reviews FranCIs aLys
Francis alys:
Politics oF rehearsal
Hammer museum, Los angeLes
29 september – 10 February
While a Mexican band rife with saxophones practises a pendulous danzón, Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997), the artist pushes through the streets of Mexico
a lonely red VW Beetle chugs up a hill along a dirt road. When the band City a large block of ice that slowly melts through the daylong duration
falters in their routine, the Beetle rolls down the hill and back up the hill of the performance, until it’s small enough to be kicked around by the
behind it. When the band restarts, so does the Beetle, and so on for a artists scuffed Converse sneakers, finally resolving itself into a small, rapidly
counter-intuitively gripping half-hour video by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. evaporating puddle. The Marxism of ‘praxis’ collides with the inherent
This iconic piece, titled Rehearsal 1 (1999–2004), features in the Mexico temporality of a heavy block of ice, both dissolving upon contact.
City-based artist’s first major US museum retrospective and touches upon While politics proffers answers to questions, poetics attempts to ask
many of the salient themes of Alÿs’s oeuvre. Consisting of around a half- them. One is a closing down, while the other is an opening up. When Alÿs’s
dozen major video pieces, more than twice as many tables of notes, plans hopeless tasks of unproductive labour are performed in the streets, the
and sketches, and a handful of paintings, drawings and animations, the understated political element of the context comes across as a subtle stroke,
exhibition labours under the title Politics of Rehearsal, a politics that’s always but when a street in Mexico City becomes the Green Line representing a
practising, more interested in the poetic repetitions of unproductive labour border through Jerusalem, the piece loses its subtlety.
than in any efficient production of goods or services. In When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), 500 volunteers march
Though containing a certain delicate grace, the paintings, drawings over a giant sand dune a shovelful at a time, effectively moving it about
and animations are slight both in their presence in the exhibition and in two inches. Like Rehearsal I, When Faith Moves Mountains makes both
Alÿs’s overall practice. The tables, heavy with documents, come off as a a beautiful metaphor and a deadpan joke about a raft of salient issues
tad too didactic and are best viewed as the relics and sketchbooks of the (from the deromanticising of Land Art to the productivity of labour) in a
much more interesting videowork. simple, elegant way. The tension, and therefore the power, of Alÿs’s work is
Throughout his career, Alÿs has performed a variety of acts of between the poetic and the political. But when the political overtakes the
conceptual absurdism in social contexts, the most famous being his paseos poetic, the tension releases and his subtle art threatens to become simply
(or strolls) throughout cities all over the world that are part Baudelairean another obvious gesture. Andrew Berardini
flânerie and part Situationist dérive. In the paseo on view at the Hammer,
When Faith Moves
Mountains (still), 2002,
in collaboration with
Cuauhtémoc medina and
rafael ortega, 16mm film
transferred to DVD,
34 min. Courtesy David
Zwirner, new york
artreview 132
December_REVIEWS.indd 132 5/11/07 12:25:59
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