Head to toes: Francis Alys's paths of resistance

ArtForum, April, 1999 by Carlos Basualdo

CARLOS BASUALDO

My epigraph was easy enough to find. It was typewritten by Francis Alys on the lower left corner of a tourist map of Stockholm, which had been spread out on a simple antique wooden table complete with a matching chair in a room inside the Swedish city's Nordic Museum. Together with other writings and a postcard, the installation was one component of the artist's the loser/the winner, 1998. itself part of an ongoing series of projects the artist calls paseos (strolls). Generally carried out with various props in tow, the paseos have been enacted in any number of diverse locales: Alys strolled the avenues of Havana while wearing magnetic shoes; he traversed the working-class neighborhood of Pinheiros in Sao Paulo carrying a punctured can of paint that left a fine. colored line tracing the artist's path; and, in the case of the loser/the winner, he walked from one end of Stockholm to the other clad in a sweater that unraveled with every step.

In the loser/the winner, Alys's work - his walking - connected two sites separated in space and time: The point of departure was the modern, rationalist building, very much in the Bauhaus style, that houses Stockholm's Museum of Science and Technology. The destination was a nineteenth-century neo-romantic structure recalling in turn the palaces of a century before: today it is home to the Nordic Museum, a curious visual encyclopedia embracing everything from ethnographic displays of Laplander culture to a recent show concerning the relationship of Swedes to their cars. Alys's hike had taken him through the parks that lie between the museums. At both sites, viewers had at their disposal (in racks located at the entrance of the two rooms where the exhibition took place) postcards printed with the artist's image, his back turned to us, clad in an electric blue sweater, its tonality obviously manipulated on a computer, with a long unraveled thread extending from one of the sleeves to the edge of the photo. The following typed inscription was found on the postcard:

Here is a fairy tale for you Which is just as good as true What unfolds will give you passion Castles on hills & also treason How, from his cape a fatal thread To her window the villains led.

Two small paintings, one per venue, rounded out the installation. Each represented a tall, anonymous individual, wearing the blue sweater, strolling through a dark forest, an appropriate enough setting for a fairy tale. The image, painstakingly rendered on a canvas partially covered with a torn piece of translucent paper, was the only document in which the audience could actually see the determined walker in his idealized setting. By contrast, in the fifteen photos strewn across the table at the historical museum, the blue thread meandering in the grass or between the somber trees was the only trace of the absent stroller. The fact that the artist was missing raised a number of questions. Had the action actually taken place? Or better, is it beside the point whether it took place or not? For Alys's paseo is a fable - a journey that is also already a story of a journey - and fables are nothing but a curious mix of reality and fiction, a truth half told in a world of half-truths, that questions the truthfulness of reality itself.

Alys's personal history might itself be a fable extracted from his work. Once upon a time - actually, at the end of 1987 - the Belgian architect arrived in Mexico as part of a French assistance program to that country's government (participation seemingly allowed our protagonist to avoid military service in Europe). With no knowledge of Spanish, the young Alys, who had studied engineering in Belgium and architectural history in Venice, quickly found himself working on the aqueducts of La Mixteca (Oaxaca), several hours south of Mexico City. On one of his days off, walking through the streets of the capital's historic center, an activity that had developed into a routine of his visits to the city, he happened to meet curator Guillermo Santamarina, a tireless promoter of contemporary art in that country. The setting was the Salon de los Aztecas cafe, a space that housed art shows and a bookstore, not far from the Zocalo, the magnificent square in front of Mexico City's baroque cathedral. Their initial conversation may have been about streets and books, but we can surely guess that before long the difficulties facing contemporary art in Mexico came up. Around that time, the Salon de los Aztecas was the meeting place for a whole new generation of artists. Almost by coincidence, Alys would encounter there those with whom he would soon begin to show his work on a regular basis: the British artist Melanie Smith and the American Thomas Glassford; and the locals Pablo Vargas Lugo, Gabriel Orozco, Diego Toledo, and Abraham Cruz Villegas. From the very beginning, Alys's work responded intimately to the environs in which it was realized, incorporating local materials and reflecting on the conditions of production in Mexico. One of his earliest works would be a poignant critique of the idealization of the Mexican pictorial tradition: three pieces of chewing gum, red, white, and green, like the colors of the Mexican flag, attached to a wall. It was in Mexico City that Alys, toward the end of 1991, would complete his first paseo, walking through the city's streets, dragging along a little magnetic dog mounted on wheels. From that point on, the fables would replace the aqueducts.