Snapshots From an Indefinite Vacation

By Patrick, Martin

How might an artist who tends to wander and shift his attention to altogether different material with great regularity situate his practice; that is to say, how can the artist prevent his work from almost floating away into an eclectic and potentially inconsequential series of gestures? This question becomes especially relevant when critically examining the work of Francis Als, Belgian- born artist and resident of Mexico City for nearly twenty years. In large pan, photography ends up being a consistent tool for Als to “ground” his work in documentary records that offer a concrete, unsparing verisimilitude. If his gaze occasionally wavers, the camera’s relative stasis helps confirm the suspicion that there is some great internal rudder guiding this peripatetic yet often exactingly precise twenty-first century artist during his near- constant travels.

I would prefer as a point of entry into this particular essay- yet another attempt to take on this prolific and perplexing artist- to discuss a number of Als’s projects that are directly associated with the use of photography and photographic imagery. Manifold contradictions emerge from Als’s photographic works, such as his reliance on the clear recording of otherwise ephemeral incidents. These actions and works often consist of absurdist, almost dreamlike vignettes, such as in “The Paradox of Praxis” (1997) in which the artist pushed a melting block of ice along the street to exemplify the statement, “Sometimes to make something is really to make nothing; and paradoxically, sometimes to make nothing is to make something.”

It is of course rather ironic to analyze the medium-specific attributes of an artist who is a self-professed “hybrid.” In turn, this would be directly related to the fact that Als was (again in his words) “not trained in one medium…. I’m not somebody who’s obsessed by any specific medium.” Als notes:

I do use the camera quite a bit whether it’s to take photos or to do videos. And often the camera becomes a kind of filter with a situation I feel foreign to. Like when I’m … a kind of outsider the camera offers a kind of … protection. A mix of protection and justification … of my presence in that place at that moment.2

Als is well known for his incorporation of the “walk” and the Baudelairean flaneur is often cited in any extensive discussion of his practice. Als is generally an urban walker, rooted in the long history of artist-walkers such as Stanley Brouwn, Hamish Fulton, and Richard Long. Moreover, one could assert that Als is more intent on recording details of the social landscape than the actual landscape itself in the traditional sense. The importance of the focused stroll has been integral to so many artists that it could serve to a certain degree both as “the machine that makes the art” (to paraphrase Sol LeWitt) and as a mechanism leading to unanticipated discoveries. As writer Rebecca Solnit has commented,

The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don’t know you are looking for, and you don’t know a place until it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.3

Als originally received his professional training as an architect, and his practice, even today, seems to be haunted by references, however oblique, to architecture. His works often begin from a few lines drawn onto a map, notes jotted on paper, structures conjured out of not much at all. The working methods favored by Als run almost entirely counter to certain assumptions about architecture, and this can be stated via a number of opposing terms: inside/outside, stationary/ambulatory, monumental/ephemeral. We might recall Gordon Matta-Clark here, another widely traveled artist whose antipathy toward traditional notions of architecture helped spawn his iconoclastic brand of practice, literally cutting and carving away at the faade of urbanisai. In similar fashion to Matta- Clark, Alys uses photodocumentation to record the results of actions and sitespecific projects, and such residual information “becomes” the piece for most viewers.

This was made abundantly clear in his piece “When Faith Moves Mountains,” which Alys organized on April 11, 2002, near Lima, Peru- a work that on one level was simply a grand choreographic feat: aligning 500 volunteers (many of them university students) along a sand dune, each with a shovel, each contributing their own physical effort to “move” the very terrain beneath their feet. A 1600-foot- long dune being shifted about 4 inches enacts another notion favored by Alys, that of expending the maximal effort for minimal result.

The artist writes: “The dune moved: this wasn’t a literary fiction; it really happened. It doesn’t matter how far it moved, and in truth only an infinitesimal displacement occurred-but it would have taken the wind years to move an equivalent amount of sand. So it’s a tiny miracle.” If the premise of the piece itself verges on the fantastical, as Alys states, the fact that it was actually carried out is what counts, especially as the artist considers it to be moreover a “social allegory…. This story is not validated by any physical trace or addition to the landscape.” In addition, Alys sought a kind of rebuttal to what he regarded respectively as the social insularity and aesthetic monumentality of the work of Long and Robert Smithson. He refers to this piece as “land an for the landless,” because the dunes of coastal Peru are also home to impoverished shantytowns.4

A short video offers glimpses of this project as it coalesced as well as retrospective comments from several volunteers. The arc created across the surface of the dune by the volunteers clad in white shirts makes for a powerful still image, which graced the cover of Artfomm in Summer 2002. In the video, the same figures are seen through a haze of sand and wind via helicopter, and in many shots the lens is coated by assorted bits and pieces of gunk and detritus, so we never see an entirely clear image, devoid of imperfections. This funky, offhand quality is wholly integral to the statement being made. Little by litde, small gestures count, at the very least symbolically; and sometimes the symbolic impact is the most significant when the gestures are toward some great, crazy, unforeseen, and perhaps ridiculous outcome. As one of the volunteer participants recounts, “So in fact we’ve got other projects like drink the Atlantic, melt the Antarctic, paint the sky, that kind of thing … simple stuff.”‘

In his digital project The Tite/”(1999), which Alys created for the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, we glimpse a silhouette of a figure emerging from a dark field, revealed to us by a bright window-like space inset into the darkness. The shadowy figure walks away from us, casts glances both left and right, raises “his” left arm into the virtual opening, then appears to leap downward, thus out from the window, into the screen and away from our view. The portion of the project just described is a downloadable Screensaver (itself now an anachronism); the project also incorporates a text presented as a Flash animation, to be clicked through, scrolling upward like a film strip. The text, co-authored with critic Cuauhtemoc Medina, a frequent commentator on Alys’s work, cites a wide range of texts, from Filippo Brunelleschi to Prince (yes, that one), discussing the format and history of the perspectival window.

Alys can be understood as participating within a now long- standing tradition of ephemeral artistic activities becoming transformed into evocative photographic documents. He has commented: “The initial concept for a project often emerges during a walk. As an artist, my position is akin to that of a passer-by [as I am] constantly trying to situate myself in a moving environment.”6 Alys’s approach is often characterized by this notion of perpetual movement such that when he makes more straightforward “classical” photographs, they become quieter, more diffuse and subtle in their impact.

In the series “Sleepers” (1997-2002) and “Ambulantes” (1992- 2002), the images are presented in the form of a slide show. This technique has been used to great effect in the history of contemporary art, from the work of Marcel Broodthaers to that of Nan Goldin, and it also lends an atmosphere of everyday pedanticism: this is what I saw, you should have been there, oh this was so interesting, this was the roll I shot in…. This cyclical array of frozen vignettes imitates some larger narrative sweep, and carries the viewer along. “Sleepers” offers views of both human and canine inhabitants of Mexico City sleeping on the street. Here, a couple sways nearly to the point of toppling off a bench; there, two dogs huddling together form an entirely relaxed and supportive duo. “Ambulantes” are relatively straightforward documents of rambling denizens of the city along with their pushcarts, carriages, wagons, and dollies. The ramshackle vehicles are stacked, piled, and wrapped with all manner of aesthetically alluring paraphernalia.

Alys arrived in Mexico in 1987 to both work as a public servant after the devasting earthquake and to avoid military service in his home country. Much has been made of Alys’s living in Mexico as an “out\sider,” and he himself has made light of this in a number of works, including labeling himself “turista.” But now with the extended period of time he has lived in the city, he as an observer can ironically conduct the steady, prolonged investigation of a place. This has become the case with the long series of walks undertaken by the artist, a process he has subsequently taken “on the road” to London, So Paulo, Copenhagen, and New York.

As the premise of “Narcoturismo (Narcotourism)” (1996) Alys stated: “I will walk in the city [Copenhagen] over the course of seven days, under the influence of a different drug each day. My trip will be recorded through photographs, notes, and any other media that become relevant.” Thus, the experiment conducted by the artist consisted of imbibing the following substances May 5-11 of that year: spirits, hashish, speed, heroin, cocaine, valium, and ecstasy. The process of creating the work involved preserving (ostensibly) a state of intoxication for fourteen hours each day. Alys later displayed a page of text, including diaristic accounts of his experiences (“Awareness of a change of state, but not followed by a visual echo. Auditory acuity enhanced. Appetite gone. Smoking diminished. At night, nausea and thirst.”) and a photographic image of the artist’s walking feet clad in Converse high-tops was used to represent the piece.7

“Narcotourismo” appears as but one installment in Alys’s ongoing investigation of various altered states: travel, intoxication, (potentially) violent behavior, and sleep. He has spoken of using the city as a “laboratory,” and certainly in “Narcotourismo” he himself becomes a test subject himself. Alys walks, but he also prowls. Implicit violence has often served as a key theme in his works, most infamously in his Rtmactmenls (2000) video, wherein he walked the streets holding a gun in plain sight until his arrest by the police. He then “explained” the reasoning behind this piece, and staged a recnactment with the complicity of the police.

In the video MightwaUh (2004), the wide-angle lens of a surveillance camera records a fox-as a stand-in for the artist- roving around amidst the Tudor portraits and sculpture busts of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The intruder seems ill at ease in the galleries as he paces the perimeter-a postmodern alliance of nature and culture, yet far more quietly oblique than the bombastic neo-shamanism of Joseph Beuys and his coyote some thirty years before. The 20-minute piece is filled with edited “highlights” but remains staggeringly dull, as it should be. One might recall other videos of recent vintage characterized by their “slowness,” such as Bruce Nauman’s Mapping Ou Studio 1: Fat Chance John Cage (2001), in which a camera records the meager happenings in his studio at night, and the mice and insects shuttling by are the sole noteworthy events.

Mightwatch is calm, yet, its bookend to an extent is the far more agitated short video, El Gringo (2003) in which the viewer follows the camera-eye as it leads into a rural Mexican locale. The camera lingers on some cacti and advances along a rough path. A few dogs approach and soon begin circling and barking loudly. Almost immediately, the dogs are out of control, baring their teeth and snarling while continuing to bark. The camera/protagonist Tails to the ground, and it/we are left there, uneasily confronted by dogs still staring curiously but beginning to direct their attention elsewhere.

Alys tends to be most interested by working in a mode of collaboration, deriving an energy or friction from this approach. Even when Alys can be viewed as the “author,” his works often incorporate the use of dialogue, mediation, volunteers, research, and travels such that his claim to authorship of the work is partially relinquished, an altogether appropriate stance for the current moment.

In a recent essay on Alys, curator Kitty Scott states that “[Alys] described his practice as ‘nearly writing’ and referred to his sketches with fragments of text as ‘written drawings.”" Alys in his works brings an experiential dimension of life to bear upon these notes and fragments. In his gallery installations, Alys often exhibits some of the materials that led to the completed piece, often on tabletops, loosely under glass beneath hanging metal lamps- a kind of restaging of the studio, or as an historian Leo Steinberg famously described the methodology of Robert Rauschenberg, the “Flatbed Picture Plane.” Steinberg wrote:

The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards- any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed- whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.9

Furthermore, Alys, who is less a multimedia artist than an artist who is simply antagonistic toward any idea of media specificity and imposed limits, has defended his work as a collection of mere notes and sketches and ultimately a narrative that is accessible regardless of its original form of dissemination: “The structure is similar to that of a narration or a story, something you can take with you, something you can steal and tell and tell again and again…. One of the few criteria I apply when I am working on a script is exactly that, to simplify its structure until it becomes just a story, a joke, a fable.”10 Alys has directly focused upon the amateurish, accessible, and populist aspects of work conducted in the public space.

Alys’s most recent exhibition, “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic can become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political can become Poetic,” or more succinctly, “The Green Line,” was on view at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City in early 2007. The focal point of the project was a video recording of Alys reenacting a work from 1995 called “The Leak,” in which the artist walked along dripping a thin trail of blue paint from a can. The original work, however, was a kind of meta-commentary on painting and individual identity, stylistic tropes, etc., that could be read as “poetic” only to a degree.

By fast-forwarding almost ten years and exhibiting this now- green leak incorporating historical narratives, the piece is suffused with different connotations and is allowed to transform once again. The historical material in question is the drawing/ carving up of Palestine in 1949 via a green line created by General Moshe Dayan’s pencil. Beyond Alys’s orchestrated spilling of 58 liters of paint over the course of a 24-kilometer walk, he later (in 2005) interviewed a number of activists, intellectuals, and officials as they were shown excerpts from the documentary footage. This in turn elicited a variety of compelling responses, such as that of British critic Jean Fisher: “I don’t think that the poetic gesture is ever where you think it’s going to be. Don’t you agree? You can make a gesture, but how can you know if it’s going to have a poetic resonance or not?” or that of anthropologist Rima Hamami: “Your pose here is exactly like a Palestinian…. What’s so wonderful is that you’re doing this sort of mini-terrorist act as you are doing it. It’s like an everyday form of resistance that Palestinians wouldn’t have thought about…. Only a conceptual artist-person would come up with this kind of thing.”"

Throughout the main room of the gallery were strewn anthropomorphic sculptures of handmade “guns.” As they had been fabricated roughly, with film canisters, reels, and strips incorporated into their wood, wire, and metal frameworks, they had an edgy, provisional quality recalling Etienne-Jules Marey’s repeating “rifle” camera used to create chronophotographs dissecting the movement of birds in flight in 1882. On one wall of the exhibition installation hung a small, approximately 5- ? 7-inch painting, replicating therefore the scale of a snapshot and iconography borrowed and reworked from Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich: a lone (gun)man stares off into the sea, a rifle propped upon his shoulder. The image has the murky, indistinct, and somewhat amateurish quality shared by many of Alys’s painted works.

“The Green Line” was not a commissioned piece but a work entirely generated and motivated by Alys himself. Alys equally used the video as a setting for the interviews he conducted in a manner emulating that of a working journalist. This approach, in turn, replaced the individual voice by a more collective expression, especially when compared to the earlier version of the piece. Alys has continued to pursue unusual and demanding projects that are frequently documented via photography and video, and by virtue of this ongoing use of photomedia, something different emerges. In this process, all his initially nebulous notes, sketches, and drawings leave in their wake a newfound crystalline rendering. Without the resultant photographs, Alys would remain solely a spinner of tales rather than a conjurer of images of lasting and powerful significance.13

I entered the art field by accident: a coincidence of geographical, personal, and legal matters resulted in indefinite vacations which, through a blend of boredom, curiosity, and vanity, led to my present profession.

– Francis Als, interview in Flash Art, 2000(1)

NOTES 1. Gianni Romano, “Francis Alys: Serais and Gallery Watts,” Flash fut, March-April 2000. 72. 2. “Franics Alys in conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist,” Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image. V. 1 (DVD). New Talk New Museuam of Contemporay Art, 2004. J. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Man York: Pengiun, 2000), 11. 4. “A Thousand Words: Francis Alys Talks About What Faith Mo\ats Mountains, ” Artforum (Summer 2002), 147. S. Video (DVD), included with, Alys and Cuauhtmoc Medina, When Faith Moves Mountains (Madrid: Turner, 2005). 6. Francis Alys, Walks/Paseos (Maxico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1997), 15. 7. Paul Sdamal Ecuasy: In and About Altered Stales (Cambridge, Massschusetts: MIT Press, 2005), 50- 51. 8. Kitty Scott, “Portrait Francis Alys, ” Parkett 69 (2003), 24. 9. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” in Other Criteria: Confrontation with Twentieth-Century An (New York Oxford University Press, 1975), 84. 10. David Tornes. “Francis Alys, Just Walking the Dog,” Art Press 263, 18-23.11. Quotations are taken from the video component of Aly’s exhibition “The Green Line.” 12. I would like to extendf my speical thanks both to Alys for informally discussing his work on the occasion of the recent opening a David Zwirner and also to Bill Conger for his insignful comments on an earlier draft of this text.

MARTIN MJMCK is an art historian and critic of contemporary art. He currently teaches at Illinois State University in Normal.

Copyright Visual Studies Workshop, Inc. May/Jun 2007

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