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Rebecca Mir
UIC MFA Catalogue Essay by Isaac Lyles
May 2010
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Rebecca Mir is in the myth making business. Sheʼs a storyteller threading a narrative through multiple works made of multiple materials to speak to us in a manner as intimate as it is grand. In her artist statement, she writes, “I am an explorer... I am looking for the trails we make, leave, forget.” The trails she traces are those ingrained into us, those longings, those disappointments (longingʼs handmaiden). She chronicles the pain familiar to anyone that has a vision of a better world and a better life. I do not mean to imply sheʼs out for some utopia, quite the contrary, sheʼs out for home. Life is hard enough without looking for heaven on earth. Fulfillment, love, meaning, these enflesh our lives and write the scars of our inner history. These are the vast, human expanses that Mir traverses.
Recently Rebecca Grady changed her name to Rebecca Mir, founded a country (“Rubaccaquon”), built a mountain, a tropical storm, an ice floe, a wave, and a ladder to the sky. All of this smacks of romantic heroics, a will to grandeur, sublime intentions––but Mir is up to something more incisive and near than that. Its about the oceans, shores, mountains, and countries of the interior; those borderless regions that broaden with probing. That ladder to the sky? Itʼs made of paper. The tropical storm? Pipe-cleaners. The fallibility of her materials merged with the expansiveness of her subjects bakes up a poignant tension. These
ambitionsdreamsdesires will not last––oh to be so human.
One of the artists most akin to Mirʼs exploration of desire and failure is the great Bas Jan Ader. In 1975, he set out to cross the Atlantic in a 13 foot long pocket cruiser named Ocean Wave in a piece he entitled, In Search of the Miraculous––and never returned. Weeks passed before a Spanish fishing boat discovered the remains of Ocean Wave and in 2007 those remains were stolen; now, no physical trace remains of Aderʼs fateful journey. Unlike In Search of the Miraculous or Yves Kleinʼs Leap into the Void of 1960, Mir embraces her/our limitations. She does not seek to transcend death or conquer nature, but asserts a heroic fragility. Life is not to be taken for granted, spent recklessly. Rather than traverse an ocean or ʻleap into a voidʼ, in Dinner with the Ocean (2009) Mir lays out a regal spread of fruits, meats, and a goblet brimming Bordeaux upon the beach then films the slow lapping of the waves as they claim her offering. Mir expresses symbiosis with the ocean and a respect and longing for its fearful eternity (“the sea, the sea of possibility” as Patti Smith phrased it). The pathos of this piece is immense; it achieves a sublime poetry. In a letter to the ocean, Mir voices her desire to marry it, but is unable to do so (because marriage between woman and ocean has yet to be legalized). Instead, she consummates her relationship with it through a “dinner:” she serves the ocean.
Rebecca Mirʼs work is emotive and self-involved but she eschews the “bad girl” confessionalism á la Tracy Emin and the dead-end irony so characteristic of the 1990s. Mir speaks a subtle poetry of human fallibility, of the illimitability of desire, countered by deathʼs terminus. She uses images of the illimitable to give scope to the hopes and desires that life circumscribes (that hit the shore). Mir feels too much to be flippant about loss; gravitas habits even her smallest gestures. Enter Compass, a key-chain toy in which, upon looking through the plastic lens at one end, youʼll see a faint yellow arrow (faint as if hesitant to suggest a direction) directing you to somewhere; it is immobile not subject to the earthʼs magnetic poles but to the subjective whim of the person holding it. Itʼs as if to say, ʻIf you need direction, look
inside, and I will offer you a way forward.” I believe that that is what Rebecca Mirʼs work offers us, a way forward, a means to experience the pangs of longing we live with but also to embrace our limitations, to even laugh at them, to understand, as Lester Bangs says, pain is the “strange fruit” surrounding us, and if we look deeply in the mirror we may find a means to savour the strange and bitter liqueur of pain and longing that is ours until death.
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