Francis Alys.
Markle, Leslie
FRANCIS ALYS
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA September 29, 2007 * February 10,
2008
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UCLA's Hammer Museum continues to bring cutting-edge
international art to Los Angeles with one of its most recent offerings,
"Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal." As the first
large-scale museum exhibition in the United States dedicated to the
acclaimed work of this Belgian-born artist, this survey is perfectly
timed. Since 1990, Alys has made his home base in Mexico City where he
explores the semiotics of urban space by bringing notions of cultural
and geographical elision to the forefront of much of his work. As a
cultural outsider, the artist's inquiry into the nature of ritual
and repetition has a typically Brechtian character, often with an ironic
edge.
Alys's artistic affinity with the Situationist International
and neo-dada movements like Fluxus manifests itself in his efforts to
conjure an experiential map for the city through arbitrary social
encounters, which transcend the confining Euclidean geometry of modern
urban planning. In this exhibition, he extends the praxis of derive
through several time-based works incorporating the myth of Sisyphus as a
recurring theme. In his video work, The Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997), Alys
pushes a large block of ice around city streets until it is reduced to a
mere puddle. The apparent futility of this gesture belies the poetic
nature of his walk or paseo, which resonates with the work of Robert
Long and Hamish Fulton. In Rehearsal 1 (1999-2004, in collaboration with
Rafael Ortega), the artist takes this myth to yet another level of
absurdity. Using an older model Volkswagen car--a clearly populist
icon--he attempts to traverse the steep incline of a neglected
backcountry dirt road. Numerous trials invariably end with the Bug
rolling downhill backwards, only to begin again. All of this is paired
with a musical score performed by what sounds very much like a small
ragtag band of street musicians. Added to this is the recurrent barking
of a neighborhood dog, whose aggressiveness toward the whole exploit
creates an absurdly comic frisson without parallel in much recent art.
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The practice of derive, or "drifting"--which originated
with the Lettrist International figure Ivan Chtcheglov and later
developed by Situationist guru Guy Debord--was initially intended as an
antidote to normative forces in modern society, encouraging people to
explore their own environment without preconceptions. Even though Alys
at times positions his take on this practice rather ambiguously, its
psycho-geographic underpinnings always ultimately shine through. For
When Faith Moves Mountains (2002, in collaboration with Cuauhtemoc
Medina and Rafael Ortega), for instance, the artist extends the
territory of earth art into collaborative performance by ostensibly
having 500 volunteers clear away an entire mountain high above Lima.
Again, the sheer repetitious futility of When Faith Moves Mountains
strikes the viewer as absurd, yet when seen in the context of
totalitarian governments assumes a chillingly precise aspect.
While psycho-geography and derive have become standard tools in
performance art as well as fashionable art trends over the last quarter
century, artists like Alys have attempted to use them as surgical
instruments rather than as benign forms of social engagement. By
attempting to sidestep the perceived limits of the everyday, Alys's
performance work becomes performative in another, far richer sense, by
isolating within representations of normality what they persistently
fail to perform--or, to unpack the etymology of par-fournir, to
"furnish through one's own means." This is why a lot of
Alys's work is superficially paradoxical and elusive, making it
difficult to pin down. While many of his projects involve some kind of
time-based public performance, they generally pursue a ludic course,
often involving multiple partners and the various transformations
implied by the act of collaboration. At times these may be scripted as
random encounters with no preconceived end in view, formulated to evolve
according to the whims and insights of the parties involved, or
alternately are meticulously planned events with absurdly megalomaniacal goals. In either case, their ultimate game plan concerns the liminal nature of every social engagement. Through the exploration of these
threshold states, which he pursues in the role of postmodern flaneur,
Alys extends the physical and temporal boundaries of performance as
play.
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