After 30 Years in Mexico, a Belgian Artist Says We Should Stay Wary for the Long Haul — Including of So-Called “Progress”

Francis Alÿs is an urban wanderer who turns absurd performances into acts of resistance

A tall, thin man appears on the streets of Mexico City. Under a blazing sun he is moving a huge block of ice. At first he has to crouch low just to shove it forward; as the ice melts and shrinks, he switches to kicking it along. The block has no destination. It leaves wet trails on streets all over the city, and the trails dry almost at once. After more than nine hours, the ice is a puddle.

This was a 1997 performance by the artist Francis Alÿs, and the man pushing the ice was Alÿs himself. The nine hours were cut down to a video of nearly ten minutes, the camera trailing him past Mexico City's streets, cars, storefronts and passersby. Some people give him a long look; others glance away fast, pretending they saw nothing. Nobody steps up to interrupt him and ask what he is doing.

“In 1997 I had already lived in that neighborhood for more than ten years. The neighbors knew me, knew I was an artist, even if nobody knew what kind of art I made.”

Alÿs's first solo show in China opened recently at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. In an interview he looked back on the performance from twenty years ago: nine hours of “labor” that produced no artwork in the traditional sense — no painting, no sculpture — and even the prop he had prepared beforehand vanished.

The ice-pushing walk was called Paradox of Praxis I, and the subtitle spells the paradox out: Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing.

The paradox of human action seems to be the permanent theme of Alÿs's work. Sometimes the effort comes to nothing; sometimes the process itself is the point.

Another piece, Rehearsal I, is on view at the Shanghai Biennale, which opened the same month. In the half-hour video, Alÿs drives a red Beetle in a performance of “climbing.”

The hill is in Tijuana, Mexico. The soundtrack is a brass band: when the music quickens, the car accelerates uphill; when it slows, the car, halfway up, rolls back down. After failure upon failure, the car drops out of the frame altogether.

Engels described human society climbing in a straight line through five social formations. But in Latin America, has society really advanced? The question also answers the theme of this year's Shanghai Biennale, Proregress: progress in the narrow sense may be the largest illusion humans have.

Mexico City, That Belgian

Alÿs has lived in Mexico City for more than thirty years, and people still pick him out as a foreigner at a glance. “I'm too tall, too white, I look too much like an outsider” — even though he settled on that street before most of his neighbors did.

In 1985, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Mexico City. The next year Alÿs came to Mexico as a volunteer with a national relief corps; volunteer service counted against Belgium's military draft.

He had trained as an architect and an engineer. For his first two years in Mexico his main job was repairing the city's water supply, which the earthquake had wrecked. When his “service” ended, he decided to stay and become an artist.

The architect's change of career did not go smoothly at first. To pay his way, he painted other people's apartments and worked as a billboard painter.

“Young people often ask me now how to invent a style of their own. Thirty years ago that wasn't a question for me. There was no contemporary art in Mexico then; nobody knew what contemporary art was, myself included. That is a good thing for someone making work — nothing to worry about. Plenty of young people today have seen far more than I had, but too much information can get in the way,” Alÿs told QDaily.

The first work that amounted to anything was a homemade “toy dog” from 1991, built as simply as possible: a rectangular block with a magnet inside and four rubber wheels. For a stretch of time he took it out on a leash and walked it around the city every day, straight-faced, as though the errand mattered. The dog was called The Collector, and its collection was not the expensive things people buy at auction but the junk modern life throws away.

“This magnetic collector runs through the streets every day, and the metal it picks up soon covers its whole body. It keeps attracting until, one day, the collector is buried under its own spoils.” That is how Alÿs explains it in the nine-minute edit.

The dog's city walks did not in fact yield much. The magnet was weak, and the haul came to a few beer bottle caps — but the piece still made Alÿs's name in the international art world. Around the end of the Cold War, plenty of people met the same fate as those bottle caps: they became the waste of a modernity marching under the banners of “development,” “progress” and “globalization.”

That sits oddly against the values of the profession Alÿs had left. By the 1960s modernism ran architecture, and designers believed that well-planned, well-functioning space could shape a modern way of living. Alÿs went the other way.

“When I decided to leave architecture, my first impulse was not to add anything to this city but to look for what was already there — for the ‘residue’ the city has digested and left behind, or for the negative spaces, the gaps, the in-between zones.”

To Mexicans, this Belgian walking a fake dog was probably just a madman, and for a while Alÿs turned into one of the city's urban legends. In an interview he once described studying in Italy: he loved the culture and the daily texture of the place, but soon had enough of “the endless Italian discussion” — “pure word games, nothing built.” Compared with the vanity fairs of the established art scenes in Europe and the United States, Mexico City offered no haughty criticism and no bottomless interpretation, and ordinary people keeping their distance made it easier for him to live as a hermit.

Wandering as Political Resistance

Alÿs lives near the main downtown square, the Zócalo, or Plaza de la Constitución, and Mexico's colonial history is written into how that square changed. In ancient times it was sacred ground where the Mexica held their rituals. Spanish colonizers arrived in the sixteenth century, the temples came down, and a Catholic cathedral went up in their place. The “constitution” in the square's name is the Spanish constitution of 1812. The Metropolitan Cathedral (Catedral Metropolitana) on the north side is still the largest Catholic cathedral in Latin America.

The Zócalo is Mexico City's most important public space. Job seekers gather at the railings along its edge, each advertising a trade: fixing pipes, painting, unclogging drains. One day in 1994, Alÿs stood among them holding a sign that read Turista — tourist.

In 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect and the Mexican peso lost half its value almost immediately. People called the crisis the “Tequila Effect.” A presidential candidate was assassinated at a campaign event that year too.

In the middle of an economic and social crisis, what service do you buy when you hire a tourist? An outsider's confusion, an “advanced perspective” standing in for the experience of the developed West, or secondhand knowledge out of a guidebook?

Alÿs has also used street photography to show Mexican society.

Around 2000, for instance, he shot a series on street vendors, Ambulantes. Their rough carts carry loads out of all proportion to their bodies, stacked high and ready to topple. Alÿs called them a “circus” with no ringmaster: the city works as a place of exchange, and these ordinary people, doing their juggling act every day, are what make it interesting. Of course, being a stubborn and conservative folk theater, Mexico City has not only jugglers but also the officers standing by to clear the streets.

Around 2011 he photographed another series, on people sleeping rough and on stray dogs.

Next to these fairly plain street pictures, Alÿs's real force is in the modern fables he builds.

Between 2003 and 2006 he filmed a mirage in Patagonia, in southern Argentina. The camera pushes forward along the road; you can see the marvel ahead of you, and whether you walk fast or slow it stays visible and stays out of reach.

At the Rockbund show, Alÿs pinned a short text beside the piece explaining where it came from. The Tehuelche, the indigenous people of Patagonia, used to hunt the South American ostrich, the rhea, in a particular way: they walked behind it until it dropped from exhaustion. That method died out long ago.

But when what you are chasing is a mirage, who is the one who ends up exhausted?

Alÿs ties the fable to Argentina's corralito — the “little corral” — crisis of 2001. To stop money leaving the country, the government of the day limited how much cash residents could take out of the banks: 1,500 pesos a month from a current account.

The blueprint the government had drawn was itself a mirage; the promised growth never arrived; people were penned like cattle and could go nowhere. Alÿs called the film A Story of Deception, Patagonia.

He also spent ten years chasing tornadoes in Mexico, again and again. At the Rockbund show you can lie down to watch the footage he shot with a handheld camera.

Latin America's geography throws up weather that keeps giving Alÿs material, and Latin America's position on the margin of the world economy is the subject he wants people to notice: in these places where modernity failed, how are people supposed to live?

“Poetic Politics”

Alÿs is not alone in asking the question. Unfinished modernity is a theme across much Latin American art, and the political and social mess on the ground pushes artists to think it through.

In recent years that argument about whether progress is real has drawn attention on the international art market too. This September, for example, Art Basel extended its map to Argentina. At this Shanghai Biennale, the large number of Latin American artists brought a wide range of social and political subjects with them.

There has always been a political line buried in Alÿs's fables. Ten years ago he had a solo show at the David Zwirner gallery in New York: Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political, and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.

The theme of this year's Shanghai show is “Expenditure.” The curator, Yuko Hasegawa, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, said in an interview that the idea, taken from the French philosopher Georges Bataille, runs through everything Alÿs makes.

“In a globalized context of capitalism and convenient technology, excessive ‘non-productive expenditure’ matters to human activity as much as ‘productive expenditure’ does. That idea fits Alÿs's practice closely: the nerve to face social conditions as they are, to distrust what the eye reports, and to rethink what physical labor and spent time are for.”

In 2002, another Alÿs performance caused a stir. Outside Lima, the capital of Peru, he hired five hundred volunteers to shovel sand and, between them, try to move a dune. In the end the dune did move several feet — and the moved dune looked exactly like the one they started with.

Critics read it as a statement about the superpowers and the societies of Latin America: the first writes the second bad checks for economic and social progress. Has any progress arrived? And what was spent?

Some of his recent projects take on regional politics more directly, and the form has changed with them: no longer the fable, no longer wrapped in layers of symbol and metaphor, but something plainer and more concrete.

In 2010, after traveling in Afghanistan, he took part in the thirteenth documenta in Kassel. The film he shot, Reel-Unreel, looks something like a documentary.

The idea came from a common street game, rolling a hoop, which Afghan children also play. Alÿs swapped the hoop for a reel of film. The children split into two groups, one heading uphill and one down, running after the reel out of curiosity.

War has changed the landscape in Afghanistan; shanties and temporary shelters are everywhere. But Alÿs's camera stays calm. The children run through the streets of Kabul, past the old city, the bazaar, the docks along the river and the rubbish heaps, where buildings wrecked by fighting stand next to lives being rebuilt.

A title card comes up at the end: on September 5, 2001, the Taliban seized thousands of reels of film from the Afghan Film Archive and burned them outside Kabul; people say the fire ran for 15 days and nights. What the Taliban did not know was that most of the reels were copies, duplicates.

At that 2007 solo show, Alÿs put a passage on the wall that admitted some doubt about his own work: can an artistic intervention really produce a way of thinking that did not exist before? Can one absurd act really shake people out of habit, break their assumptions, send them looking again for where the conflict starts? Can performance art like this really change anything?

Ritual, war, spectacle, games — what are these acts for? What we can do, Alÿs says, is stay wary for a long time.

(Images without a credited source were provided by the Rockbund Art Museum.)