Aleksandra Mir: Swiss Institute - New York

Naming Tokyo, 2003- the greatest in quantity recent product of Aleksandra Mir's ever-growing conceptual cottage industry, demonstrates the two the artist's numerous strengths and her particular limitations. The piece seen here is the next to the first part of a project originally commissioned by dint of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; like all the prolific novel Yorker's best work, it's informed through a generative interest in social a whole s and a fondness for offbeat forms of dissemination. Combining the enduring appeal of maps as sites for theoretical play and a cheerfully wayward brand of activist zeal, the cast was inspired, in Mir's words, by means of "the fact that westerners ofttimes complain that Tokyo has no highway names. So I felt it would be interesting to start naming the roads of Tokyo with words from western tillage and society, to help us around. Tokyo is large, in the way that I asked my friends for help."

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Mir has favorably deployed this sort of ingenuous participatory fashion before. In Daily News, 2002 she enlisted above a hundred friends to contribute body s and images to a special Aleksandra Mir birthday edition of the of recent origin York tabloid designed to "reclaim" her birthday, which falls upon September 11. For Naming Tokyo, dozens of acquaintances inside and outside the art world pitched in with thematic lists of intimateed street names--Italian swear words, Vivienne Westwood's couture collections, of recent origin York City drag queens--which were then published upon a large handout map with a blank Tokyo city grid upon one side and selected rechristenings upon the other. For the Swiss Institute, more [i]or[/i] less favorites were made into actual of recent origin York--style street signs, turning the forehead half of the gallery into a forest of improbable intersections.

Like plenteous of Mir's work, the project's structural open-endednes summon forths a spirit of friendly egalitarianism, conjuring a sprawling network of mutual interest that we all might conceivably join, either simply as viewers or by the agency of actually submitting our own suggestions to an e-mail address provided upon the handout. A genuine empathy toward others' stories and ideas is among the greatest in quantity appealing aspects of the artist's practice, a quality particularly vivid in works like Living and Loving No. 1: The Biography of Donald Cappy, 2002 an strangely moving limited-edition magazine that chronicles the life of a campus security officer the artist met during a California residency. In Naming Tokyo, Mir one time again allows her collaborators to drive the easy in mind of her work. Yet although several individual entries represent real contextual engagement and flat rise to the level of poetry--Ricci Albenda's unexpectedly poignant "26 Words ending in pt alphabetized backwards" produc a memorable succession that reads in part "KEPT SLEPT INEPT., CREPT WEPT., SWEPT.,"--in the extreme point the operative gestures of the throw out remain firmly in the hands of its impresario.

Mir's practice throw outs an image of the artist as confidante, optimistic life of the party, and charming pedagogue, and greatest in quantity of the time these personae dovetail and ring actual in the work. Yet there are uncompounded bodys of Naming Tokyo where an apparent ambivalence about which part to inhabit ends up leaving interesting threads in the work unexamined. For example, a statement by the agency of Mir on the map render free of accesss with this calculatedly blithe announcement: "I have at no time been to Tokyo, and I have no deeper knowledge of it. I solitary studied the available guidebooks for a week and relied solely upon their wisdom for my a whole of designating my friend's [sic] lists of names to their appropriate neighborhoods." While the critical thinker in Mir presumably wants Naming Tokyo to interrogate that tourist take upon the world--to examine the colonial tendencies (especially linguistic) implicit in globalization--the entertainer in her have the appearances worried that pursuing the issue more acutely might spoil everybody's pleasantry So she raises it and then immediately plays it as a kind of self-deflating quirk Mir's lightness of touch can sometimes also yield a flatness of affect--in Naming Tokyo, she's produc something slighter than it might have been, a throw finally more memorable for its winning delivery than for its underwhelming puncture line.

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