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

Gregory Volk

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In a current arts situation marked by proliferation, with more and more galleries, exhibitions, biennials, collectors, art fairs, art consultants, art blogs and, well, artists, one of the more lamentable occurrences has been the suspension of Dia Art Foundation's pioneering contemporary exhibitions on 22nd Street in New York's Chelsea. Between 1987 and early 2004 Dia presented some of the most compelling, thoughtful and visually striking exhibitions anywhere--ambitious, mostly one-person shows specifically designed for the institution's converted warehouse.

Because they were up for many months, these exhibitions rewarded repeated and patient viewing, while accentuating the myriad nuances of the works on display. It was good to see Robert Irwin's 1998-2000 installations in Dia's third-floor gallery, involving scrims, natural light filtered through gels on the windows and fluorescent lights, but better to see them several times over, in order to fully appreciate their blend of phenomenological research, optical bedazzlement and meditative quiescence. Gerhard Richter's sprawling photography archive Atlas had its U.S. debut at Dia in 1995-96, anticipating its inclusion in his 2002 MOMA retrospective by seven years; Lawrence Weiner's excellent 1991-92 exhibition anticipated his current Whitney Museum retrospective by 16 years. Bridget Riley's 2000-01 exhibition brought a renewed interest in this British Op artist, who had only rarely exhibited in New York. While showcasing luminaries who emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s, Dia also presented standout next-generation artists such as Roni Horn, Jorge Pardo, Jessica Stockholder, Pierre Huyghe and Tracey Moffatt. In an increasingly fast-paced art scene and market, Dia, with its slowed-down focus on complex visions to be savored, was all about art and not about hype, and was therefore a refuge and oasis.

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As Dia shifted its attention (and presumably its finances) to Dia:Beacon in upstate New York, such exhibitions unfortunately shifted upstate as well, much to New York Cites, and Chelsea's, detriment. That's why Dia's return to the city in a three-year collaboration with the far uptown Hispanic Society of America is so welcome. Inaugurating this effort is a fascinating exhibition by the Mexico City-based Belgian artist Francis Alys, who, since the early 1990s, has garnered considerable international attention for his offbeat and sometimes ephemeral work: sending a peacock as his representative to the opening of the 2001 Venice Biennale, for example (The Ambassador), or pushing a large rectangular block of ice (akin to a Minimalist sculpture) through Mexico City for more than nine hours, until it became a small chunk, then drops, then nothing at all (Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997). In the United States, Alys's work has recently been much more visible. His Dia exhibition coincides with his first large-scale U.S. museum survey, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and follows by several months his show at David Zwirner in New York, his first solo with the gallery.

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Alys's "Fabiola," at the Hispanic Society, features almost 300 paintings of a 4th-century female Christian saint (d. 399 A.D.), based on a now vanished late 19th-century prototype by the French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner. The twist here is that none of the paintings were made by Alys, although he has long worked in the medium. Instead, they were accomplished over the last few decades by sundry amateurs, unknowns and religious devotees of varying talents, ranging from considerable to meager, working in diverse places, styles and eras. While some of the works have signatures or attributions, many others are anonymous. (A checklist provides what little information is available.) In true Dia fashion, Alys's exhibition is up for 8 months; having opened Sept. 20, 2007, it runs through Apr. 26.

Alys has gradually acquired this collection of depictions of St. Fabiola during his global travels--at flea markets, from street vendors or through private dealers and friends who were on the lookout. And he is known for his travels. Born (in 1959) and raised in Belgium, Alys was studying architectural history in Venice when, in 1986, he temporarily relocated to Mexico to assist on a project dealing with aqueducts, as an alternative to serving in the military in his home country. When his civil service ended, Alys remained in Mexico City. He also jettisoned architecture to begin work as an artist, without formal training or a substantial support system.

Central to much of Alys's work is an engagement with travel per se, with moving through time and space rather than adhering to a fixed vantage point. In one of his acclaimed "paseos," or strolls (which are often documented), he walked through a gritty, working-class neighborhood in Sao Paulo toting a punctured can of paint that left a thin blue trail on the streets, a visible record of his ephemeral presence (The Leak, 1995). For another, he spent seven days walking the streets of Copenhagen, each day under the influence of a different drug (Narcotourism, 1996). Rather than walking through nature, in the manner of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Alys devises urban passages that propel him through different cultural and historical milieus; through stark class and political differences; toward, and not away from, others. Moreover, while they convey a contemporary sense of rootlessness and drift, they equally imply a radical openness to the surroundings, wherever and whatever these might be.

While traveling early in his career, Alys began to notice paintings (and occasionally other artworks and objects) depicting St. Fabiola, and he commenced researching and collecting them. In almost all the works, the figure's appearance and pose are strikingly similar. You see the same beautiful young woman, in profile, wearing a red cloak with a hood drawn up; pensively, she gazes slightly upward. This oft-repeated image (and there are probably thousands of Fabiola paintings rattling around, constituting a Fabiola movement or subgenre operating entirely outside the art world) is not copied after a particularly renowned masterpiece, nor is it a portrait of a particularly famous saint. The story goes that Fabiola, born to a wealthy Roman family, was married to an abusive husband. She left him and took up with another man before her husband's death, which was allowable under Roman law but strictly prohibited by the Church. When her lover died, Fabiola underwent penitence, pledged herself to the Church and her wealth to the poor, and was eventually welcomed back into the fold as a model of virtue and humility.

Wealth, domestic violence, rebellion, risk, self-sacrifice and altruism could be the elements in a story for the ages (or the plot line in a soap opera, for that matter), but Fabiola was pretty much forgotten until a melodramatic 1854 novel by the British prelate Cardinal Wiseman rescued her from obscurity, turned her into a Victorian-era heroine and helped make her something of a cult figure. Henner painted the definitive version of Fabiola in 1885; that painting subsequently disappeared, though not before inspiring several copies. In a collective example of postmodern art-making, sans theory, the earnest painters in Alys's collection produced copies of copies based on a 19th-century French/British, image/text hybrid, a fictionalization of an early Christian woman from Rome.

Alys wanted to present his "Fabiola" installation not in a sleek and immaculate contemporary space, but in a museum setting heavy with history, and in the Hispanic Society he found the perfect fit. The museum, in an imposing and ornate Beaux-Arts building, owns a large collection of paintings, sculptures, objects and textiles from Spain, Portugal and Latin America, including masterworks by Goya, El Greco and Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. Alys chose galleries paneled in dark wood that are normally reserved for 19th-century paintings, which makes sense conceptually, in that latter-day copies of a lost 19th-century original are returned, in a certain way, to their origins.

You enter the hushed, serious galleries to discover a crazy hodgepodge of Fabiolas on the walls, as if a deranged person had been set loose to decorate the space with the object of his or her obsession: big Fabiolas meticulously rendered in oil on canvas; flaking Fabiolas on wood panels; small Fabiola cameos; a Fabiola made of colored coffee beans and seeds; a Fabiola in needlepoint; a Fabiola hand-painted on a plate; Fabiolas presumably made in big cities by artists hunched in front of easels and Fabiolas made in dusty little villages. Styles and genres abound, from academic realism to caricature, folk art and photorealism. It appears that just about everything that has gone on before, in terms of art history, is still going on in this vast community of painters operating simultaneously not in the art world but in the wider world.

Fabiola has proliferated wildly and exponentially, like an analog version of a computer virus, and the question is, why? Maybe it's the simplicity of her pose: Fabiola alone against a dark background uncluttered by anything tricky or confusing and without any indication of a specific place. She could be anywhere, in any country or era, and therefore she is a flexible subject. But perhaps there is something else about this figure, something mysterious and indefinable, that has inspired generations of artists and Sunday painters to offer their own versions of her, as if through a strange, hypnotic pull. Maybe it is her timeless beauty, her look of strength mixed with vulnerability, the fact that she's alone but appealing to something or someone. Maybe she has something that they'd like to have, calm wisdom in the midst of sorrow and suffering. Maybe she is an excellent friend, known for patience and compassion, or a bittersweet reminder of what is was like to be young, or a surrogate lover. Maybe her quiet eroticism is appealing to some, and her independence to others. Maybe they are drawn to the way she's clearly visible, but also partly concealed. Maybe they see her as a cross between a saint and a celebrity, say a movie star on a poster. Maybe they just like her name.

The more time you spend in Alys's exhibition, the more these unanswerable questions arise, and the more this savvy installation dealing with history and modernity, originals and copies, acclaimed artists and outsiders, seems chock full of raw and conflicted humanity. Who were, or are, these obscure painters and why have they painted Fabiola? Setting out to depict a saint, Francis Huys (whoever that is, and a Google search turns up nothing valuable), in an undated painting, made Fabiola's crimson cloak especially vivid and bright and provided her with matching lipstick: she's color-coordinated, resembling a 1940s movie star headed to some gala event. In a 1947 painting by Mahssene (here a Google search only turns up an area in Algeria), Fabiola is more defiant and angry than usual; she's still calm but, you guess, inwardly seething. An anonymous and undated encaustic painting makes it seem that Fabiola is enveloped in mist, and she also appears younger and more innocent than usual, almost a child. Elsewhere, Fabiola puts on some weight, grows older, has darker hair, takes on non-European facial features, is very somber or surprisingly whimsical. You get the feeling that, while artists have tried to stick to the prototype, they've always added something of themselves: their homes, their histories, their sadness and desire. As she travels and travels, becoming, in effect, a nomadic figure at loose in the world, Fabiola picks up traces and hints of every life that she touches.

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Even at their most poetic, evocative and occasionally humorous, Alys's projects often have a sharp note of cultural and political challenge, and that's certainly the case here. This exhibition temporarily opens the museum to artists who labored in obscurity and impassioned amateurs who normally wouldn't have a prayer of making it into an elite institution, and as such it is a remarkably democratic and egalitarian enterprise. This is something Alys has previously explored. Beginning in 1993, he commissioned Mexican sign painters to make large versions of his small paintings, which scrambled the distinction between artist and artisan. These sign painters used Alys's works as models but were encouraged to incorporate their own variations and innovations; Alys, in turn, made paintings in response to theirs. With the Fabiolas, one can likewise forget about timeless, precious and transcendent works of art, meticulously cared for by restorers. Many of the examples feature peeling paint, stains, puncture marks and scrapes, and no attempt has been made to tidy them. They are roughed up, marred by real-world encounters; they evoke the wear and tear of actual lives perhaps spent in political upheaval and economic duress.

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Then there is the whole business about collecting art and temporarily installing that collection in a museum. In a time when moneyed collectors are competing for the pricey works of hot artists (like Alys himself) or speculatively loading up on works by promising youngsters, Alys has been taking a completely different approach, casually procuring paintings by unknown artists for a pittance. His acquisitions (on their own) are virtually worthless; quite a number are in rotten condition and they all have the same subject matter (though their unintended "seriality" here looks like artistic intent). On one level, his collection is an ironic send-up of art-world politics, a gleeful subversion of hedge-fund managers cum collectors shelling out big bucks for original artworks that bring prestige and skyrocketing value. As the art world scrambles to Miami, London, New York and Basel clamoring for new wares, Alys ambles to a street market in Tijuana or an antiques shop in Antwerp to search for yet another battered Fabiola to add to his peculiar collection.

Another way of approaching the Fabiolas is as a gigantic and collective rehearsal. Everyone who's made one is practicing and practicing, trying to achieve the imagined power and majesty of the long-lost original. This is prime territory for Alys, because he's long been more interested in rehearsal, repetition, collaboration, recycling, impermanence and constant change than in fixity and finish.

Alys's impressive exhibition at the Hammer Museum, organized by Russell Ferguson, focuses on the crucial role rehearsal plays in his work, both obviously and subtly. There are large works in "Politics of Rehearsal": installations, video projections on walls, long tables full of copious documentation. There are also small, deceptively modest works that have a large impact: Deja Vu (1996), for instance. This involves a 10 1/4-by-12 5/8-inch painting hung near the entrance to the exhibition, depicting a thoughtful man in a gray suit walking down a street with his hands in his pockets (he's an anonymous Everyman, yet you can't help but think of the thoughtful Alys also walking down streets in far-flung cities). The figure is at once intensely private withdrawn or even lost in contemplation--and very public, as he navigates the urban neighborhood. As often happens in Alys's captivating drawings and paintings, an utterly banal scene seems haunted by immensities, mysteries and complexities. After viewing this painting, you move through the exhibition, encountering Alys's diverse works, only to discover the same painting, or rather an exact copy of it, near the end. The effect is startling. The first painting is a rehearsal for the second, or vice versa. Beginning and end get conflated, and both works shed their status as autonomous paintings to become part of a searching process.

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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.

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.

It is useful to consider Song for Lupita in relation to a very different work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), presented here as video documentation with accompanying materials. Five hundred volunteers in a curving line slowly ascend a huge sand dune, very much like a mountain, on the outskirts of Lima, while digging with shovels. Bit by bit, they succeed in moving the "mountain," if only a few inches of it. Of course, wind and weather will eventually erase their achievement. The mountain will increase in size, or shift, or erode. Whatever was accomplished by all that digging will prove ephemeral. Yet it is the unlikely, impassioned and oddly elegant process of it all, artfully captured in the video and photographs, that makes this work so profound and engaging. Seen from afar, these 500 people form a bright line in a vast and desolate landscape--akin to the arc the water makes in Song for Lupita, or to the path Alys takes on one of his urban walks. Their collective land art project also has political implications: banding together, people really can effect change. They can oppose environmental degradation, resist takeovers of their homes and land, stop a war or bring down a repressive government.

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While this work evokes such struggles, it also has an amplitude reaching deep into history. The title refers to Matthew 17:19-21, in which Jesus proclaims to his disciples, "I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." The mountain-moving action occurs in a barren area of sand and rock suggestive of a biblical landscape. This, incidentally, is one of many instances when Alys uses religious tropes, although his art is hardly religious per se. Wandering pilgrims, ritual processions, iconic images and the occasional miracle--not to mention St. Fabiola--all factor into his work.

Alys's 1995 walk with a paint can through Sao Paulo was probably not witnessed by many people, but The Leak later assumed legendary status. While few of his works function as explicit narratives, many have a fablelike quality: they evoke memorable episodes that happened once, far away, but whose reputations spread widely through both documentation and word of mouth. Making his own legends, while living in an adopted country where legends are essential, is perhaps one key to Alys. The time when he moved a mountain or sent a peacock to Venice. The time when he bought a revolver in a shop in Mexico City, loaded it, walked into the city with the loaded gun dangling from his hand, and kept walking until the police eventually grabbed him; he reenacted the event the next day with the cooperation of the police (Reenactments, 2000). The time when he was invited to participate in an exhibition occurring in both Tijuana and San Diego, two cities separated by a fraught and controversial border that is very much in the news these days. He arranged a five-week trip by airplane taking him from Tijuana to Mexico City, Panama City, Santiago, Auckland, Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Anchorage, Vancouver and Los Angeles, ending in San Diego just a hundred yards or so from where he began, but without ever actually crossing the U.S. border (The Loop, 1997). The time when he walked through Stockholm wearing a blue sweater that unraveled in a single strand across the whole of the city (the loser/the winner, 1998). The time when he walked the so-called "Green Line," the pre-1967 border between West and East Jerusalem, while dripping green paint from a can.

This work, "SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC" (2004-05), was the centerpiece of Alys's recent exhibition at Zwirner, and it is linked to his walk in Sao Paulo. Once again he walked through a foreign city, holding a dripping can of paint, but in this case political issues are much more frank and pronounced. An excellent film of the action by Julien Devaux (who has often collaborated with the artist) shows Alys walking past Israeli army checkpoints, trailing his green paint. He walks past and among Palestinian kids, and past Orthodox Jews waiting for a bus. He walks across thoroughfares and down side streets, in and out of Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods, around corners, up a rocky hill where he meets some goats and past the wall of the Old City. His wavering green line is very playful, like a child's doodle writ large, but you always suspect that he'll be arrested forthwith, especially when he passes soldiers with guns. Alys says nothing, doesn't stop to chat on the few occasions when people (mostly children) acknowledge him, and offers no explanation. But his green line is supremely evocative. It makes visible the implicit border that has long divided this city, and its color echoes the original armistice boundary drawn in green pencil on a map by the Israeli commander Moshe Dayan in 1948.

This work has nothing to do with making statements; instead, it poses questions. What if the fierce borders that separate people, nations and cultures were as whimsical, silly and easily traversed as this one? What if there were a free exchange across these borders, and they simply wore away over time? The film of Alys's walk was later shown to a number of people, including a Palestinian anthropologist, an Israeli member of the Knesset, an Israeli activist and a Palestinian journalist, and their insightful commentaries, which you hear as you watch Alys walking, become an essential part of the work. At Zwirner the film was exhibited with an assortment of "gun projectors" on the floor, mixed-medium rifles with attached reels---as if to show films--as well as notes, drawings, photographs and maps that fleshed out the work's background and trajectory. Tackling one of the most vexing conflicts in a way that is at once provocative and humble is exactly the kind of thing at which Alys excels.

All three of these exhibitions underscore the considerable wisdom that suffuses Alys's adventurous work. Coursing through everything, no matter how seemingly mundane and inconsequential, is a large-minded awareness that things rise and fall, appear and disappear, and that the most robust plans, either of individuals or nations, are always subject to accident and flux.

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"Fabiola," organized by the Dia Art Foundation, is currently on view at the Hispanic Society of America, New York [Sept. 20, 2007-Apr. 6, 2008]. "Politics of Rehearsal" opened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles [Sept. 30, 2007-Feb. 10, 2008], and travels to the Honolulu Academy of Arts [January-April 2009] and the Museo de Arte del Banco de la Republica, Bogota [April-July 2009]. "SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC" appeared at David Zwirner, New York [Feb. 15-Apt 6, 2007].

Gregory Volk is a New York-based art critic and curator He is also associate professor at the School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.

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