Hello
mudam.lu, Luxembourg, 2003
By Ralph Rugoff
'Hello' is the most basic form of greeting in English, a word
that has no real meaning other than its use in acknowledging and
initiating an encounter. In Aleksandra Mir's Hello San
Francisco, discourse is seemingly stalled at this introductory
enunciation. Part of an ongoing photographic project that also
includes versions made in London, New York and Sydney, Australia,
among other places, Mir's Hello presents a pictorial daisy
chain in which one person meets another, who meets another, who
meets another, et cetera. Some of these people are famous, some are
not—but all regard each other, or the camera itself, as if uttering
this ubiquitous phrase.
Mir's project is at once a type of documentary and a picaresque
epic, employing existing photographs to unfold a tale of
extraordinary encounters and unexpected twists and turns. Making
use of family snapshots as well as diverse forms of celebrity and
archival photographs, Hello presents a far-ranging
sequence of meetings between both public and private figures. An
unpredictable rhythm informs its transitions from images of the
famous to the anonymous. Starting, say, with an image of rock
singer Jim Morrison and his lawyer Max Fink, we find ourselves
proceeding through pictures of various Fink family members until in
one image Betty Ford (former U.S. First Lady and founder of a
notorious celebrity rehab clinic) makes an appearance. The
succeeding photographs jump into the realm of politics, while
taking us back in time: from President Gerald Ford and the royal
families of England and Japan, we move through history to Jackie
Kennedy, the Mercury astronauts, and a press photo of John F.
Kennedy greeting a teenaged Bill Clinton. Further on in Hello
San Francisco, a trip through the home photo album of the
Quinlan family ends up leading us to photographs of Franklin
Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo.
We are accustomed, of course, to looking at images of the famous
(thanks to tabloids such as the British magazine 'Hello') as well
as images of leading historical figures. Mir's project, however,
disarms us with its uncanny linking of celebrities and unknown
individuals. In our media society, these two groups constitute
distinct classes, conjuring separate orders of reality. Their
repeated entanglement thus takes on a surreal quality. Indeed, the
improbable connections and disorienting jumps in time and space
that characterizes Hello's parade of encounters seems
designed to play with, and wryly question, our faith in the
credibility of photography. Yet while Mir occasionally includes
images of fictional characters (such as Santa Claus and Miss Piggy)
as well as publicity stills from films, Hello's raw
materials are never invented or forged by the artist. Instead, they
are gathered through a painstaking process of archival and field
research. Essentially, then, Hello would appear to be a
hybrid form of documentary reportage—a fabricated non-fiction.
More specifically, Mir's artwork suggests a strange kind of
ethnographic survey, a contemporary kinship chart of coincidental
relationships that is made visible—and perhaps even fostered by—
our photographic culture. Mir's version of social anthropology,
however, is propelled by a delirious logic. In tracing unlikely
connections between people, Hello follows the basic 'modus
operand'i of conspiracy theories, and in the process evokes a world
tied together by secret knots.
At the same time, it is worth noting that Mir's informal kinship
chart does not chronicle historical lines of affiliation—as does a
conventional family tree—but instead proceeds horizontally, moving
sideways, as it were, from encounter to encounter, irrespective of
their chronological order. Rather than ever approach the
possibility of resolution, it unfolds in such a way that each
segment of its photographic chain is at once a provisional
conclusion and the beginning of a new sequence. In this way,
Hello evokes a potentially endless landscape of
connections—an information age version of the sublime.
In exploring this territory, Mir's work indirectly echoes a certain
strain of conceptual art from the late 1960s and early 1970s that
took the form of open-ended series, and, in deadpan fashion, often
invoked either the infinite or the sublime. Among other works that
come to mind, I think of Douglas Huebler's long-term project, begun
in 1971, to photograph everyone in the world. But compared to
Huebler's enterprise, which mocked the totalizing aspirations of
modernism while humorously engaging with a task that was clearly
endless, Mir's Hello is less conspicuously absurd. At
first glance, most of the images that Mir employs appear to be
absolutely straightforward. But just as a simple idea, when pushed
to extremes, may begin to seem extraordinary, so Hello
becomes more and more ludicrous as it expands in size. As the
individual images link up into longer and longer sequences, their
appearance is denatured and they take on an increasingly uncanny
aspect. The unremarkable scenes that they depict gradually begin to
strike us as curious and enigmatic. At the same time, their serial
connections present evidence of a preposterous alternative universe
in which everyone is somehow associated with everyone else.
Hovering in the background to Mir's project is the popular notion
that we are separated from any given stranger by no more than "six
degrees of separation"—in other words, by a chain of six
acquaintances (e.g. a friend of mine has a friend who has a cousin
whose sister-in-law works with someone whose neighbor knows you).
But rather than simply call attention to the haphazard chains of
association that link people in different social domains, Mir's
project addresses the world as it exists in photographs. It plays
on our fascination with images of the famous, and extends this
voyeuristic relationship to the realm of home snapshots. And it
focuses on the flattening of difference that occurs in media
culture, underscoring the estranged banality shared by both
publicity images and anonymous family photos. Each of these genres
is a form of common cultural property, as instantly recognizable
and seemingly transparent as the word Hello itself. In
Mir's hands, however, they are transformed into elements of a
narrative code that not only evokes an endless horizon of images,
but also turns upside down our conventional pictures of the world.
Deceptively innocuous, Hello provokes us in the end to
rethink the routine distinctions we make between objects and
series, public and private, fact and fiction, and beginnings and
endings.