A STORY OF DECEPTION, 2003–2006, consists of a painting sliced in half and a film loop of a highway shot from the front of a car. The car straddles a dashed white center-line. In the middle distance, we see the glimmer of an oily mirage hovering above the scalding pavement. As the vehicle inches forward, the mirage evaporates, only to grow larger at the horizon, where the road dissolves. The car moves deliberately, slowly, as if toward a destination. It goes nowhere. Nothing changes.
A Story of Deception was an apt introduction to the mind of an artist whose practice revolves around the representation of futility. The Belgian-born Alÿs has explored this theme with a certain relentlessness since moving to Mexico City in 1986, as the impressive enfilade at Tate Modern—irreproachably installed by curators Mark Godfrey and Kerryn Greenberg, with help from the artist—made abundantly clear. In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing), 1997, a seminal early project, Alÿs pushed a weighty block of ice through the streets of Mexico City’s historical center until the obdurate mass melted into a puddle. In Rehearsal I, 1999–2001, a red Volkswagen Beetle drives up a hillside in Tijuana accompanied by the music of a brass band in rehearsal. According to Alÿs’s instructions, when the musicians stop, the driver releases the clutch and the car rolls back downhill. The music starts up, and the action occurs all over again. (The cycle repeats ad nauseam.) In Barrenderos, 2004, street sweepers were asked to push a mountain of garbage from one street to the next until the growing accumulation of trash could no longer be moved. In each of these instances, an expenditure of energy yields no tangible result.
Alÿs’s works engaging the moving body—his walks, sweeps, drives, and flights—are his most arresting because they exhaust themselves in the making. Sometimes doing something leads to nothing indeed. The ideas of something and nothing are dialectically intertwined, John Cage once suggested. In his “action” The Collector, 1990–92, Alÿs took a series of promenades with homemade magnetic “dogs” that attracted bottle caps and other bits of detritus. Displayed at the Tate on shelves, the contraptions were records of purposeless walks, walks that took place for no reason other than for the sake of walking. For Alÿs, walking is a negation of “productive” action, of rational decision making. “As long as I’m walking,” he declares in a totemic work of 1992, “I’m not choosing . . . smoking . . . losing . . . making . . . knowing. . . .” The list goes on. For Alÿs, to walk is not to do. The walker walks: That is all she does. And yet his practice reveals, à la Cage, the logical impossibility of an artist doing nothing, just as the Minimalist work, in opposition to its negative discourse, reveals the very impossibility of making an artwork that means nothing. Each form of nothing posits a different “something”: The nothing is productive in spite of itself.
As Long as I’m Walking is thus the antipode of Richard Serra’s Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself, 1967–68, which describes the sculptor’s endeavor as a series of action infinitives (“to roll,” “to crease”) capable of revealing material properties (“of tension,” “of gravity”). For Serra, doing something leads to something, a result. Splashing lead creates splashed lead. Serra’s later practice is an unending escalation of that tautological formula. Alÿs’s well-known When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002, is, among other things, a salutary response to the Ozymandian scale and hulking materiality of the public sculpture of the increasingly distant-seeming economic boom, exemplified by Serra’s practice of the past decade and a half, whose spectacular domination of the beholder marked the abeyance of site-specificity as a critical form. Five hundred student volunteers bearing shovels climbed a great dune above a favela near Lima, Peru. Arranged in a line just as the barrenderos were, the shovelers moved the hill ever so slightly. The “result” was intangible. A monumental effort resulted in nothing. And yet this resulted in something: the memory of the event as recorded in photographs and a video notable for its modesty, its refusal of high production values during a time of lavishly produced film projections.
Like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gabriel Orozco, Alÿs came to prominence during the recent period of excess; the performative, often ephemeral nature of these artists’ practices exerted a considerable counterappeal within that milieu. Along with Christian Philipp Müller and Renée Green, these figures of ’90s art inscribed the mobility of the artist at the center of their practices. The Loop, 1997, a project commissioned by cocurator Olivier Debroise for the binational exhibition inSite97, thematized the travails of migrant workers attempting to cross the border between Tijuana and San Diego. Alÿs made the trip in reverse, flying from Mexico to South America to Australia to Asia, and from there, finally, to Southern California via Alaska, arriving at his destination without crossing the US-Mexico border. His journey took more than a month. Much like The Green Line, 2004, his celebrated walk along the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank, The Loop highlighted the cartographic definition of the nation-state, the political and identitarian functions of the map. The status of the nation-state in globalization is much contested. Does the mass immigration of recent decades foster an erosion of national identity or its shoring up? What is the impact of the current “nomadism” on the artist’s subjectivity and work? The Loop allegorizes two contemporary forms of travel: that of the migrant, who has yet to reap globalism’s rewards; and the freewheeling mobility of those who can afford to travel and adopt a cosmopolitan subjectivity. For what is The Loop but a cartographic self-portrait of Alÿs himself, the emblematic “global” artist, who constantly shuttles between exhibitions, art fairs, and projects?
The international artist has a locality, a base, wherever that may be. And it has often been noted that the poverty of means of Alÿs’s practice is particularly suited to the Latin American milieu in which he has largely worked. It is not for nothing that many of his most arresting works were staged in Mexico City’s center, a terrain deeply sedimented with layers of history. In Patriotic Tales, 1997, Alÿs led a circle of sheep around the great flagpole in the Zócalo. On August 28, 1968, thousands of civil servants were ordered to appear in the city’s main square to voice their support for the repressive regime of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz; as a gesture of noncompliance, they bleated like sheep. That autumn, some two hundred student protesters were massacred by Ordaz’s soldiers in Tlatelolco. In the video, the sheep join Alÿs; with each circumambulation of the flagpole, another animal joins the herd. We count sheep, literally. And when the circle has grown unwieldy, the direction of the walk is reversed. Alÿs is now the last in the herd, the follower rather than the leader. The number of sheep diminishes one by one until he exits the screen. The bells of the old Metropolitan Cathedral toll plaintively.
Allegory is “the figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another,” the dictionary tells us, and it is impossible not to read Patriotic Tales as an allegory of Mexican political history. In the catalogue, Godfrey aptly describes Alÿs’s practice as a whole precisely along such lines. Alÿs’s art, he observes, represents “the most important renewal of the allegorical impulse identified in the early 1980s by Craig Owens” in that critic’s essay of the same name, one of the canonical texts of postmodernism. Allegory “occurs whenever one text is doubled by another,” Owens writes. “Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist . . . does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured. . . . Rather, he adds another meaning to the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement.” What the postmodernist work allegorizes is the instability of the text’s—and its own—meaning. Allegory is a palimpsest effect that calls into question the truthfulness of the original text. Owens ascribes this deconstructive approach to artists such as Cindy Sherman and Troy Brauntuch; its contemporary expression may be found in certain works by Pierre Huyghe that destabilize a prior narrative by means of a supplemental one.
Certain of Alÿs’s actions—such as his 2000 Re-enactments, in which the artist entered a gun shop, bought a pistol, and walked around Mexico City with the loaded handgun in plain view until he was arrested, and then repeated the event the next day with the police’s knowing participation—might be seen, then, as precisely the sort of postmodernist allegory Owens sought to identify. More often than not, though, Alÿs’s works do not suggest a deconstructive approach. His projects are grounded in aspects of the lived world, whether historical or here and now, to evoke general principles or themes. (The allegorist, Goethe observes, “starts with a universal idea and then looks for suitable particulars.”) Even Re-enactments begins with a mundane reality: the prevalence of guns in Mexico, the negligence of the Mexican police, the capriciousness of the country’s judicial system. Thus, even if Alÿs goes on to double the first “performance” with another, the work retains a literal level absent in postmodernist allegory. This makes Alÿs’s work specifically rather than abstractly referential. The sheep walk and the promenade through Jerusalem allude to particular conflicts. The drives to nowhere are abstract evocations of futility—elegant tautologies. In other works, the allegory is unfortunately obvious. (The videos titled Children’s Games, 2008–, caused me to cringe: Do we really need to be shown that sand castles eventually wash away, that skipping stones sink?) The meaning is clearly stated. “Futility” is reduced to cliché.
The relative effectiveness of Alÿs’s best works depends on the universal being concretized in the particular and on the allegory retaining its multiple referents and meanings. The more historically specific, the more local, the work’s siting, the more open-ended its interpretation. The Alÿs who found his art in the streets of Mexico City remains the most compelling Alÿs. Speaking of traditional allegory, Owens might well have been describing the artist’s practice: “A conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present—these are its two most fundamental impulses.”
“Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception” is currently on view (through Jan. 30, 2011) at Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; travels to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 8–Aug. 1, 2011.
James Meyer is a contributing editor of_ Artforum.
