Francis Alÿs became world famous for his Paseos. The artist’s drawn alter ego is now sauntering at the SCHIRN.
It all started with walks. The Belgian-born artist had actually studied architecture. Then Francis Alÿs traveled to Mexico City to work on a project. He fell in love with the city during his jaunts and stayed. In the early nineties he produced his first Paseos there, performances during which he sauntered through public space. Sometimes he pulled a magnetic dog on a rope behind him that attracted pieces of discarded metal. Other times he pushed a huge block of ice through the streets until only a couple of drops remained before evaporating completely on the hot asphalt. He even dared to walk down what is considered one of the most dangerous streets in the world holding a loaded gun, in doing so calling attention to massive crime. This walk lasted just twelve minutes before the police subdued him.
One can watch Alÿs on his outings for hours. He has published video documentations of his performances or versions of them restaged for the camera on his website. He implements trenchant irritations into everyday environments and understands art as an intervention that develops its impact above all outside of the museum. His works are nonetheless presented in large-scale exhibitions worldwide, often in conjunction with drawings or photographs. The Tate Modern in London devoted an extensive retrospective to him in 2010. Alÿs is currently one of the most sought-after artists, even through he indulges in the hype tongue-in-cheek: in 2001 he sent a peacock to the Biennale in Venice that, accompanied by a guard, strutted through the Giardini and stood in for the artist at receptions in the evening.
Poetic Gestures, Political Statements
A work from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt is on display at the exhibition Infinite Jest that is untypical for Alÿs, even though it again focuses on a sauntering man. Time Is a Trick of the Mind from 1998 consists of two projections of the same animated film. A man passes by a tall fence skimming a stick along the iron bars, producing a rhythmic composition of the sounds it makes. Like the artists himself in his performances and videos, the stroller shapes time. The soundtracks run slightly staggered so that tension develops between the time passing in the one and in the other. The videos and film stills produced in 2004 present the work once more as an intervention. The artist walks through London with a drumstick in his hand and produces sounds on different fences. In this environment, the works can also be read as the criticism of ownership and territorial claims to property, which the former colonial power Great Britain in part asserts to this very day.
Using minimalist poetic gestures, the artist, born in 1959 in Antwerp, turns his works into political statements. He calls attention to conditions in slums, to corruption, to pollution, to hot spots, in short: to the dynamics of geopolitical processes and the ramifications of globalization. Yet the metaphors on which his performances center remain open to a certain extent, so that everyone can formulate his or her own interpretation. For his Sleepers series he documented people lying motionless on the ground in Mexico City; the viewer is sometimes left in the dark about whether they are sleeping or dead. For the work Painting/Retoque he meticulously painted over the faded markings on a street directly next to the Panama Canal on a strategically important strip of land that was controlled by the United States for many years. Only one of his works has monumental character: for Faith Moves Mountains, 500 helpers used shovels to displace a 200-meter-high and 500-meter-long sand dune in Peru by 10 centimeters. As much as the world likes to show itself from its bad side: for Alÿs, there is always also a glimmer of hope.
In Jerusalem, he let green paint drip onto the ground, and in doing do manually traced the line drawn on a map from 1948 that marked a cease-fire between Israelis and Arabs. The Green Line--Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic is the title of the work from 2004, one that gets to the heart of Alÿs's entire oeuvre.