Head to toes: Francis Alys's paths of resistance

ArtForum, April, 1999 by Carlos Basualdo

Rather than the shadow of the flaneur, then. Alys's strolls violently conjure another figure at the margins of modernity: the subject of the situationist drift. Situationists, halfway through the century, turned to "the drift" - a "fleet-footed technique through diverse environments." according to Guy Debord - as an antiurban critique of the modern city's rationalism. It was a question of mapping out, against the grain. the urban fabric. of discovering its personal underside, of unearthing the true experience underneath the layer of spectacle that would cover it up, like a thick layer of grime, in the contemporary city. At the end of the century, Alys's paseos are a parodic, indeed tragic, version of that situationist vision. Some, like the loser/the winner, openly exhibit the vestiges of the romantic ideology that animated the attitudes of the situationists. Others, such as Narcoturismo, seem to be conceived and executed as the nightmarish underside of the situationist project, erratic wanderings through the peripheral streets of a sleepless Paris. In Alys's strolls, an astringent criticism harmonizes with flights of the imagination, but there is no chance for situationist melancholy. The "original experience," a longing for some uncontaminated and pure access to reality that still motivated Debord and appeared as a leitmotif in his restless invectives, has completely disappeared, as has the very possibility of conceiving a willful and autonomous subject or the notion of a pure and undisputable "truth." We, Alys's contemporaries, are left with nothing more than a world of white lies and half-truths. A world of fables, and the space that separates them is a distance to be traveled without the illusion of final destination. A perfect distance for a stroll.

Carlos Basualdo is a frequent contributor to Artforum.

Translated from Spanish by Vincent Martin.