Aleksandra Mir Quotes

I follow these intimate connections of strangers and, surprise!, end up finding even myself in the work at some point.

I'm so extremely well prepared for negative response, I've taken precautions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The moment right now, it's a tragically regressive time we live in, you know. We just grounded the Concorde. Where's the future? We've lost the future.

In a way I am saying the nation-state doesn't exist, borders don't exist, you can try going anywhere. It is a kind of pre-Internet consensus I always had in me.

I've made a poster at home. You know the iconic image of Che Guevara, the black and red graphic of his face? I think it's the perfect graphic, the best graphic ever made. I cut a Concorde out and put it over his head so it's Che looking up and the Concorde going by. Both are dead, maybe obsolete.

I wanted to contribute to the landscape tradition in art. By now I guess we are comfortable with the thought that man has been everywhere or affected everything in nature.

Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.

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.

You pick people, and they pick you sometimes. It's especially great to connect with people you think you have nothing in common with.

"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.

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.

The plane as an object has been a huge effort to make. It is a sculpture, a technological invention, a piece of aviation culture. But really, it only exists to be inserted into a variety of landscapes, to be a catalyst, to offset them.

I've gotten all kinds of reactions and it's been used in so many different ways.

I'm depending on other people to take the work and run. And if they run in so many directions, they sort of cancel each other out. So the meaning is always open.

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.

National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas - using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.

"Hello" is pseudoscience. The only smart way to read it is not to believe in it, not to trust it, or to put yourself in it and imagine what's out there that you haven't been told or seen.

There are ends, occasionally, with projects. That happens. But they are natural dead ends. It's usually the outside situation that demands an ending. I never really settle for one.

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

The space program caused so much future-thinking in culture. People who couldn't go to the Moon were building space-fantasy chairs and corsets and hairdos and anything that they could put their hands on.