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Can artistic interventions create a context for change? This is the question that visual artist Francis Alÿs asked himself and his audience in his exhibition early in 2007 at the renowned David Zwirner Gallery in New York. He was presenting a project that he carried out in Jerusalem in 2005, when he walked through the city with a perforated pot of green paint, leaving a green trail behind him. Alÿs followed the ceasefire line that Moshe Dayan drew on the map with a green pen in 1948 after the Arab-Israeli war as a border between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and which has gone down in history as the Green Line. In this work Alÿs is questioning the value of borders. However, his work is also about the relevance of art as a commentary on political matters. The title that Alÿs gave to the work clearly demonstrates his own belief in this relevance: Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political, and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.

Walking as an Art Form

The Work of Francis Alÿs

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Francis Alÿs, Sometimes

Doing Something Poetic

Can Become Political,

and Sometimes Doing

Something Political Can

Become Poetic. 2005.

Photo courtesy David

Zwirner Gallery,

New York.

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In physical terms, little remained of the action performed by Alÿs in Sometimes Doing Something Poetic. The green line that he created had virtually disappeared within a couple of days. The only evidence of the walk is the film recording made by the artist in collaboration with Julien Devaux. Alÿs included this film in the exhibition, along with documentary material about the Green Line and his interviews with Palestinians and Israelis. A series of ‘guns’ that he made from found materials and a number of his typical small-format paintings also fea-tured in the exhibition. However, the essence of Sometimes Doing Something Poetic lies in this transient action, which leaves behind no piece of art except for a film recording and some documentation.

This immaterial manner of working is a theme that runs right through the oeuvre of Francis Alÿs, who was born Francis Alijs in Antwerp in 1959, trained as an architect and architectural historian in Doornik and Venice, and moved to Mexico in 1987 as a volunteer on a construction project. He remained in Mexico, where he modified his surname because his new compatriots had difficulty pronouncing it and, far more significantly, changed his profession: the architect became an artist. Alÿs had a very practical reason for this career switch. Previously he had always lived in small provincial towns, but in Mexico City he found himself in a metropolis with a population of millions. The experience was a shock for him, not least because of the serious economic crisis that Mexico was going through at the time. He attempted to process his love-hate relation-ship with Mexico City by going for walks through the city, his so-called ‘paseos’.

On one of his first walks, he pulled behind him a magnet on a string in the form of an angular tin dog, The Collector (1991). As he walked around the city, a second skin of metal grew around the animal, staying with it as it continued on its walk. In the same way Alÿs used his walks to collect ideas, impressions and conversations with people, which he would then make the subject of his work. In this way, in a far more immediate manner than through architecture, he gained an insight into the urban rituals and unwritten codes of the big-city environment. At the same time, the effect he has on the existing urban structure as an artist of ephemeral work is much less intrusive than the ‘footprint’ he left behind as an architect in the concrete form of schools, aqueducts and dams. Alÿs has con-sciously chosen to disrupt the dynamics of his environment as little as possible.

These paseos, which Alÿs began in 1991 in Mexico City and which have be-come an essential element of his creative process, are closely related to the urban walks of the 1960s French situationist Guy Debord.1 In most cases Alÿs documents his walks in photographs, slides or videos, accompanied by notes, drawings on tracing paper and small-format paintings, always depicting the same walking man. During the fifth Havana Biennial, the artist walked around in Magnetic Shoes (1994), which, like The Collector, carried the story of the city along with them. He took his walks through Copenhagen under the influence of a different drug every day. Narcotourism (1996) became the story of being physically present in one place, whilst being mentally elsewhere. In Ghent and São Paulo, Alÿs explored the area while leaving a trail from the gallery with a leaking pot of paint (The Leak, 1995).

‘When you’re walking,’ says Alÿs, ‘you’re receptive to and aware of everything going on in your immediate surroundings: small incidents, smells, images, sounds…’.2 Sound is very important in Railings (2004), one of the seven walks

The ‘paseos’

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that Artangel commissioned him to take in London. In this video, he walks past the snow-white houses of Regency London, rattling a stick along their black iron railings. The distance between the houses and the corners of the streets where the railings are interrupted determines the rhythm of both the film and the accompanying recording. In effect, Railings sketches the spatial arrange-ment of this typical district through the rattling of the stick.

Alÿs not only maps the city in spatial terms, he also investigates its political, social and economic dimensions. He has previously described his work as: ‘Politics in the sense of the Greek word polis: the city as a site of experiences and conflicts, from which materials are taken for invention, art and the creation of ur-ban myths.’3 In the previously mentioned series of walks in London, Nightwatch (2004) focuses on Bandit the fox, released by Alÿs in the National Portrait Gallery at night. Using images from the museum’s advanced camera system, the artist made a video showing the disoriented fox walking around amongst the por-traits. The work refers to the security cameras that are present everywhere in London, not only on the streets, on the Underground and in shops, but also in other locations.

However, the majority of the works that showcase Alÿs’ social involvement have been prompted by the political and social situation in Mexico (and Latin

Francis Alÿs, Turista.

Mexico D.F. 1996.

© Francis Alÿs.

Social involvement

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America). Re-enactments (2000) is one of Alÿs’ most subversive works, with its very literal presentation of the violent character of the city where he lives. The artist’s plan was to walk through the busy streets surrounding his apartment, carrying a loaded 9mm Beretta, until he is picked up by the police. This is not so much about trying his own nerve as about putting reality to the test and ex-posing the way social control and the police force work in the violent metropolis of Mexico City. The police stop the artist in less than twelve minutes but then, with their consent, he repeats the action one more time. The two films, pro-jected alongside each other in the work, hardly differ from each other. This raises the question of the evidently very fine line between fiction and reality. If the two films resemble one other so closely, who can guarantee that the first version was not also staged?

Between 1992 and 2002 Alÿs made the work Ambulantes, a slideshow of street vendors, men and women who push simple barrows, often made by themselves, crammed with boxes and bags through the streets of Mexico City, and thus offer their wares for sale. This series, with its colourful images, is a tribute to the survival of these men and women of the street, performing a Sisyphean task as

they push the weight of these staggeringly high piles of goods. The images in Ambulantes were gathered during one of Alÿs’ many paseos and show the daily routine in a Latin-American metropolis such as Mexico City. They are a reflec-tion of harsh reality, or, as the artist expressed it himself in an interview with De Morgen: ‘Sometimes I’m sitting in my studio and I really need to go out into the street to buy cigarettes. The contrast hits me so hard that I wake up and realise: “This is the reality.” I live in a world of artists, but there is a very different, harsher world outside. What I can do is comment on certain things, give them a value, document them, demonstrate that change is possible.’4

Alÿs attempted to do this in a very literal way in his large-scale project When Faith Moves Mountains, which he created for the Lima Biennial in 2002. When Alÿs was devising this project in 2000, Alberto Fujimori was ruling Peru with an iron fist and Lima was plagued by serious riots sparked by dissatisfaction with

Francis Alÿs,

Los Ambulantes.

1992-2002.

© Francis Alÿs.

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his policies. Alÿs wanted to come up with a spectacular counter-gesture and combat the prevailing pessimism. He recruited five hundred men to move a mountain of sand on the edge of Lima’s slums by ten centimetres. Standing side by side, the volunteers shovelled sand for a whole day. Whether they actually moved the mountain and by how much is not really important. When Faith Moves Mountains was primarily a sign of hope for a country in a huge political crisis: the faith that we can change things if we really make an all-out effort.

However, When Faith Moves Mountains is also an attempt by Alÿs to deromanti-cise the Land Art of Richard Long and Robert Smithson. When Long went on his walks through the desert of Peru, the social context was probably the last thing on his mind: his walks were contemplative undertakings. And Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), a spiral of black basalt constructed in the Great Salt Lake, resulted not from the strength of local people, but from the skill of engineers. In con-trast, Alÿs speaks of When Faith Moves Mountains as the accomplishment of the common man, Land Art by people who own no land. Alÿs had previously taken on the Minimal Art of artists such as Donald Judd. In Paradox of Praxis part 1: Sometimes Making Something Leads To Nothing, Part 1 (1997), he pushed a gigan-tic block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until, at the end of the day, nothing remained except a puddle of water. The rectangular block of ice is an allusion to the language of forms employed by the minimalists: ultimately, how-ever, it is nothing more than frozen water.

In Rotulistas (1993–1997), Alÿs raised the issue of artistic authorship. He gave his own paintings, the reflection of his walks, to a number of advertisement painters, or rotulistas, of which there are so many in Mexico City. Each of them was asked to create a new work based on the paintings, in a larger format and with the addition of their own stylistic elements. Using these as a basis, Alÿs created new works and sent them, once again, to the rotulistas. This created an

Francis Alÿs,

When Faith Moves

Mountains. Lima, Peru,

11 April 2002.

Video still. muhka,

Antwerp/Vlaamse

Gemeenschap.

Removing art from its pedestal

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endless flow of paintings, in which it is no longer clear which is the original and which is the copy. Alÿs sold the paintings at democratic prices, but he had to put an end to the project when it became so successful that he feared he would become trapped within his own system.

It is not only art itself that Alÿs views in a critical manner; he also targets the art world, inflated as it is by its own sense of self-importance and vanity. He did not participate in the 2001 Venice Biennale, but instead sent a number of pea-cocks, which were free to move about amongst the art lovers. He clearly could not care less about the whole art business and prefers to work on his own projects, far away from the centre of the art world.

Nevertheless, in the international art world Francis Alÿs has achieved great success. He has had solo exhibitions at important museums such as the MACBA in Barcelona, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the National Portrait Gallery in London,

Kunsthaus Zürich, the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and has participated in various biennials and exhibited his work at respected galleries. In 2006 he was the only Belgian artist included by the art magazine Flash Art in their list of the top one hundred promising artists and international gallerists placed him at number nine in their top one hundred. His work is to be found in international collections such as those of the Musée de la Ville de Paris and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, Fundació La Caixa in Barcelona, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, LACMA and LAMOCA in Los Angeles, the Tate in London and the Walker Center for the Arts in Minneapolis.

Strangely, however, Alÿs’ oeuvre is rarely exhibited in Flanders. In 1991 one of his works was included in the group exhibition Addenda at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle near Ghent; ten years later a series of drawings appeared at The Big Show at the NICC in Antwerp; in summer 2003, When Faith Moves Mountains was exhibited in the same city, this time at MuHKA; and in

Francis Alÿs,

Sleepers.

1997-2004.

Series of slides.

© Francis Alÿs.

Out of sight, out of mind?

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2004 Re-enactments featured in the first exhibition at Extra City, also in Antwerp. Sleepers (1997), a slideshow in which Alÿs alternates sleeping homeless people with sleeping dogs, was shown at the beginning of 2007 in Commitments at Cultuurcentrum Strombeek. However, as yet there has never been a solo exhi-bition devoted to the work of Francis Alÿs in Flanders (or in the Netherlands, for that matter) and only one of his works is in a Flemish collection. The Flemish Community acquired When Faith Moves Mountains in 2003 and gave the work to MuHKA on long-term loan.

We can only speculate as to the reasons behind this lack of interest in the country of his birth. Maybe it is because he has now been so far away for so long and appears to have focused entirely upon Latin-American life. Perhaps it is because he maintains such a distance between himself and the media and the art-world networks. Alÿs is, for example, not tied up with any one specific gal-lery and at the beginning of 2007 he refused to be nominated for the Flemish Cultural Prize for the Visual Arts. Perhaps this refusal was his way of saying that Flanders has some catching up to do first before it can start handing out prizes to him.5

1. Guy Debord, in his 1958 Théorie de la dérive, describes the ‘dérive’, the idea of walking through

the city with no specific destination, in order to surrender oneself anew to the stimulus of the sur-

roundings and the resulting encounters.

2. Quote from Francis Alÿs, Mapping the City exhibition, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 16 February

to 20 May 2007.

3. Quote from Francis Alÿs, Satellite of Love exhibition, Witte de With, Centrum voor Hedendaagse

Kunst and tent, Rotterdam, 27 January to 26 March 2006.

4. De Morgen, 9 October 2004, interview by Lillian Van Den Broeck.

5. Alÿs indicated that he believed the prize should go to a younger artist than himself.

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Francis Alÿs,

Plaza Garibaldi.

2004. Video still.

© Francis Alÿs.

Published in The Low

Countries 2009, no. 17

See www.onserfdeel.be or

www.onserfdeel.nl