by Simon Collings
Cult classic
The artist cultivates a faux naturalism in her film work which, through its transparently exaggerated artifice, is both fantastical and seductive. Fans of her work love the parodic, deadpan humor, the unexpected profundity of the banal, the poignancy of the bathetic phrase elevated into the realms of art. One film scholar likens her movies to ‘watching a series of TV commercials each folding into the next, the robotic actors voicing phrases lifted from advertising features and pop psychology advice columns.’ Some pundits have suggested that the actors are actual robots, programmed with the limited vocabulary of marketing flyers and commercial pop lyrics. Is Neoprene Dangerous?, her most recent feature, opens with a woman removing a towel from a tumble dryer and pressing it rapturously to her cheek before driving at speed along winding mountain roads to the local mall where she shops for a multi-functional digital air fryer.
Performance
We often saw her around the neighborhood, shuffling along in her tattered, grimy clothes, loaded with plastic bags of litter. Some days she carried as many as a dozen, filled with paper, drinks cartoons, food packaging, cans and bottles. Occasionally she would stop, carefully place the bags on the ground, and retrieve a piece of rubbish from a hedge or gutter to add to her collection. We tried to speak to her once or twice but she acted as though we didn’t exist. Several times I noticed a woman with a small digital camera filming her. Later we learned that the woman with the bags was a performance artist called Mira Lindstrom. She lives in quite a nice house apparently and has a partner and two red setters. The woman I’d seen filming her was a collaborator recording the work. Next month a London gallery will present a retrospective of Lindstrom’s art, including the first screening of a 3-hour film called Litter.
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Simon Collings is the author of three chapbooks and a full collection of micro-fictions. He is based in the UK. Read more from Simon here.
