Snapshots from an Indefinite Vacation

Abstract

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 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 work of Francis Alys, Belgian-born artist and resident of Mexico City for nearly twenty years. In large part, photography ends up being a consistent tool for Alys to ground his work in documentary records that offer a concrete, unsparing verisimilitude. If his gaze occasionally wavers, camera's relative stasis helps confirm suspicion that there is some great internal rudder guiding this peripatetic yet often exactingly precise twenty-first century artist during his near-constant travels. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 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 Alys's projects that are directly associated with use of photography and photographic imagery. Manifold contradictions emerge from Alys's photographic works, such as his reliance on clear recording of otherwise ephemeral incidents. These actions and works often consist of absurdist, almost dreamlike vignettes, such as in Paradox of Praxis (1997) in which artist pushed a melting block of ice along street to exemplify 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 medium-specific attributes of an artist who is a self-professed hybrid. In turn, this would be directly related to fact that Alys was (again in his words) trained in one medium .... I'm not somebody who's obsessed by any specific medium. Alys notes: I do use camera quite a bit whether it's to take photos or to do videos. And often camera becomes a kind of filter with a situation I feel foreign to. Like when I'm ... a kind of outsider camera offers a kind of ... protection. A mix of protection and justification ... of my presence in that place at that moment. (2) Alys is well known for his incorporation of walk and Baudelairean flaneur is often cited in any extensive discussion of his practice. Alys is generally an urban walker, rooted in long history of artist-walkers such as Stanley Brouwn, Hamish Fulton, and Richard Long. Moreover, one could assert that Alys is more intent on recording details of social landscape than actual landscape itself in traditional sense. The importance of focused stroll has been integral to so many artists that it could serve to a certain degree both as the machine that makes art (to paraphrase Sol LeWitt) and as a mechanism leading to unanticipated discoveries. As writer Rebecca Solnit has commented, The random, 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 mind, body, landscape, and city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect ineffable. (3) Alys 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 Alys 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 facade of urbanism. …