A story of deception
Modern 15 June – 5 September 2010
www.tate.org.uk

An exhibition by Francis Alys at Tate Modern takes place during summer 2010 as the experimental artist showcases his work from over the last twenty years. Including painting, installations, animation, sculpture and video art, this exhibition is set to explore the nature of this politically motivated conceptual artist.


guards
Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Artangel
Guards 2004/05

Alÿs’s work starts with a simple action, either by him or others, which is then documented in a range of media. Alÿs explores subjects such as modernising programmes in Latin America and border zones in areas of conflict, often asking about the relevance of poetic acts in politicised situations. He has used video projection and film but also spreads his ideas through postcards. Painting and drawing remain central to his work too.

ambulantes_1992
Francis Alÿs
Amulantes II (Pushing and Pulling) – detail 1992 – 2003

His presence is unobtrusive, but it always leaves a trace: in The Swap (1995), Alÿs traded objects with commuters in the Metro in Mexico City, where he has lived since 1986. He began with a pair of sunglasses, and ended up with a small wooden dog. Yet the documented trades were not the end of the process: “The protagonist leaves the last object,” Alÿs wrote in his documentation of the event – and who knows what other swaps were triggered by its presence in the eco-system of the Metro?

the embassador
Francis Alÿs
The Ambassador 2001

The strength of the idea is its simplicity: Alÿs is a kind of story-teller, and his stories have a fabular quality that makes you want to tell other people about them. “If the story is right, if it hits a nerve, it can propagate like a rumour,” he has said. “Stories can pass through a place without the need to settle. They have a life of their own.”

nightwatch_04
Francis Alÿs
The Nightwatch (still) 2004

On occasion, he has co-opted animals to act as his familiars. He released a fox in the National Gallery (The Nightwatch, 2004) and a mouse in the largest collection of contemporary art in Mexico (The Mouse, 2001). In a work called The Ambassador, he sent a peacock to represent him at the Venice Biennale of 2001. Given Alÿs’s apparent desire to produce work which acquires its meaning through engaging other people, the gesture might be seen as a way of subverting the Romantic cult of the artist as sole begetter of the artistic enterprise. Yet it has more specific meaning, as well: Lynne Cooke says that “Alÿs’s witty lampoon” contains “sly echoes of Aubrey Beardsley and other late nineteenth-century aesthetes, dandies who not only prized this exotic animal, but cultivated a mode of public posturing as integral to a wilfully decadent lifestyle they considered an art form in its own right”.

greenline_2004
Francis Alÿs
Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic (The Green Line) 2004

Other works are less susceptible to interpretation. When Alÿs walked around Jerusalem, trailing a ribbon of green paint behind him, he was following the so-called Green Line, which was drawn on a map by the Israeli Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan at the end of the Arab- Israeli war of 1948–1949. It marked the respective positions of Israeli and Arab forces in the final ceasefire, and it has served as a highly permeable boundary between Israel and the West Bank ever since. The piece was called The Green Line (2004), and it fell into a group of works with a longer title that summed up one aspect of Alÿs’s philosophy: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic (2005). “Can an artistic intervention truly bring about an unforeseen way of thinking, or is it more a matter of creating a sensation of ‘meaninglessness’, one that shows the absurdity of the situation?” Alÿs has asked. “And can an absurd act provoke a transgression that makes you abandon the standard assumptions about the sources of conflict? Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place?”

In 2003 Alÿs went to Patagonia to film the ostrich-like birds called nandus. “The impetus for that project was a story that the Tehuelche people used to hunt nandus by walking after them for weeks, until the birds collapsed from exhaustion,” writes Russell Ferguson. In the end, the artist “felt that his film stayed too close to a conventional nature documentary”, and instead, he made a work called A Story of Deception (2003–2006), which consisted of images of the shimmering heat haze that lay at the end of the dusty roads along which he was travelling. It was, he said, the “perfect image of fuite en avant, of fleeing forwards”, constantly in pursuit of something that lies out of reach.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *