I find myself doing fieldwork physically, in the tradition of anthropology. I literally go to the opposite end of the world, to the most exotic faraway places I possibly can, only to find the closest things to me when I get there.

Aleksandra Mir

Categorized in : World Opposites Exotic

I think the wildest wildlife you can find these days is in Chernobyl, where wolves are running around breeding quite well in the nuclear disaster zones.

nuclear running thinking

I'm neither shy nor impressed by media and press. It's just another industry to me. My response to the criticism was, "I work with a steel factory. Why can't I work with the media?"

shy media criticism

Dutch beaches were known to me as man-made territories, as part of various land reclamation projects. But I was also interested in the media reality of the Moon landing. I wanted to use that event as a measure of time, to see what had happened in those thirty years - which happens to be my lifetime as well. I was born in 1967 and I remember seeing the Moon landing on TV when I was two. All those things were in play. Then it became a big production. It took five months to gather up the goodwill and make it happen.

moon beach reality

Of course I can have a simple reaction of sympathy and sorrow to destruction. But you also know that you can't have new things if you don't occasionally destroy the old. That's something you're really not allowed to say because things are often destroyed according to particular power relations so it means taking a stand in those cases, which I am not really interested in doing either. I think I am simply interested in looking.

simple mean thinking

Really the moment I decided I wanted to do art seriously, I left art school. I wanted to be with people who were interested in the same things I was: popular culture.

people art school

I was a lousy academic. I spent most of my time in the cafeteria. But I met fantastic people from all kinds of fields; law, medicine, history, and they eventually dispersed all over the world to do their fieldwork. I liked the way these people committed to the long term in a sincere, visionary way. Their projects weren't about "next season." They were ten-year commitments. They were lifestyle choices that had traditions of fieldwork built into them - moving around, living on location, discipline, a real rigor for research.

real commitment moving

I wouldn't say the anthropologists were making art, but they were definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning, passion, and they were also experimenting with form. There was a sense of trying to be as sincere as possible, whether you were investigating something far away from you or very close.

passion practice art

I try to make that tension almost stupidly overt in my projects, almost ridiculously so. I keep coming back to the same obvious points again and again.

projects coming-back trying

"Hello" is always presented as a linear narrative, a singular chain, sometimes in a loop. But the reality of making it is that connections are naturally sprawling all over the place, so I am free to edit any way I want.

connections want reality

My purpose isn't to be confrontational. My purpose is to find out about the world and play myself against it to the extent that it is even conceivable.

purpose play world

The Stonehenge proposal got a lot of interesting criticism. One of the best - or worst - said something like, "Go home to Las Vegas." I think this project could possibly be realized at a very late part of my career. Right now, I don't have the authority, the budget, the credibility.

careers home thinking

Stonehenge had an aura but it was also just stone. Then in the sixties, it became a great hedonistic, hippie, druid, rock-n-roll party site. There are amazing pictures of people up on the stones going wild and that's the image I recreated for my model of the project: full access to everyone. I even invented a Stonehenge soccer team that uses spaces between the stones as goals.

team hippie soccer

People get upset when Baghdad, the "Cradle of Civilization" is burning, or when the Buddhas in Afghanistan are falling. These are real concerns.

real civilization fall

In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.

new-york art school