Fashion Hats, duplicated shop window, 1997.
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(43) Beijing, The World from Above, 2004
(44) Sea of Japan, The World from Above, 2004
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40. The World from Above
Backwards and forwards, but here we are — after Hello, after the
Daily News. In 2003, ∴ began to work with cartographies160—
selecting locations to map by hand from either recent trips, movie
references or graphic interest.161 Are maps not like hats?162 Or
umbrellas? Let’s note: 1) the initial drawings slightly larger than
1.22x1.22m², are partly copied from “mass-produced maps”163 and
2) that this work also marks Aleksandra’s development from more
social orientations and ephemeral works of the 90s. And 3)
similarly, the works open to different personal histories, knowledge
and experiences. They are subjectively plural — “never finished
and appear different to everyone.”164 All the same, these first maps
hung on the walls for ∴’s first solo show at Greengrassi, London,
2004, The World from Above, — centred, edge to edge. On central
floor plinths sat blown eggs decorated with (Sharpie) pen designs
— a la DIY Fabergé eggs. Mir’s aesthetics have as we have said, a
DIY aesthetic. What is DIY? Does not everything above the ground
come from what is beneath the ground? Does art not contain an
inside? Is the Earth not like an egg? And a blown egg …? Is that
not an egg whose contents have been removed? Like a photograph?
Does an umbrella not resemble a hemisphere? Half an eggshell?
Through which a plane might fly? A night sky? We are tracing
paths. Do people not live on maps? In Tokyo?
160 Like the Carte du Tendre? — 129 above.

161 The World from Above, 2004. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/worldfromabove/worldfromabove.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
162 See Marc Augé, Non-Places, trans. John Howe, London: Verso, 1995, p116
163 The World from Above, 2004. Op cit.
164 Ibid..
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(45) You are My Roadtrip, Church of Sharpie, 2005
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(46) Production shot, Church of Sharpie, 2005
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41. Some Really BIG maps
Of course, The First Woman on the Moon has aerial views of the Earth.
∴ explores cartographies. There is logic. This logic, this loose
conceptual bundling, Mir’s simultaneous ideas, all provide
cohesiveness. It’s not all so simple, however. Things overlap, even in
mapping, turn on themselves; question themselves. Are reflexive. ∴, by
making Earth and Space her locale, creates a universal locale? Do we
not conceptualise places we have never visited? Drawing to sculptural
dimensions, — filling the plane of the gallery wall, top to bottom, —
Mir followed The World from Above with some “really BIG maps” for a
couple of group shows — in Dresden and Berlin. Greengrassi retained
rights.165
In May 2005, Mir secured a temporary studio in New York and with 16
assistants produced 20 drawings, each 4.7m x 3m², each outlining the
USA’s borders. Aleksandra would sketch out the day’s work in the
evenings. During the day, her (16) assistants would fill in her sketched
out legends and designs. Among the collaborators, this temporary
workshop thus became known as The Church of Sharpie. (A Sharpie is
a brand of permanent ink marker).166 The results would be shown
together in London in October as WELCOME Sometimes.167 This
material, her 20 US maps and legends were Aleksandra’s second
Greengrassi Show.168
165 Some really BIG maps, 2004. <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/bigmaps/bigmaps.html>[Accessed 12/8/8].
166 <Available from http://www.sharpie.com>[Accessed 10/8/8].
167 Welcome Sometimes, 2005 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/sharpie/greengrassi.html>[Accessed 28/8/8]
168 Ibid.
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42. Drawings
In 2006, further series followed, Switzerland and Other Islands (a series of

32 drawings, some as large as 360 x 600 cm) at Kunsthaus Zürich;169 4 more
Sharpie drawings of the Mediterranean (as a quasi island)170 tropical
flowers,171 roses,172 mandalas.173 Let’s say Aleksandra found a root and then
carry on again. A beginning of this thread (of drawing) traces back to ∴’s
Sketchbook of 2001-2004 — let’s remember Mir’s graduate studies were in
anthropolgy — and note the Sketchbook. Typically, Aleksandra’s first
conscious drawing — a cartoon of female curators’ hairstyles — was made
while ∴ was on the telephone with Polly Staples and being asked (on the
phone) to contribute to Staples’ fanzine, Saturday. (Mir used to doodle while
on the phone).174
169 Switzerland and Other Islands, 2006. <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/switzerland/switzerland.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
170 Mediterranean, 2007 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/mediterranean/mediterranean.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
171 Tropical Flowers, 2005 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/tropicalflowers/tropical.html>[Accessed 24/8/8].
172 Rose Sisters, 2007 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/rose/rose.html>[Accessed 24/8/8]
173 Mandalas, 2007 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/mandalas/mandalas1.html>[Accessed
28/8/8]
174 Sketchbook, 2001-2004 <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/sketchbook/sketchbook.html>[Accessed 28/8/8]
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(47) Newsroom (1986-2000), installation view, 2007
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43. Newsroom (1986-2000): NEWS + ROOM
Mir’s Newsroom (1986-2000) (2007) pulls a lot of these

threads together. There are developments, lattices of
reference. Let’s pick at the roots of what is going on and then
come round again. In New York, ∴ researched pre-9/11
covers of the Daily News and the New York Post. As research,
Mir and three assistants photocopied a total of 10,000 covers
over a period of a few months. 200 covers were selected in
themes. Using the Church of Sharpie technique, assistants
would be present working on the copies live in the gallery
itself. In her (editor’s) office, ∴ went about her business and
appeared occasionally with a new design traced, ready to be
filled in.175 Mir says herself, it was like a studio and gallery
visitors would find a small team with their music and various,
changing members, producing this changing suite of new
work where it was being sold, Mary Boone Gallery. Each of
the seven weeks of exhibition would thus have a theme for 20
or so odd covers on the walls. And the meaning of these
tabloid headings writ large? Somehow expressing connections
of people in a running history? In something as mundane as a
tabloid title? Is a shared memory a kind of umbrella or an
airplane? Is it that the present is also created? That news and
gossip character our lives? That we are news and gossip?176
175 “Thus, those making multiple visits to the show would have found a near-constantly changing suite of large
Sharpie-drawn reproductions with repeating protagonists (celebrities, anonymous urban Everymen), sympathetic
groupings of content (riffs on food poisoning, murderous parents, miracles, art theft), or typographical quirks (most
frequently ampersands, hyperbolic numbers, exclamation points, and dollar signs).”Suzanne Hudson, Aleksandra
Mir. Mary Boone Gallery/ Printed Matter, Artforum, December 2007. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/hudson.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
176 “Whether one buys them or not, a glance at the headlines while passing by a deli or waiting for a bus is enough to
be connected to the diverse masses that make up their readership. Never mind if what is reported is mostly disaster
or scandal.”Aleksandra Mir, Press Statement for Newsroom, July 2007. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/news/news.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
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(50) The End Isn’t Near, from programme, Cinema for the Unemployed, 1998
(51) Anthrax Nation, 2002. Limited edition of 10; photocopied newspaper.
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44. THE END ISN’T NEAR
If we look back (backwards and forwards as we are doing), we

can see further roots. For the programme of Cinema for the
Unemployed, 1998, Mir reproduced the cover of a found copy of
the (New York) Daily News — carrying the story of an asteroid to
miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. The poster for this event is a
black and white film still of a man falling through a shop window
— like Fashion Hats? Like the window in Mexico City? Like the
First Woman on the Moon? Like Antarctica? Mir’s programme
was of disaster movies, morning to night. The Cinema for the
Unemployed showed Disaster Movies. She doesn’t stop here.
Invited to contribute to a May 2002 exhibition ‘Copy,’177 Mir
produced an edition of ten photocopies of an October 2001,
Daily News — the cover carrying the banner ANTHRAX NATION
(a story about Anthrax contamination of mail). ∴ also made a t-
shirt with this ANTHRAX NATION cover.178 We mentioned The
Daily News, Mir’s birthday paper. Can you follow the trail?
45. Thebes, Crown of Boetia
▁▂▃▄✈✇
177 Ruth Horowitz Gallery, New York City, May 2002 curated by Neville Wakefield. Wakefield has involved Mir in his
projects over many years — most recently including her Declaration for Space in God is Design in Sao Paolo.
178 Ibid.
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46. Cash
Aleksandra has had to find a means of approaching and entering

the art market: from M.I.M.E. to gallery. She has effected her route.
It is nonetheless, so precisely difficult to discuss Aleksandra in
part, because she has these multiple socius, complementary traces,
multiplicities. There is a continued quiet activism — in that the
work continues an uneasy, (uncanny) thread of popular fears,
(hysteria?). Yet clearly, Mir collaborates. She opens
correspondences. She involves friends, contacts, galleries and
foundations, collectors. She has a liveness. Of course, social life
implicates itself. As does Dada. ∴’s mime company, M.I.M.E.
have never all met together. Let’s say then that ∴ is in the middle
of things. Bateson’s plateaus179 — let’s note those. Let’s note also
that Aleksandra is not alone. Her exhibits are of social consensus,
interactions, remappings and remarkings of problems, not
manifestos. They are incomplete and ‘relational’. Other traces
intrude and complement. ∴’s mappings can only ever be partial. Is
it this which allows ∴ play?180 What is for sale?181 Are Oedipus
and Tiresius both blind now?
179 “A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory
Bateson uses the word “plateau” to designate something very special: a contuous, self-vibrating region of
intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.” Giles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., p24
180 See JC Freiderich Von Schiller, , Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794. Op. cit.
181 “If the bourgeoisie no longer need art as an ideological instrument, by the same token the artist was no longer
required to represent its interests — and in the default of other class interests could take as the subject of art its own
internal processes.” Foster, Hal, Recodings. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996; p163.
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47. Nicholas Serota
At our beginning, in that photograph in Gothenberg, what flows

through Aleksandra? The routes Aleksandra flows across? In
that Artforum advertisement?The Contemporary Museum has its
own cultures,182 milieux and discourse as different galleries,
theirs. There is a world outside. Aleksandra’s big umbrella was
an umbrella to share. Like her world? An embassy for the
Moon?
Clearly, Aleksandra has commodified herself — is she not

selling both product and event? Yet, she includes others’
interactions and others’ contributions within her work. Mir’s
structures, her management and collaboration, are these Mir’s
spaces between photographs? The interaction? The relations?
Is Aleksandra Mir a brand? How else does one live as an
artist?
182 Nicholas Serota, Expedience or Interpretation. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
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(52) Gravity, 2005
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48. FLIGHT
Absurdity was mentioned earlier: GRAVITY was a rocket

made of scrap exhibited in the re-opening season of London’s
Roundhouse, 2006.A leksandra described her rocket,
GRAVITY as being that in which TFWOTM travels to the
Moon — from land art to sculpture. Is GRAVITY not also a
failure of machines?183
✈
⏏
Obviously, ∴ did not go to the Moon. The Moon was Utrecht.
Antarctica? Is Antarctica not a kind of Moon? Is the territory
being shown? Like a large drawing? And the space rocket
never left the ground. ∴’s questions are all concerned with
performance because her questions are about living. Life takes
place. And then? Can we see that Mir’s oeuvre is conceptual?
So, Mir is a performance artist, however we look at it?184 Are
all modern artists not now Dada? Is language a virus? Is art
travel? Or travel without moving? Transient trajectories?
183 The parts of this spacerocket are all now recycled. Gravity, 2006, Op.cit.
184 Jeremy Cooper gives an account of the scene around Factual Nonsense with many of the YBAs contributing
performance and live events to Joshua Compston’s Fete Worse Than Death. Jeremy Cooper, no FuN without U.
London: Ellipsis, 2000, pp75-85, and 123-134. Let’s note that the relations of practice and artefact are problematic,
an invisible theatre that even beyond culutral hemispheres involves notions of performance.
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49. Questions
The year before, in Antarctica (2005), ∴ risks her life to stand

on an iceberg in yellow Antarctic waterproofs with a For Sale
sign in her hands and a big smile on her face. Isn’t that, doing
that, standing on something which could flip unexpectedly
— because that is what icebergs do185 — isn’t standing there like
that, somehow also like standing on the Moon? On Mars? You
fall into the water. Your breath collapses. You freeze.186 What a
clown!
185 Antartica, 2005 <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/antarctica/antarctica_home.html>[Accessed 28/8/8].
186 Ibid.
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(53) Antartica, 2005
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50. Universal Schizophrenia
But this For Sale sign? Is it a flag? ☠? Action? Life? An index? A

quantity? Everything? The USA can not own the Moon, can it?187 Can
Russia, Space, the Arctic?188 The Antarctic?189 Can Dada? Is
ownership an action? What is ownership, a gift?190 Surely, ∴’s
relations are elements of her own perspectives? That she brings
forward her own zenithal projections, her own Zulu time? Her own
strategically plural subjectivities.191 Have politics changed? What is
For Sale? Allegory? Comedy? Tragedy? Traces? Everything? Art as
Wealth? Is ∴ displaying hers?192 For Sale? What is Wealth? When
you breathe in the cold and your breath mists? Isn’t that like
smoking? NO SMOKING? Why are so many artists going to
Antarctica? Art and Politics? What does it take to believe something?
A lack of questions? And then there are the pink fenders.193
187 “1. The moon shall be used by all States Parties exclusively for peaceful purposes.
2. Any threat or use of force or any other hostile act or threat of hostile act on the moon is prohibited. It is likewise
prohibited to use the moon in order to commit any such act or to engage in any such threat in relation to the earth,
the moon, spacecraft, the personnel of spacecraft or man- made space objects.
3. States Parties shall not place in orbit around or other trajectory to or around the moon objects carrying nuclear
weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction or place or use such weapons on or in the moon.
4. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the
conduct of military man uvres on the moon shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research
or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for
peaceful exploration and use of the moon shall also not be prohibited.” RESOLUTION ADOPTED BY THE
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 34/68. Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial
Bodies. <Available from http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/gares/html/gares_34_0068.html>[Accessed
28/8/8].
188 Richard A. Lovett, Russia Plants Underwater Flag, Claims Arctic Seafloor, National Geographic News, August 3,
2007. <Available from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070802-russia-pole.html>[Accessed
28/8/8].
189 See Antarctic Treary, 1959. <Available fromhttp://www.scar.org/treaty/at_text.html >[Accessed 28/8/08]
190 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Chicago: Unviersity of Chicago Press, pp1-33.
191 “Must this multiplicity of female desire and female language be understood as shard, scattered remnants of a
violated sexuality.” Luce Irigaray, op. cit. P30.
192 Laura Mulvey identifies at the beginning of the entry of commercial and soft-core pornography, a male gaze. Laura
Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16.3, Autumn 1975. <Available from
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema>[Accessed 1 May
2008].
193 Smileys, 2005. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/antarctica/antarctica_home.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
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51. The internet
For all this ambition, we still need some speed. Is to see

Aleksandra Mir’s work across the internet to see ∴? Does that
affect what Aleksandra does? Her pages of projects? In these
words? Is that it? In fact, can you see it? Is Mir’s output somehow
digital? Streams of reasearches, searches for form? A kind of
kaleidoscope? Is a kaleidoscope digital? Obviously not? And to
call Aleksandra Mir another name, is that enough? Her conceptual
persona? Her Gravity? Her doubling? Her archive? Is this not also
about the differences of things made with hands, improvised? In
life? About what works? What has meaning? Irony? If everything
reflects everything else, is that shizoanalysis? The ability to think
in contradictions, metaphors? Let's stick to the text, ∴,
Aleksandra Mir and her reflexive practice. Her additionality.
∵
Gravity
A pink tank is a tank painted pink, isn’t it194? Rose Selavie?
(This is life: it is pink). How else could it be?
194 Pink Tank, 2002. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/pinktank/pinktank.html>[Accessed

18/8/8]
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(54) Plane Landing (Zurich), 2008
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52. Appearance and Disappearance. 
Forward. It is Summer 2008, ∴ took her Plane Landing from

2003 to Zurich Airport195 — part of her ambition to travel
with it to different places196. How can a Helium jumbo jet be
art? When there is no helium in it? Is a balloon a shell of art?
Because it was Art somewhere before, can it be Art
somewhere else, later on? Zürich? Dada? The Hindenberg?
Compton Verney? The museum? As Simulacra?197
Substitution? Plunder? “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say
so.”?198 Helium 3? Are all jet balloons Art?199 Is this gas plane
future technology? The ghost of an accident? Something also
familiar? Uncanny? Don’t people have helium balloons for
parties? As blimps? As Zeppelins? So how does someone read
something which is open, ambiguous? By context? What is
context? A zeppelin is not a plane, is it?
195 Shifting Identities - (Swiss) Art Now). Plane Landing, 2008. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/planeswitzerland/plane.html>[Accessed 18/8/8]
196 Plane Landing, 2003. Op. cit.
197 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: Univeristy of Michigan Press,
2003.
198 Robert Rauschenberg. Quoted in Jon Bardin, Neuroesthetics and Conceptual Art. <Available from
http://thethirdculture.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/neuroesthetics-and-conceptual-art/>[Accessed 28/8/8]
199 Op cit. Mir expresses this concept herself, in a conversation with Claire Doherty in Bristol.
CD: With a project such as this, are you able to articulate where for you the work resides? Are there aspects of the
project that are purely production or is every aspect of the process another facet of the work?
AM: I get this question more and more often which may be indicative of how all aspects of my practice are naturally
blending into one seamless flow. 'Plane Landing' is an object, which functions both as a sculpture and as a prop for
a performance, situated in a ready-made landscape. I allow the audience as much insight into the process of
preparations, the inflation and deflation as is practical and safe. I photograph all stages of the production and this
material is made public, both as documentation and promotion of the event. Recently, documentary material of my
past ephemeral works have also started to enter museum collections, as art history. Aleksandra Mir in conversation
with Claire Doherty, 2003; op. cit.
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⇑↵ ∀
∧
53. ♔Matrixiality
There’s another word we need now, the matrixial200. This is an

idea we have mentioned briefly in passing already. But to clarify
a little further, a matrix, strictly speaking, is a breeding
woman201. Matrixiality is not an explosion of cells dividing into
cells. Matrixiality is where that happens. Mir translates her
quantities and numbers to qualities — as events and matrices.
What exactly do I mean? Let's take the Plane Landing back to
Compton Verney where it was first inflated publicly. We are
getting complicated. Aleksandra had thought of a floating plane
on a train in England.202 Can a giant inflatable airplane be a
cabaret act? But typically, Aleksandra’s  has rooted also from
within her, from a response to an aircrash, Flight 990.203 Let’s
note this also as a key work: Flight 990.204 Aleksandra makes a
model, smashes it and then builds it again from those pieces.
Another doubling? So Plane Landing is a ghost of Flight 990?
Ⅎℵ ⅋
╓╥╖
╟╫╢
╙╨╜
200 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze. Leeds: Feminist Arts and Histories Network, 1995.
202 Plane Landing, 2003. op. cit.
203 See for example BBC News | Americas | Flight 990: What happened and when?<Available from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/515921.stm>[Accessed 18/8/8].
204 Flight 990, 1998. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/flight800/800.html>[Accessed 23/8/8].
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54. Feminism
The Ghost Dada of Dada. The daughter of the daughter of the

daughter of Dada. Is not the Baroness Elsa, also a woman?205We are
pulling threads into the weave. This is not 1918. The Cabaret plays
out dreams no matter whatever old pschitt they are.206 If public
reactions to the theatres of the surrealists and the futurists show
anything, it is that our capacities to be shocked have blunted.207
Where are the tomatos now? Zurich’s geneologies have always been
more than the Cabaret Voltaire, haven’t they? How can I write about
a woman if I can not know what a woman thinks? Through
“women’s work”? Through the camera?208 Through compressing
time?209 Is Art a machine then? Something which can change the
way things are done? The logic of making — a technology? A
technology for when one is dreaming? Another form of dream?
Does Aleksandra not use technology? Does she not live in the spaces
between her photographs? But we are talking at cross-purposes. Is
this ∴’s practice? Aleksandra produces her own limits, produces
herself as a partial mirror?210 She alters the familiar, questions its
dimensions and identities, and then reframes these. Can we say her
practice is a research of correspondences and metaphors:
autopoesis,211 automythography,212 Probability? Possibility?
205 Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927)

206 Alfred Jarry . Ubu Roi. Trans. Beverly Keith and Gershon Legman. New York: Courier Dover, 2003.
207 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. New York: Random House Inc, 1991
208 Krauss identifies photography central to surrealism: the camera is a mechanical eye. Rosalind Krauss, "The
Photographic Conditions of Surrealism" (October, winter 1981)
209 Dada is Dada.
210 “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise
participate in the circulation of representation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than
performance.” Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2006,
p146.
211 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis. Op. cit. p108
212 Deirdre Heddon discusses the role of autobiography in recent performance as a mode also of Protest. Mir
fictionalises her own identity, makes it myth. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance, London Palgrave,
2007.
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(55) Flight 990, built, smashed and rebuilt scale model, 20 x 16", 1999.
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55. Envelopes
Art is an envelope213 and Switzerland is an island.214 Of course

they are, are there not lines all round them? You can see them on
maps. Can’t you? But we need to begin to work our way back, to
unparcel our subject. This is what our methodology is, isn’t it?
(Artistic gestures have resonant signatures in the brain.
Everything is harmony).215 The question is if this feedback —
(the chemical / genetic / phenomenologic) — and thick
description is still language — is sufficient for cybernetics? Is it
simply our own reflections?216 Another global view? And Utopia
is an island isn’t it? Can ∴ show us it? (Feedback on feedback.
That is nature and harmonics.) Schizoanalysis examines across
folds, fields, flows, across territories by identifying
multiplicities. Aleksandra performs her schizoanalyses in her
work. Deterritorializes. Let’s stay with that.
℻ⅯⅯvⅼⅼⅼ⌂
℠ ℡™
213 This is a fold. Giles Deleuze, The Fold. New York: Continuum, 2001
214 Switzerland and Other Islands, 2006. Op cit.
215 See Semir Zeki, Statement on Neuroesthetics. <Available from http://neuroesthetics.org/statement-on-
neuroesthetics.php>[Accessed 28/8/8].
216 In 1996, Giacomo Rizzolatti and a team of researchers observed reciprocal signalling in the brain to visual and
aural signals. Rizzolatti suggests this is located in the body, or at least, corporal recognition. See for example
Sandra Blakesee, Cells That Read Minds, New York Times, January 10, 2006. <Available from
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10mirr.html>[Accessed 28/8/8]
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56. forked speech
╋╂╁╫
simultaneous description
Do not talk about Dada. Dig over entrails, speculate on the
future from carcasses. Yes, I will describe it to you. Of course
there is more to say. This is Dada. [This is life: it is pink].
How can art feed at the table of the machines of death?
We are talking about the dematerialization of Art217. The

author is dead.218 The subject is the writing.219 Aleksandra Mir
is writing Aleksandra Mir. ∴ is writing ∴. I need to be brief.
To sketch, rather than paint. To effect a description of the
whole from the molecular.
Is it any wonder that Oedipus kills his father? Isn't Oedipus

schizophrenic?220
⌥⎈⎋⏏
217 “The structure then of works of art will have to be different from the structure of objects which merely resemble
them.” Arthur C Danto, Art Philosophy and the Philosophy of Art. Humanities, Vol. 4, No. 1 (February 1983), pp.
1-2. <Available from http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_r1.html>[Accessed 20/8/8].
218 Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author. Aspen 5+6. Edited and designed by Brian O'Doherty, Fall-Winter 1967.
<Available from http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/index.html>[Accessed 4/4/8].
219Michel Foucault. "What Is an Author?" Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. Ed. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David
Neal Miller. Albany: State University Press of New York, 1987. 124-42.
220 Oedipus does not remember names, recognise faces. He arrives and weds the grieving queen, his mother. Oedipus
rends himself blind. His actions and symptoms are schizotypal.
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57. Miss America
Aleksandra grew up in Sweden in the 1970s, and among American

capitalism after. She admits having politics. She says she is doing
something else.221 Let\s note commentative and documentative
elements to Mir’s output. Sometimes Aleksandra’s exhibitions are
also repositories of documentation. Is appropriation not feminist?
Let’s say Aleksandra Mir is a feminist and that her feminism is ‘New
Rock Feminism’. Her first act on graduation might also be said to be
that: her collecting petitions for more woman in rock and roll at the
Roskilde Festival in Denmark —among the 100,000 music fans. She
exhibited this documentation as an installation at the Royal College
of Art, London in 2000, Democracy!222 Is Aleksandra saying that we
see how far feminism has come by how women are treated in rock
and roll? Is a petition art? Isn’t Rock an attitude? Does having
women in rock and roll require glamour photography? Yet
femininity is not celebrity, is it? And equality? Is a matrix not that in
which magic is made? Mathematics? Do we see ourselves different
yet? Our descriptions? Were we not ourselves when we were
ourselves? Was this not us?223 Is the display of the documentation,
Art? And the material itself? And the collecting of it? And the
signatories therein? The photography? All of the above?
221 “It seems to me that optimism is built into the human constitution so that we can move on, regardless of any crisis
or dilemma. I am just following that instinct.” Aleksandra Mir. Quoted in Silvia Sgualdini, op. cit.
222 Democracy, 2000. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/rock/rca.html>[Accessed 18/8/8].
223 “It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so
that it will be clear, they are already eslewhere in hat discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them.”
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter,. New York: Cornell University, 1985, p29.
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(56) Democracy! installation view, RCA, 2000.
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(57) Miss America, invitation card, 2006.
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58. $ sign?
Cixous requests an écriture feminine, one that produces itself.224 I am

arguing that Aleksandra does. I am arguing that Aleksandra’s ecriture
is written in, and with, the body. And reflexivity therefore, an ability
to reimagine oneself in terms of Cixous’ écriture feminine?225 To
continue itself? To splinter? Like Irigaray?226 To share? Like
Bourriaud?227 Is this its characteristic? To appropriate? A writing
which produces itself? Yet, Aleksandra also doubles. She effects
replications and connections, produces these, displaces these. These
are her art, her keys: placing something where it was not before,
transposing the mundane and everyday.228 And here equally, Mir’s
replications are multiple, or scaled larger than life, reproduced across
and using everyday media, across changing media. The language of
the body is not foreign. Is that why it can transport? Is this mime? So,
language expresses and is inhabited? Is language not also that which
surrounds? Does art enable our picturing of ourselves? From bones
and flesh, to architectures? From blood and sense to world and
culture? Culture and civilisation?229 Where do we live?
224 Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B.
Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 2039-2056
225 Ibid.
226 Op cit.
227 Op cit.
228 “This appropriative operation is efficacious, to be sure, but it nonetheless compensates for a lack — the lack of a
coherent social base for cultural production.” Hal Foster, Recodings, Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1985, p162
229 “There is at least a risk that their will be no more human history unless humanity undertakes a radical
reconsideration of itself. We must ward of by every means possible, the entropic rise of a dominant subjectivity.”
Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, p68
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59. Cybernetics
Notions of helmsmanship, cybernetics are also of Dasein.230 Of

plurals of Technology: Technology + 1; the feedback element of
action, a recursive gaze? And this space of living, in which one
lives, this is not universal. So how does the world steer itself ? Is
this not also the question at the heart of ∴? Not multiples rather
instances, serial instances. This space of living.
BwO?231 (Body without Organs, I mention this here because we

are looking at creative living — I'm flagposting our route).
BwO, where do you end? Superman? In the face of a text? As
a skin?232 In mitten drinnen, in media res: in the middle of
things?233 (Thousands of our layers, our plateaus, all needing
lining up now). In a democracy everything is political, ipso
facto, is it not? And an heuristics? A politics of Everything? A
party line? Marxism? The myth of a perfect Republic? An
ethico-aesthetic paradigm?234 We are moving, no? Do people
not sometimes frame and hang newspaper pages on their walls?
Is everything not politics? Imperium?Auctoritas?235 Capitalism?
230 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
231 The Body without Organs does or does not effect change and growth. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus. Op. cit., pp165-184.
232 cf. Serres in 190 above.
233 In Steven Connor’s, Michel Serres’s Milieux, — extended version of a paper given at the ABRALIC (Brazilian
Association for Comparative Literature) conference on ‘Mediations’, Belo Horizonte, July 23-26 2002. <Available
from http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/>[Accessed 10 July 2008].
234 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis. Op. cit.pp98-118
235 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2005, p84.
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60. You can lock nature out but you can’t stop it getting in.
♖♘♗♕
This thesis is also an attempt at reflexivity.
Person ➠ Situation?
61. Newsroom, 2007.The White House, 2008
Dada did not start with Dada. Dada was a «socius». Dada
went bust.236 (Blind Tiresius). In Zurich. (Lenin). In 1918.237
E = ƒ(S, N)
Any received signal is effected as a function of signal and noise238.
We need to skip a little, just to stay ahead.
C = Max (H(x) — Hy(x))

Maximum channel capacity for all possible information sources is
an expression of entropy.239 White noise.
236 Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 1990, pp50-74.
237 Ibid.
238 SHANNON, C.E., A Mathematical Theory of Communication, (1948); p19
239 Ibid. p22
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62. Le Regard
So how do you read a map? A newspaper bigger than you?

How do you hold onto an oversized umbrella? And a 20m
Helium balloon? Negotiate a labyrinth as an entrance? Map
emotion? And mass production?240 Complexity? Gestalt?241 A
matrixial gaze distinct and inextricable from Foucault’s
panopticon?242 Only reflexive? Krauss’ grid?243 Le regard?244 Is
this a schism of ∴? Is the womb not father and mother?
X²∗XY? ∴? Rooted in the body, the live-ability of the body?
Reflexive. Spectacle is Spectacle.245 Is that not part of clowning
also, the absurdity, the changes of scale? Is communication also
not feedback, resonance between communicator and the
communicated to? Completion of the partial? How can one
thing be two different things explicitly? And le regard,
Spectacle, agencement, le pli, are these not also ambiguous?
240 “The goal of socialism is abundance — the greatest number of goods for the greatest number of people, which
statistically implies reducing the unexpected to the level of the improbable. Increasing the number of goods reduces
the value of each. This devaluation of all human goods to a level of ‘total neutrality’ will be the inevitable
consequence of a purely scientific development of socialism. It is unfortunate that many intellectuals fail to get
beyond this idea of mechanical reproduction, and are instead contributing toward the adaptation of humanity to this
bland and symmetrified future. Artists, whose specialty is seeking uniqueness, are consequently turning in
increasing numbers against socialism. Conversely, socialist politicians are suspicious of every expression of artistic
power or originality.” Jorn, Asger, The Situationists and Automation, 1958. (My emphasis). “Les situationnistes et
l’automation” in Internationale Situationniste #1 (Paris, June 1958), trans. Ken Knabb in Situationist International
Anthology (2006). <Available from
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/mirrors/www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.automation.htm>[Accessed 24/8/8].
241 Lacan, J “The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I”.In Harrison C. and Wood, Art in Theory:
1900-2000, op. cit. pp620-624
242 See for example, Michel Foucault, Truth and Judicial Forms. In Michel Foucault, Power, Essential Works of
Foucault 1954-1984, vol 3, ed. James Faubion, London: Penguin, 2000, pp58-64
243 Rosalind Krauss: "Grids" October 9, Summer 1979. [Reprinted in: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985, pp. 9-22.
244 Foucault’s gaze.
245 “THE SPECTACLE, BEING the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of an abandonment of any
history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time.” Guy Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994, p114.
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63. Formulae
Is this also magik?246

64. Folds.
Let’s pick up some of these folds247 and bring what we can back
to our view. Isn’t this something also: the pace of language in its
discourse of deduction?248 Mir’s art is not a “surface with
markings”.249 It plays with its own traces, and limits: as a thing of
language and as language, it is also ephemeral.
246 The philosophers were known as wizards in Greece. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8. 19 (trans.
Conybeare). <Available from http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Trophonios.html>[Accessed 7/7/8].
247 Les plis.i
248 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari contrast Art and Science as being of a difference of Discursivity and
Deduction. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, London and New York: Verso, p127
249 Van Den Berg, Dirk J (2004) ‘What is an image and what is image power?’. Available from
<http://www.imageandnarrative.be/issue08/dirkvandenbergh.htm> [Accessed 7 January 2008].
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65. The gods made Tiresius, a woman for ten years.
Do Plato and Socrates not always return to the crowd? Is Mir

not returning from the crowd with her newspaper copies, her
planes, her portraits of airliners?250 Herself and her archives?
A ⇒ B?
If everything is from one source, that source must be in
everything, must it not? Is this also not cybernetics?What is
being produced? Feedback?
Tiresius has lived as man and woman. Is it this? The spaces

between photographs? And yet Tiresius as man again is blind.
250 Airplanes, 2005. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/planes/planes.html>[Accessed 31/8/8].
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66. Entwined
Some time ago we mentioned a return to Sicily. Let’s pick up that

also with the ideas of voudoun we left before. This will give us our
loop. Mir goes to Venice from Palermo. Her companions are a
microcosm of the art world, two younger artists, a curator and a
collector accompany. They travel in a 1977 Rolls Royce Silver
Shadow. The Rolls Royce is the Sicilian Pavilion. “All five
participants … take an active and self-conscious part in their roles,
as themselves and as symbolic entities.”251
So Aleksandra is entwined with her work, — that lone figure carrying

her umbrella? That one without a studio252 making ephemeral
moments? Tracing those routes, CDG> LHR> CPH> JFK> FDF>
DRS? Crossing timezones? That one in the car with the others. Is this
a terrain between photographs? How Mir disseminates her work?
How she manages it? And the photograph is an index? A plateau?
251 Sicilian Pavilion, 2007. Op. cit.

252 Newsroom (1986-2000), 2007. Op. cit.
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(58)(59)(60) Sicilian Pavilion, 2007
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67. Martinique
In 2004, Aleksandra and Sarah Gavlak (a gallerist friend) go

to Martinique on the invitation of the collector, Frederic
Guilbaud. ∴ and Sarah wear angel wings for the duration of
their stay. ∴ stages ceremonies in the Atlantic Ocean and
Caribbean Sea.253 ∴ raises a No Smoking sign above her head
and lowers it into the sea — one of the same she bought for
the Whitney.254 The umbrella breaks. On Martinique as angels,
∴ and Sarah, the duck feathers in the sea, the glue. Voudoun.
Borders are like metaphors — they transport. Metaphor is an
umbrella. Aleksandra Mir’s The Big Umbrella is broken. Her
metaphor is not.
68. Materials
With Mir, the Luxury and the Everyday do not exchange values.
Let’s say they are opened, suspended; rendered ambiguous. We did
not define Luxury and the Everyday. With felt tip pen scribbles,
ordinary blown eggs imitate Fabergé’s. A helium balloon imitates an
airliner. The daily newspaper copied, becomes an art object. Airliners
become sketches. But these eggs, the newspapers and airplanes do
they not all also contain lives? Like The Big Umbrella?
“The avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating — the

fact itself — calls for neither approval nor disapproval.”255
253 Hell in Paradise, 2004. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/hell/hell.html>[Accessed 21/8/8].

254 Op cit.
255 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939). In ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory:
1900-2000, London: Blackwell, 2007, p542.
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69. 48 Hour Underground
George Lakoff notes that framing is a thinking structure which

renders experience.256 This brings us round again. Is the originary not
that also which moves expression? And this movement, is it not
outside the real world, as symbolic play? Is Mir imitating? Certainly,
Mir fictionalises herself. She does this in part, by handicapping our
information, her representations. Is fiction imitation? And life? How
do we fill in details of Mir’s life without her biography? With a
newspaper? As a cipher uncoding, processing her daily encounters of
the world,257 Mir moves among the mass produced, among series.
Why should we need her biography? To understand her concepts? To
know how to live? To live? Do her environments communicate Mir?
Or those around her? Does Mir communicate ∴?
70. Discussion
What have we discussed? Dada, cybernetics, matrixiality and

Tiresius as foils to Oedipus, male speech, linearity and Modernism?
Yes, perhaps as background; not so explicitly. The social foci, the
relations, and expressions of Mir’s work play out her matrices. But
we have traced Mir’s path, found her orbit and followed her gaze.
This gaze we found is reflexive: it turns on itself — our oriel. ∴.
256 Lakoff, George (2006) Simple framing. Available from <http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/

projects/strategic/simple_framing/> [Accessed 7 January 2008]
257 Jamaldin, Sharifa, Aleksandra Mir, ReadBABY SurfBABY, Amsterdam, 2004. <Available from
http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/jamaldin.html>[Accessed 23/8/8]
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71. Mir’s 48 Hour Underground:
On Saturday December 13, 2003, 00:00

I will go underground for 48 hours, during which:
I will move out of my apartment to an unspecified address.
I will disconnect from my social network.
I will appear in disguise when in public.
I will not use my credit cards, make phone calls or send emails.
I will engage in unspecified anarchist activities.
I will repeat this 48-hour scenario every year for the rest of my
life, and I will try to write a book about it before I die.
— Aleksandra Mir, New York, 2003.258
258 48 Hour Underground, 2003 <Available from

http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/48hour/48hour.html>[Accessed 23/8/8]. Included in The Outlaw Series,
New York. <Available from http://www.theoutlawseries.com/outlaws.cfm>[Accessed 27/8/8].
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(61) 3 Graces, (design for souvenirs), marker and photoshop on paper, 8x10", 2007
102/121
(62) Icebergs, melting ice, 2004
(63) Icebergs, melting ice, 2004
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(64) Smash Patriarchy, 2005
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(65) Aviation Archive, installation detail from Welcome Back to Earth, solo exhibition, Kunsthalle St.
Gallen, May 2003.
(66) Installation view from Welcome Back to Earth, solo exhibition, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, May 2003.
105/121
(67) Installation view from Welcome Back to Earth, solo exhibition, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, May 2003.
(68) Fabergé Eggs, detail from the World from Above, solo show at Greengrassi, London, January 2004
106/121
(69) You Can’t Hurry Love, contribution to Sandwiched, a project organized by Jacob Fabricius in
cooperation with the Wrong Gallery and the Public Art Fund in New York, 2003
107/121
(70) No Smoking, Whitney Biennial, 2004
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(71) Naming Tokyo II, Swiss Institute, New York, November, 2003
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(72) Detail fromStonehenge II, a re-proposal to Artangel in the form of a 3D scale model, London, ICA, 2003
(73) Detail fromStonehenge II, a re-proposal to Artangel in the form of a 3D scale model, London, ICA, 2003
110/121
(74) Hell in Paradise, Martinique, 2004
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(75) The Big Umbrella (Martinique), 2004
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(76) Access, proposal for wheelchair ramp, Helsinki, 2001.
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(77) Garden of Rockets (1-4), mixed media, 2005.
(78) Sarah Gavlak and Aleksandra Mir visiting the Garden of Rockets,
John F. Kennedy Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, 2004.
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(79) M.I.M.E., 1999-2003.
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ABSTRACT
To approach the art of Aleksandra Mir is to make a journey. Mir’s

work is reflexive. That is, it questions its own and her own status
as art and artist. Such an approach is timely. It moves beyond
formal concerns of minimalism and modernism, and refreshes
ideas of art’s public engagement. While Mir positions herself as
however albeit fantastical, a symbol, her move is complex and her
work forms partial (incomplete) articulations of often
simultaneous and contradictory plateaus. While her world is a
lived world, it is also to a degree, fictionalised. Nonetheless, she
has a matrixiality which renders the mass produced and the
natural, personal. This position is one equally of cybernetics — in
that Mir’s reflexivity is also feedback, — as of Guattari’s later
“ethico-aesthetic” paradigms.
In content the thesis does not restricts itself only to discussion of

Mir as a means of accessing her own structures. Rather however,
than impose external critiques, or group Mir more broadly, the
thesis also attempts reflexivity. Using Mir’s documentation online,
the text also attempts a discursive analysis — to unpack material
from documentations. The thesis does so with its own internal
structure — rather than imposing one from outside. As such the
text attempts to engage Dada, in that Mir juxtaposes her own
structures of the world with the world. Dada believes nothing.
116/121
Primarily focussing on the sequences and relations involved in
Mir’s work, the text is not directly linear. In highlighting Mir’s
behaviours — Mir’s approach is both strategy and conviction.
Rather than conduct discourses on theory, in Mir’s work where
ambiguities and doublings abound, the text attempts an
essentialist reading, and itself, the creation of originary writing,
Cixous’ écriture feminine. Such an undertaking also approaches
Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of assemblage and phylum. The
methodology used is thus of originary writing and of Dada.
Members of the Oedipus family and circle remain behind the

text — and the text questions its own escape from myth. Many
writers have noted an urgency in achieving a systemic and
decentred democracy. This thesis examines Mir’s work against
consideration of Mir’s Protest and DIY aesthetics. It attempts to
articulate structures of reflexion, loose conceptual bonds in
Mir’s production. Such production extends beyond the museum
and gallery — into life. Mir’s partial expressions are unclosed.
117/121
ILLUSTRATIONS
(1) Daily News, self-published newspaper, 2002. • p8
(2) Plane Landing (Zurich), helium- inflated balloon, 2008 • p9
(3) Collage from Aim at the Stars, gold leaf frame, 2008. •p9
(4) Collage from Aim at the Stars, gold leaf frame, 2008. •p10
(5) Collage from Aim at the Stars, gold leaf frame, dimensions variable, 2008. •p11
(6) Installation view from Newsroom, 2007. •p13
(7) Installation view from Newsroom, 2007. •p13
(8) Mandalas, Sharpie pen on paper, 2007. •p14
(9) Marzarama, marzipan and statuary, 2008. • p15
(10) Marzarama, marzipan and statuary, 2008. • p15
(11) Love Stories, carvings on trees, 2007. • p15
(12) Narvik Superstars, inset stars on dockside, 2007. •p16
(13) Gravity, The Eternal Countdown, calendar, 2007. •p16
(14) Sicilian Pavilion, Rolls Royce and decoration, 2007. •p17
(15) Accident (with Lisa Ann Auerbach), marzipan, 2007. •p17
(16) Installation view, Mouvement Organisé, 2006. •p19
(18) Installation detail, Mouvement Organisé, 2006. •p19
(19) Asteoridus Svizzerus, marker on paper, 360 x 400 cm, 2006. •p20
(20) Treasure Island, marker on paper, 150 x 180 cm, 2006. •p21
(21) Lonesome Cowboy, B&W still, 1994. • p24
(22) Life is Sweet in Sweden, hostesses by the Ullevi sports arena, 1995. •p25
(23) CD cover for Bingo Blues, 1998. •p25
118/121
(24) Homeboys, snowmen, 2001. •p26
(25) Smileys, fenders and snow, 2005. •p26
(26) Plane Landing, helium-inflated balloon, 2003. • p29
(27) The Big Umbrella, giant umbrella, (Copenhagen), 2004. • p29
(28) The First Woman on the Moon, performance vew, 1999. • p34
(29) The First Woman on the Moon, installation view, 1999. • p34
(30) Yo No hablo Español, Letterpress Businnesscard, 2004. • p4
(31) Yo No hablo Español, cast bronze sign, Mexico City, 2004. • p45
(32) Yo No hablo Español, window display, Mexico City, 2004. • p46
(33) Yo No hablo Español, sign and flower pots installation, Mexico City, 2004 • p46
(36) Collaged poster from Mouvement Organisé, 2006. •p48
(37) Reincarnations '05, shot glasses, 2005. •p50
(38) Reincarnations '05, pro -abortion bags, 2005. •p50
(39) Reincarnations '05, installation view, 2005. •p51
(40) Reincarnations '05, installation view, 2005. •p51
(41) Reincarnations '05, Invitation card / designs for shot glasses. •p52
(42) Fashion Hats, duplicated shop window, 1997.• p60
(43) Beijing, The World from Above, 2004 • p61
(44) Sea of Japan, The World from Above, 2004 • p61
(45) You are My Roadtrip, Church of Sharpie, marker on paper, 190x120, 2005. •p63
(46) Production shot, Church of Sharpie, 2005. •p64
119/121
(47) Newsroom (1986-2000), installation view, 2007. p67
(50) The End Isn’t Near, from programme, Cinema for the Unemployed, 1998 • p71
(51) Anthrax Nation, 2002. Limited edition of 10; photocopied newspaper. • p71
(52) Gravity, recycled scrap, 2005 • p75
(53) Antartica, 2005 • p78
(54) Plane Landing, 2008 • p81
(55) Flight 990, built, smashed and rebuilt scale model, 20 x 16", 1999. • p85
(56) Democracy! installation view, RCA, 2000. •p89
(57) Miss America, invitation card, 2006. •p90
(58) Sicilian Pavilion, 2008 • p98
(61) 3 Graces, (design for souvenirs), marker and photoshop on paper, 8x10", 2007 • p102
(62) Icebergs, melting ice, 2004 • p103
(63) Icebergs, melting ice, 2004 • p103
(64) Smash Patriarchy, 2005 • p104
(65) Aviation Archive, installation detail from Welcome Back to Earth, solo exhibition,
Kunsthalle St. Gallen, May 2003. •p105
(66) Installation view from Welcome Back to Earth, solo exhibition, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, May
2003. •p105
(67) Installation view from Welcome Back to Earth, solo exhibition, Kunsthalle St. •p106
120/121
(68) Fabergé Eggs, detail from the World from Above, solo show at Greengrassi, London,
January 2004. •p106
(69) You Can’t Hurry Love, contribution to Sandwiched, a project organized by Jacob Fabricius
in cooperation with the Wrong Gallery and the Public Art Fund in New York, 2003. •p107
(70) No Smoking, Whitney Biennial, 2004. •p108
(71) Naming Tokyo II, Swiss Institute, New York, November, 2003. •p109
(72) Detail fromStonehenge II, a re-proposal to Artangel in the form of a 3D scale model,
London, ICA, 2003. •p110
(73) Detail fromStonehenge II, a re-proposal to Artangel in the form of a 3D scale model,
London, ICA, 2003. •p110
(74) Hell in Paradise, Martinique, 2004. •p111
(75) The Big Umbrella (Martinique), 2004. •p112
(76) Access, proposal for wheelchair ramp, Helsinki, 2001. •p113
(77) Garden of Rockets (1-4), mixed media, 2005. •p114
(78) Sarah Gavlak and Aleksandra Mir visiting the Garden of Rockets, John F. Kennedy Space
Center, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, 2004. •p114
(79) M.I.M.E., 1999-2003. •p115
All images from http://aleksandramir.info
121/121

What Does Aleksandra Mir Represent

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What Does Aleksandra Mir Represent

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What Does Aleksandra Mir Represent?

aesthetics3. Dada is a word for « ».4 Dada is nothing.5

FLUX is FLUX. In part, my work is your attention.

Have you noticed Antarctica is not in the map above?

Let us say that, to use a term from Deleuze and Guattari,

It is not polite to mention a woman’s age, but Aleksandra Mir is an

Aleksandra Mir was born on the 11th September 1967 in Poland.

Let us note here quickly also that Мир is ambiguous. To Russian

Aleksandra Mir has herself authored many publications — and self-

Characteristically, Aleksandra has also “published” pro-choice posters,

28 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/pdfs/pdfs/NamingTokyoII.zip>[Accessed 27/8/8].

(3) Collage from Aim at the Stars, collages on board

37 Plane Landing, 2008 <Available from

(7) Installation view from Newsroom, 2007

(11) Love Stories, 2007

(13) Gravity, The Eternal

(15) Accident (with Lisa Ann Auerbach), 2007

42 Newsroom (1986-2000), 2007. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/news/news.html>[Accessed

(17) Installation view,

(18) Installation detail,

2006? A rocket called GRAVITY, built out of scrap — old boilers,

Is this Aleksandra Mir? Always flitting like a bee from project to

53 Gravity, 2006 <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/gravity/gravity.html>[Accessed 20/8/8]

Clearly an artist with several projects on the go at the same time,

Aleksandra Mir’s first document is a single B&W photograph,62

(23) cd cover, Bingo Blues, 1998

(25) Smileys, fenders and snow, 2005.

So this Aleksandra Mir, then, what else has she done?

Aleksandra Mir has organised hostesses to welcome visitors to

63 Lif e is Sweet in Sweden, Gothenburg, 1995. <Available from

In 2002, Aleksandra published a newspaper on her birthday. This was called

(27) The Big Umbrella, Copenhagen, 2004

14. Unrealised projects

In her archive online, Mir includes models and sketches from

Yes, Aleksandra uses some conceptual machines. These machines,

84 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p1; Op Cit.

We are discussing reflexive practice. We need to look a little wider

95 Sicilian Pavilion, 2007. <Available from http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/sicilian/sicilian.html>[Accessed

(29) The First Woman on the Moon, 1999

A New York artist raises an American flag on a Dutch beach. Is

100Artforum, Summer 1999.

101Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October, Fall 2004

In the 90s, then, it is enough to say that ∴’s approach shares

∴ is conceptual. So is Dada. And is Fluxus not also live? Are

Let us say that Aleksandra’s course is matrixial. That everything

Is it not that events have chronologies? And these themselves

118 S. Gualdini, Op cit.

Critical language distinguishes cultural artefacts and practices

The Museum accedes? The performance is over? Every museum

∴ puts her documentation online for independence.122 She

124 Architecture (2001), ongoing. <Available from

There is an old word, «cirque». A «cirque» is a kind of natural

We will need to look to spectres of feminism, Oedipus’

Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, demands equal burial rites for

Is not the search of novelty part of the baroque? These folds,

Let’s pick out a couple more projects here. Organized Movement,

Organized Movement developed from a residential workshop and

Can we note the variations, the shop window, and local

136 Organized Movement, 45 minute documentary. <Available from

(31) Yo No hablo Español, cast bronze sign installed at the

(35) Installation view, Mouvement Organisé, 2006.

In Paris, in 2006 at Galerie Laurent Godin, for Mouvement Organisé,139 Mir

139 Mouvement Organisé, 2006. <Available from