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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
Alys deals in simplicities, which assume many layers of possible meaning, and those simplicities are almost always entirely plausible. A kid kicking a plastic bottle is plausible, as is an old car repeatedly trying to ascend a steep street. A stripper taking off her clothes while listening to music is entirely plausible and happens all the time--however, not like in another video, Rehearsal 2 (2001-06). On the soundtrack, a female singer and a male pianist rehearse a Schubert song, often stopping to converse and redo a section. When the song proceeds, the stripper goes into performance mode, swaying gracefully and removing her garb. When the song ceases, yielding to discussion and practice, she abruptly stops, and puts the same clothes back on. She's a seductress, but her seduction is constantly interrupted; she's an expert at titillation but spends half her time getting dressed. Excitation and payoff are constantly delayed, and if the stripper represents a promising future, for instance a modernized Mexico taking its place among the advanced nations of the world, that future is approached only through a great number of stumbling fits and starts.
The related video Politics of Rehearsal (2005-07) makes these political and cultural implications much more evident, but with a big dose of humor. It consists of raw footage of a singer and pianist working together, a different stripper's stop-and-start performance in response to that rehearsal and various cameramen (including Alys) recording the actions. But this time there is voice-over commentary: a conversation between Alys and curator/critic Cuauhtemoc Medina concerning Mexico's conflicted relationship with modernity, and how the United States model for progress clashes with Mexican tradition and understanding of time. Once again, the stripper is an apt, yet hilarious, symbol of waylaid promise and delayed expectation. Mexico has certainly had its share of both through the years.
All of these works come with considerable documentation and related materials in the form of drawings, notes, diagrams and photographs arranged on long tables or loosely attached to the walls. They disclose complex origins and stages, making them worth poring over and demonstrating how much thought and research go into Alys's seemingly casual works. They are also filled with unobtrusive treasures--for instance, a drawing of the Volkswagen, complete with all sorts of numbers and calculations, or another of a woman disrobing, simple yet elegant. Images directly referring to specific works occur with other pertinent images, notes that Alys wrote to himself in several languages, various citations and other miscellany, and you discover how he prepares for future projects while simultaneously looking to past works, angling for fresh interpretations and perspectives.
The exhibition also establishes compelling links between pieces that might not seem terribly related, and it therefore makes Alys's whole eclectic endeavor--all those walks and their photographic documentation, the videos, paintings, drawings, photographs and actions--seem part of a continuum in which ideas are constantly explored in many different ways and from different points of view. Song for Lupita (1998), a 12-second-long, hand-drawn animated film shown as a continuous loop, features a woman loosely rendered as a mere outline, almost a sketch, endlessly pouring blue water back and forth from one glass into another. Alys's drawings for the film are displayed nearby. There is no goal in the film, no linear progression. Instead, there is, once again, a constant exchange between progress and regress. As you watch this rhythmic alternation of plenitude and emptiness, following the arc of water from one glass to the other, the simple action takes on many, perhaps limitless, connotations. As the tide advances on one shore it withdraws from another. As one civilization flourishes, another declines, but that, too, will change in due time. A child's seesawing day swings many times between exhilaration and despair. The stock market rises but then the bottom drops out, only to rise again. Optimistic new governments promising reform come into power but then lose their way amid compromise and corruption. One's own most incandescent breakthroughs are inevitably followed by enervation and confusion.
