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Walkabout: Francis Alys's peripatetic actions have won him acclaim on the global scene. A traveling exhibition surveys the career of this multifaceted artist, while a New York installation makes an artwork of his own unusual collection
Art in America, Feb, 2008 by Gregory Volk
While focusing on the importance of rehearsal in Alys's work, what this exhibition underscores even more is his extraordinary ability to let mundane situations, activities and materials become richly evocative. A city boy kicking an empty plastic bottle on a sidewalk or street is completely unremarkable; it's the kind of thing you could easily see all the time, pretty much anywhere. Yet when such a boy kicks a bottle up a steep city street in Alys's video Caracoles (1999), this routine action j unexpectedly assumes a great deal of significance. Casual but concentrating, the boy is a mix of playfulness and seriousness. He makes headway, but then the bottle rolls downhill, or off to the side. His best efforts are constantly undermined, and there are times when it seems the bottle is about to roll all the way back down the hill, but he keeps going and always tries again. You find yourself wondering what the boy's aspirations might be, about his hopes and dreams, but also contemplating how hopes and dreams are often thwarted by circumstance. The top of the hill seems potentially fabulous, but probably isn't--it's just more of the same city, the same circumscribed life. The child is playing an old, old game, but with a piece of mass-produced trash, in an era inundated by consumerism and its accumulating by-products. It is one of many times when history and modernity clash in Alys's work. Maybe not only the boy but also the neighborhood, city and world are trying for an improved future, yet things keep roiling downhill, gravity undercuts ambition, and one is left with the process and effort, and no attainable goal.
This theme is repeated in Rehearsal 1 (1999-2004), one of several works that incorporate not a finished piece of music but the stop-and-go process of musicians practicing. Several months before staging and filming it, Alys recorded a brass band rehearsing a danzon, a type of Cuban music that is also popular in parts of Mexico. The musicians join in, playing in unison, and the piece really gets going, but they very quickly break down into atonal cacophony. They do this over and over again. Later, while listening to this rehearsal through headphones, Alys drove a red Volkswagen Beetle up a very steep dirt road in Tijuana, past rickety houses with cars parked at angles in the driveways, other broken cars abandoned at the sides of the street, and the discarded back seat of a car. The video of this action, with the soundtrack of the rehearsal, is riveting. Every time the band kicks in to play the song, the car ascends the hill, but when the musicians lose their way and return to noise, not music, the car rolls back down. Each attempt starts with fanfare and optimism, but ends in failure. Each failure leads to the next concerted effort. You find yourself rooting for that Volkswagen to make it, almost willing that struggling car to negotiate the last difficult stretch, be rid of this poor neighborhood and then go roaring off into a glorious future, but that never happens. The rhythmic back-and-forth motion of the car is like a pendulum, swinging toward the future and returning to the past. You think of personal things: how difficult it is to shed obdurate memories and ingrained fears, how easy it is to cling to habits, no matter how limiting. You think of societal issues as well. After repeated attempts at modernization, after antipoverty campaigns, World Bank loans and convulsive national elections, this ragged little neighborhood in Tijuana hasn't changed all that much and probably won't anytime soon.
