Some Drawings: A World According to Mir

This is Aleksandra Mir's first drawing show in France; and it is an event. Although she is better known for her large scale sculpture and action works, her drawings are in fact the primary and most developed expression of a formulated praxis of space. Since 2001, Mir has been propagating networks of black lines on vast sheets of paper-- a practice that cannot be considered either preparatory or secondary but is an artform all to itself. Presently this corpus contains twenty-six different series. Mir chose her line early on, the definite black mark of a felt-tip pen with which she delineates the world: maps, tabloid headlines, hands, plants, doilies, mandalas. 

The drawings presently on view were created in 2010. They evocatively depict LP records, and in Mir's oeuvre are the organic descendants of her mandalas of 2007, whose form and proportions they repeat. The LP theme is not innocuous-- their obsolescence bestows upon these objects a second life whenever they serve for musical sampling. Here they play only silence. Having become images of yesterday's sound, their mutism is deafening in the space Mir attributes to them, and amplified by the tension created between the change in scale  (the drawings are almost 2 meters in diameter) and the loss of resolution. Mir includes three foreign «discs» from 2007; call them heterodox mandalas (Bad Op, Brick, Porcelain). All of Mir's drawings display the same rather trivial handcraft, cheerfully advocating their status as pen marks through the slight overlap of hatching used as color fill.  The drawing is done with a Sharpie, a widely-sold permanent marker popular in the United States. It delimits contours  and adapts easily to make fill for black grounds and different values of gray. As the pens degenerate, they are classified according to the precise stage of wear, then reserved for making half tones, as for instance the pale gray of Demo, or the gradation of the reflections in Billboard. The general outline established by Mir is the score which organizes the participants of her collective work assignments, akin to  jam sessions: You can dance.

Marie Muracciole (Extract)