Francis Alÿs (born 1959, Antwerp) is a Belgian artist. His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. After leaving behind his formal training as an architect and relocated to Mexico City, he has created a diverse body of artwork that explores urbanity, spatial justice, and land-based poetics. Employing a broad range of media from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence. Alÿs commonly enacts paseos—walks that resist the subjection of common space.[1] Alys reconfigures time to the speed of a stroll, making reference to the figure of the flâneur, originating from the work of Charles Baudelaire and developed by Walter Benjamin.[2] Cyclical repetition and return also inform the character of Alÿs’ movements and mythology—Alÿs contrasts geological and technological time through land-based and social practice that examine individual memory and collective mythology. Alÿs frequently engages rumor as a central theme in his practice, disseminating ephemeral, practice-based works through word-of-mouth and storytelling.
Contents |
Alÿs studied architectural history at the Institute of Architecture in Tournai (1978–83) and engineering at the Istituto di Architettura in Venice (1983–6) before moving to Mexico City in 1986 where he arrived as part of a French assistance program after an earthquake. He soon started practicing as a visual artist. His work encompasses many media often involving the participation and presence of the artist. These performed events are documented in video, photographs, writing, painting, and animation.
Many of his works involve intense observation and recording of the social, cultural and economic conditions of particular places, usually conceived during walks through urban areas. Citing walking as the centre of his practice, for his first performance The Collector (1991), he dragged a small magnetic toy dog on wheels through Mexico City so as to attract debris to it.[3] In Fairy Tales (1995), he takes a walk after unravelling the sweater he has on, leaving an ever-lengthening, blue-thread trail in his wake.[4] Also in 1995, Alÿs realised an action in São Paulo called The Leak in which he walked from a gallery, around the city, and back into the gallery trailing a dribbled line from an open can of blue paint. This action was reprised in 2004 when Alÿs walked along the armistice border in Jerusalem, known as 'the green line', carrying a can filled with green paint. The bottom of the can was perforated with a small hole, so the paint dripped out as a continuous squiggly line on the ground as he walked.[5] The work Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) documents an action performed on the streets of Mexico City in 1997. The film depicts a simple and seemingly pointless endeavour - a large block of ice being pushed through the city streets for 9 hours until it melts away to nothing.[6]
In 2005 the National Portrait Gallery hosted The Nightwatch, an installation by Alÿs in collaboration with Artangel, in which a wild fox called Bandit was set free in the Gallery with his movements recorded by surveillance cameras.[7]
In his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers in Ventanilla District outside of Lima, Peru.[8] Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time from one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches.[9] Art critic Jean Fisher writes that "the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth."[10] The Rehearsal (1999), the first part of an as yet unfinished three-part video piece shot in Tijuana, consists of a static long shot of a green VW Beetle driving up the slope of a dirt road in a shantytown while the viewer hears musicians rehearsing a song. Every time they stop, the car rolls backwards down the hill, as if running out of petrol, but when the music starts up again, the car starts driving up the hill once more.
At Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Alÿs collaborated with Alejandro González Iñárritu on an installation entitled Amores Perros - El Ensayo (Amores Perros - The Rehearsal, 2002). The scenes shown on numerous monitors and projections were not from the film itself but from hours and hours of crude research video, casting clips, acting rehearsals and discarded rushes.[11]
Alÿs regularly employs Mexican sign-painters ("rotulistas") to paint enlarged and elaborated versions of his small paintings, which they are free to produce in limitless copies. An example is the series of paintings called The Liar, the Copy of the Liar (1997). His intention is to challenge the idea of the original artwork, rendering the process of making more anonymous and deflating the perceived commercial value of art.[12]
The paintings in the series Le Temps du sommeil were begun in 1996 and often worked on at night. They feature visionary dreamlike scenes involving tiny suited men and women acting out strange rituals reminiscent of children's games and gymnastic experiments.[13]
For nearly twenty years the Alÿs has been collecting images of Saint Fabiola, a fourth century patrician Roman woman who, despite divorce and remarriage, later did such fervent penance that she was welcomed back to the faith and, after her death, sainted. For years she fell into oblivion, but in the nineteenth century returned to popularity as the protagonist of a novel named after her. Alÿs acquired his Fabiola portraits, mostly the work of amateurs, from thrift shops, flea markets and antiques stores primarily in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Holland, and Germany.[14] All the works have been left in their original state. The artists, dates and places of origin are largely unknown. Fabiola is always depicted in profile with her head covered in a rich red veil.[15] Alÿs has been presenting his collection since 1994. He looks for a special location for each Fabiola exhibition, devising a new constellation for the portraits, which now number over 350.[16] In 1997, 60 of his Fabiolas were exhibited at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Alÿs' work has been shown in many international institutions, including the Wiels (2010–2011), Tate Modern, London (2010), The AiM Biennale (Arts in Marrakech International Biennale), The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2008),[17] the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007), Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina, MALi, Lima; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Avignon, France (2004); Centro nazionale per le arti contemporanee, Rome, Italy [traveled to Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid] (all 2003); and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2002, 2011[18]); and Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (1998). His traveling show of portraits of the Saint Fabiola has traveled to London, New York,Perú and LAMCA.[19] Alÿs participated in the Venice Biennial in 1999, 2001 and 2007, and the Carnegie International in 2004.
Alÿs is represented by David Zwirner in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich.