Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsalorganized for the museum on the work of Christian Marclay and Wolfgang Tillmans, this is the first major museum show in the United States of the

Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal

Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal

Russell Ferguson

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Steidl

This publication accompanies the exhibition “Francis

Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal,” organized by Russell Ferguson

and presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles,

30 September 2007–20 February 2008.

“Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal” has been generously

supported by Fundación/Colección Jumex and Heidi and

Erik Murkoff. Additional support has been provided by

the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the David Teiger

Curatorial Travel Fund.

All works courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

Copy-edited by Jane Hyun

Designed by Lorraine Wild and Leslie Sun,

Green Dragon Office, Los Angeles

Printed by Steidl, Göttingen, Germany

Copublished by the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire

Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90024; and Steidl,

Düstere Strasse 4, 37073 Göttingen, Germany

The Hammer Museum is operated by the University of

California, Los Angeles. Occidental Petroleum Corporation

has partially endowed the Museum and constructed the

Occidental Petroleum Cultural Center Building, which

houses the museum.

Copyright © 2007 by the Regents of the University

of California.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

in any form by any electronic or mechanical means

(including photocopying, recording, and information

storage or retrieval) without permission in writing from

the publisher.

ISBN 978-0-943739-32-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007931757

Printed and bound in Germany

Director’s Foreword

Acknowledgments

Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal

Russell Ferguson

Selected Exhibition History and Bibliography

7

8

11

125frontispiece: study for Rehearsal, 2007

DVD (back cover):

Politics of Rehearsal, 2007

Video

30 minutes

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

It is a great pleasure to bring the work of Francis Alÿs to the Hammer Museum. There is no

doubt about the importance of his projects, or the extent of his influence. While everything

Alÿs creates has a simplicity that makes it instantly accessible, his work also offers a com-

plexity that continues to resonate long after it has first been seen.

This exhibition’s framework of rehearsal and related themes evolved from many con-

versations between the artist and Russell Ferguson, adjunct curator at the Hammer

Museum, over several years. To date, exhibitions of Alÿs’s work have emphasized issues of

place, particularly connections to Mexico City, his adopted home. In contrast, “Francis Alÿs:

Politics of Rehearsal” focuses on concepts of rehearsal and repetition, failure and success,

storytelling and performance. The exhibition and this publication explore how these ideas

inform his varied practice, and how they reflect in particular the imposition of a certain

concept of modernity onto Mexican and Latin American cultures.

Over a number of years, Alÿs has developed an approach to his art that has focused

less on definitive conclusions and more on strategies of repetition. This has resulted in the

creation of a group of works that can be brought together around the idea of rehearsal.

This is by its very nature an open-ended process that always remains profoundly open to

the emergence of new incarnations for each project. Key elements retain the possibility

of being changed. Even the works in this exhibition that have been seen before are subject

to reconfiguration by the artist for new spaces and new contexts.

Our sincere thanks go to Eugenio Lopez and the Fundación/Colección Jumex as well

as Heidi and Erik Murkoff for their generous support of this project. In addition, I extend our

gratitude to the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the David Teiger Curatorial Travel

Fund, which also made the exhibition possible.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to Russell Ferguson. Russell was chief curator at

the Hammer until earlier this year, when he became chair of the Department of Art at the

University of California, Los Angeles. As was the case with the exhibitions he previously

organized for the museum on the work of Christian Marclay and Wolfgang Tillmans, this is

the first major museum show in the United States of the oeuvre of a highly influential

artist. I am thrilled that he will continue to organize thoughtful and significant exhibitions

such as these for the Hammer Museum.

Ann Philbin

Study for Déjà Vu, 1996Oil on tracing paper on cardboard7 1⁄2 × 6 3⁄8 inches

9ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people were instrumental in helping to bring this exhibition to fruition, and I offer my

sincerest thanks to everyone involved with the project.

Without funding from generous donors, the exhibition would not have been able to

move forward. I join Ann Philbin in thanking Eugenio Lopez and the Fundación/Colección

Jumex, longtime supporters of Francis Alÿs’s work, as well as Heidi and Erik Murkoff for

their generous support of this project. In addition, I extend our gratitude to the Peter

Norton Family Foundation and to David Teiger for making this exhibition possible. Their

generosity is deeply appreciated.

My colleagues at the Hammer Museum deserve enormous thanks. Ann Philbin,

director, provides continued passion and support for challenging exhibitions at the

Hammer. I am also thankful for the support of my curatorial collegues Gary Garrels, James

Elaine, Ali Subotnick, Cindy Burlingham, Allegra Pesenti, and David Rodes, a dynamic

group of people with whom it is a pleasure to work.

Jenée Misraje, exhibition coordinator, has handled myriad details connected with

the organization of the exhibition. Curatorial Assistant Claire de Dobay Rifelj provided

invaluable help in countless ways with both the exhibition and this book. And without the

constant support of administrative assistant Emily Gonzalez, I cannot even imagine having

been able to complete this project.

Jennifer Wells Green, director of development, worked to secure funding for the

exhibition with her usual tirelessness, along with her staff Megan Kissinger, Alison Perchuk,

David Morehouse, and Laura Sils. The communications department headed by Miranda

Carroll, with assistance from Sarah Stifler, Morgan Kroll, Julia Luke, and Keith Bormuth, did

excellent work in publicizing the exhibition. James Bewley, director of public programs,

along with Aimee Chang, Cole Akers, and Darin Klein, organized an exciting array of lec-

tures and discussions around the show.

Portland McCormick, senior registrar, with Julie Dickover and Kate Bergeron, han-

dled the loans and shipping with their ever-impressive precision. As always, I rely on them

with complete and justified confidence. Peter Gould and his staff were essential in installing

the exhibition. As usual, Peter handled every complexity with tact and precision.

My other colleagues at the Hammer Museum also deserve thanks for their continued

support: George Barker, Lynne Blaikie, Paul Butler and his staff, Tiffany Daneshgar, Stephen

Foley, Andrea Gomez, Jenni Kim, Mo McGee, Michael Nauyok and his staff, Catherine

O’Brien, Becky Perez, Janine Perron, Maggie Sarkissian and her staff, Mary Ann Sears,

Deborah Snyder, Sally Suchil, and Billy Taylor, and Kate Temple.

This book looks as good as it does thanks to my longtime collaborators at Green

Dragon Office. My deepest thanks go to Lorraine Wild and Leslie Sun for their dedication

to the project. Jane Hyun copy-edited the book with her usual care and skill. I am also

grateful to Gerhard Steidl and his team, the publishers and printers of the book.

The staff of David Zwirner, New York, was extremely generous with their help in all

aspects of the catalogue and exhibition. Their commitment to Alÿs’s work is evident and

deeply appreciated. Bellatrix Hubert was extraordinarily helpful to me throughout the pro-

cess, and I also sincerely thank David Zwirner, Angela Choon, Amy Davila, Susan Sherrick,

Donna Chu, Julia Joern, and Wendy White. I would also like to thank Peter Kilchmann of

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

I thank my new colleagues in the Art Department at UCLA for all of their support,

especially James Welling, Caroline McNeil, Caron Cronin, Rajpal Matharu, Joli Kishi, and

Khadijah Rashid. Mieke Marple also volunteered valuable help with my research at a cru-

cial moment in the writing of my text.

Rafael Ortega was Alÿs’s collaborator on many of the works shown here. He was

more than generous with his time on my visits to Mexico City and was also willing to lend us

his indispensible expertise on technical aspects of the installation. I very much appreciate

his help.

In addition, I would like to thank Brian Butler, Lynne Cooke, Agustín Coppel, Alfonso

Cornejo, Michael Darling, Julien Devaux, Mireya Escalante, Craig Garrett, Alejandro

González Iñárritu, Bob Gunderman, Lucero Gutierrez, Yuko Hasegawa, Karin Higa, Frances

Horn, Enrique Huerta, Atsuko Koyanagi, Gabriel Kuri, James Lingwood, Michael Mack,

Ramiro Martinez, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Ivo Mesquita, Abaseh Mirvali, Tobias Ostrander,

Estella Provas, Emilio Rivera, José Roca, Michael Rooks, Lisa Rosendahl, Eugene Sadovoy,

Guillermo Santamarina, Kitty Scott, Melanie Smith, Randy Sommer, Angel Gustavo Toxqui,

Rose Vekony, Lourdes Villagomez, and Christopher Waterman.

And finally, I extend my deepest appreciation to Francis Alÿs for his work and for his

openness to exchanging ideas and plans for this exhibition. It has truly been a pleasure to

work with him in putting the project together.

Russell Ferguson

10

FRAncis Alÿs: Politics oF ReheARsAl

We know the conventions of the masterpiece: it is a work of art that is totally resolved, that

leaves nothing to be added. As Virginia Woolf put it, “A masterpiece is something said once

and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind.”1 Comparably, Michael

Fried has influentially argued that in a successful work of art,

at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.... It is this continuous and entire

presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one

experiences as a kind of instantaneousness, as though if only one were infinitely

more acute, a single infinitely brief incident would be long enough to see every-

thing, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever

convinced by it. 2

Francis Alÿs, despite making some of the most compelling art of recent years, has an

ambivalent relationship to this idea of complete resolution. He certainly wants his work to

remain in the consciousness of those who see it. He seeks the clearest possible articulations

of the premises that he wishes to explore. In that sense he is looking for the quality of instan-

taneous presentness that Fried identifies. Yet he is at the same time highly reluctant to bring

any work to an unequivocal conclusion. Certain ideas and motifs are kept open, always

available to be pushed in new directions, reconfigured for new situations. In addition, he

has consistently embraced a durational element in his work. Indeed, he has explicitly

described his work in these terms, as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes,

metaphors or parables, staging the experience of time in Latin America.” 3

RUSSELL FERGUSON

Study for Song for Lupita, 1998Pencil on tracing paper13 3⁄4 × 11 1⁄2 inches

12 13

From the beginning of his career as an artist, Alÿs has adopted a way of working that

tends to reject conclusions in favor of repetition and recalibration. He has, that is, put the

idea of rehearsal at the heart of his practice. As the celebrated theater director Jean-Louis

Barrault put it, the rehearsal is “the creative period. For the actor it is the specifically artistic

moment. He sketches out, he effaces, he repents, he conjures up.”4 This process means that

the moment of completion is always still to come. Each completed rehearsal opens the

door to a further rehearsal, one more iteration in which things can be improved, simplified,

or deleted. If a work is still in rehearsal, then it can always be changed. The moment of

completion is always potentially delayed. For Alÿs, then, the final work is always in some

sense projected into the future, a future that is always advancing just ahead of the work. In

the interim it can constantly be revisited, and its presence can be constantly shape-shifting,

not just in the form of documentation through photographs or video, but also through

written descriptions or oral accounts passed from person to person.

The refusal of closure is true not just of performance-based works, but also of the

paintings, drawings, and sculptures in Alÿs’s studio, which often remain there for years,

picked up and put down again, sometimes worked on, sometimes destroyed, or sometimes

used as starting points for new work. Each delay in letting them leave his hands increases

the potential for them to be reconfigured in some newly productive way. His drawings

in particular bear the traces of endless revision. In the end they are palimpsests of overlaid

scraps of paper, held together with tape. Works that are performative can constantly be

tested out in new situations, different countries, even. Does a premise that works in Mexico

City still work in Europe? In Los Angeles? And does it work in the same way, or differently?

Some turn out to work the same; others are radically changed by their context.

Alÿs’s emphasis on process and response does not, then, tend towards the immacu-

late resolution of the masterpiece. The idea of rehearsal does, however, contain within it an

ideal of what the finished work might possibly be, even if its incarnations continue to flicker

and change in the light of the fire in the Platonic cave. For Alÿs, that flickering, the move-

ment back and forth and around an idea, is as productive as a determined path towards

a fixed and identifiable goal. In some cases, there may well be no goal beyond the process,

which is almost always a series of more or less tentative moves towards an idea.

Perhaps this idea is most explicit in A Story of Deception (2003–06). This film was shot

in Patagonia, almost as the by-product of another project. Originally Alÿs went there 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. The relationship of the role of walking to his own work was fas-

cinating to Alÿs, but in the end he felt that his film stayed too close to a conventional nature

documentary. What he did find, however, when looking at his footage were the mirages

that would appear down the dusty roads along which he was traveling. In the end, the work

became this footage, an endlessly shimmering mirage that is always retreating down the

road just ahead of the viewer. As he has said of this work:

Without the movement of the viewer/observer, the mirage would be nothing

more than an inert stain, merely an optical vibration in the landscape. It is our

advance that awakens it, our progression towards it that triggers its life. As it

is the struggle that defines utopia, it is the vanity of our intent that animates the

mirage, it is in the obstinacy of our intent that the mirage comes to life, and that

is the space that interests me.5

A Story of Deception, 2003–06In collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Olivier Debroise16mm film4:20 minutes

The artist’s unwillingness to bring a decisive closure to a work is evident even in his

titles. Anyone who has tried to study Alÿs’s oeuvre rapidly comes up against the fact that

the very concept of “title” is exceptionally fluid for him. Unsurprisingly, there are Spanish

and English titles. But titles also change over time. The same title might be given to different

works. Some seem to have multiple titles. A number have formal titles, but also nicknames.

Dates are also sometimes quite slippery and can be extended by a number of years, as Alÿs

continues to make new interventions into apparently completed works.

Even his activity as an artist began tentatively. Only when he was in his early thirties,

after he had trained and practiced as an architect and had moved from Belgium to

Mexico, did he begin to experiment with art. He began, in the early 1990s, with a series of

attempts to address his overwhelming experience of Mexico City. As he described it, “The

first—I wouldn’t call them works—my first images or interventions were very much a reac-

tion to Mexico City itself, a means to situate myself in this colossal urban entity.” One of

the earliest consisted of three pieces of red, white, and green chewed gum, stuck to a wall

in the sequence of the Mexican flag (Flag, 1990). For Alÿs, an increasing fascination with

the various ways in which resistances to Western modernity were played out in Mexico

went hand in hand with his own inclination to avoid definite conclusions. In Mexico City,

the rebar that sprouts from roofs everywhere sometimes suggests a whole city in a state

of rehearsal for a presentation that may or may not be completed.

following spread:Study for A Story of Deception, 2005Pencil and pen on paper6 3⁄4 × 9 inches

La logica del ñandú, 2005Pencil and pen on postcard6 1⁄4 × 4 3⁄8 inches

A Story of Deception, 2003Oil on canvasStudio view

15

19

The first body of his work to draw international attention, the series of paintings he

made beginning in 1993 in collaboration with the sign painters (rotulistas) of his Mexico City

neighborhood, are predicated on a potentially endless series of revisions and recapitula-

tions. As he described the process, “I commissioned various sign painters to produce

enlarged copies of my smaller original images. Once they had completed several versions,

I produced a new ‘model,’ compiling the most significant elements of each sign painter’s

interpretation. This second ‘original’ was in turn used as a model for a new generation of

copies by sign painters, and so on, ad infinitum.”6 They are an endless rehearsal, in other

words, with multiple finished performances (paintings), none of them definitive, none of

them truly final.

With this work, Alÿs took on board another aspect of the rehearsal process: collabora-

tion with others. In theatrical or musical rehearsal, an essential part of practice is the degree

to which the different impulses and talents of the various participants operate alongside

and against those of the others. No matter how determined or dictatorial an author, direc-

tor, or composer may be, there is always an element of collaboration that is integral to the

passage from initial rehearsal to finished work. Within a year of beginning the rotulista proj-

ect, Alÿs could say of his collaborations with the sign painters Emilio Rivera, Enrique

Huerta, and Juan Garcia that “by now it doesn’t matter whether you are looking at a model,

a copy, or a copy of a copy.”7 The collaborative element was integrated into the authorship

of the works themselves. At the same time, the rehearsal process remained ongoing. Each

set of paintings would be complete in itself, yet the series would remain permanently

incomplete.

following spread:Untitled (Sign Painting Project), 1993–97Acrylic on board and oil on canvas63 3⁄4 × 43 1⁄2 inches47 1⁄2 × 36 3⁄4 inches11 1⁄4 × 8 5⁄8 inches9 3⁄8 × 7 1⁄8 inches

pages 22–23:Sign-painting studio, Mexico City, 1996, Juan Garcia at right

Untitled (Sign Painting Project), 1993–97Oil on canvas and enamel on sheet metal8 5⁄8 × 10 5⁄8 inches36 1⁄4 × 47 5⁄8 inches36 1⁄4 × 45 1⁄8 inches

20 21

In Turista (Tourist, 1994), Alÿs simultaneously included himself among the people of

the capital and acknowledged that he remained an outsider. Standing alongside workers

with signs advertising their availability as plumbers, electricians, or painters, Alÿs offered

himself as a turista, a tourist. A tourist, obviously, would not normally be considered a

worker of any kind. As Cuauhtémoc Medina has pointed out, however, there is more than

self-deprecating irony at work here: “In his attempt to pass off his work as ‘professional

observer’ of other people’s everyday life as a professional activity, he is reflecting on his sta-

tus as a foreigner and also on the ambiguity of the idea of his ‘work’ as an artist.”8 “Tourist”

is not a job. Is “artist”? By claiming the debased title of tourist, Alÿs is also, characteristically,

delaying his assumption of the role of artist. He is still just looking:

At the time I think it was about questioning or accepting the limits of my condi-

tion of outsider, of “gringo.” How far can I belong to this place? How much can

I judge it? By offering my services as a tourist, I was oscillating between leisure

and work, contemplation and interference. I was testing and denouncing

my own status. Where am I really standing?

In one of a number of works titled Set Theory (1996), a tiny figure sits alone in an upturned

glass of water, again an image of isolation. Later in 1996, however, just around the corner

Turista, 1994Set Theory, 1996Mixed media

24

27

from the railings where he had advertised himself as a tourist, an unexpected incident intro-

duced a change in Alÿs’s role as observer, and the precise moment is documented. If you are a typical spectator, what you are really doing is waiting for the accident to happen (1996)

begins with the artist in quintessential observer mode, videotaping the movements of a

plastic bottle as it is blown by the wind (and occasionally kicked) around Mexico City’s main

square, the Zócalo. After about ten minutes the action comes to an abrupt end when Alÿs

unthinkingly follows the bottle into the street and is hit by a passing car. In a moment he

goes from observer to protagonist. The endless irresoluable rolling of the bottle had in fact

led to a conclusion. For once, there could be no more delay. Suddenly it seemed that all the

observation had been leading up to this moment. In fact, it is not possible to observe an

action without affecting it. The observer is always involved, always implicated. From here

on, there would be not simply rehearsal, but also a politics of rehearsal.

If you are a typical spectator, what you are really doing is waiting for the accident to happen, 1996Video10 minutes

29

To put it that way, however, suggests more of an overarching schema than Alÿs would

acknowledge. Another way in which he separates himself from Woolf ’s completeness or

Fried’s instantaneous presentness is in his attraction to fragments rather than wholes. One

of his avatars is certainly The Collector (1990–92), a little dog-like object on rubber wheels,

its body magnetized, that Alÿs led through the streets to pick up metallic bits and pieces as it

went. Here we can see a developing predilection for the random, for the leftovers of the

city in preference to the all-encompassing modernist rationalism that had informed Alÿs’s

earlier training as an architect. Further, in this apparently simple piece, we can see the ori-

gins of Alÿs’s future as a creator of rumors, of urban myths—the man who led a magnetic

toy dog on a string through the streets of the city.

opposite:Collectors, 1991–2003Map mounted on wood, photographs, graphite, and oil on vellum

right and following spread:The Collector, 1990–92In collaboration with Felipe SanabriaMagnets, metal, and rubber wheels8 5⁄8 × 4 × 12 5⁄8 inches

pages 32–33:Study for The Collector, 1991Pen on paper 6 1⁄4 × 10 1⁄4 inches

35

These stories, however, are themselves fragments, moments snatched in media res, the way they might be experienced by a passerby. I once asked Alÿs whether he had ever

considered making a conventionally structured narrative film. “I rarely deal with more than

one idea at a time,” he replied. “In that sense, paradoxically, I am not a storyteller. Except

if you look at a story as a succession of episodes. But if I were to make what you call a ‘more

complete story,’ I would not start at the beginning or the end. I would need to work from

some middle point, because the middle point, the ‘in between,’ is the space where I func-

tion the best.”

Re-enactments (2000) may be the closest thing Alÿs has produced to a conventional

narrative. After buying a 9mm Beretta handgun in a downtown Mexico City gun shop,

he proceeded to stroll around the streets with the loaded gun in his hand, apparently

without attracting much attention, until the police finally arrested him. Alÿs’s longtime col-

laborator Rafael Ortega filmed the walk. This narrative has a clear beginning and ending,

and in between it has great suspense, as the viewer waits for the inevitable denouement.

The following day, Alÿs repeated the action with a replica gun, again filmed by Ortega. This

time everything was staged. Astonishingly, even the policemen who had arrested Alÿs the

day before agreed to reenact their roles. While the repetition of the action might seem

to imply that this work is itself a form of rehearsal—the real incident as a kind of rehearsal

for the reenactment—the clear closure of the narrative means that Alÿs sees it somewhat

differently. The first performance was not a rehearsal for the second. The second was

a reenactment of the first. The difference is crucial. For Alÿs, Re-enactments is less about

rehearsal than it is about how actions that take place in real time are always susceptible

to being recuperated by their own documentation.

Study for Re-enactments, 2000Pencil and pen on paper8 1⁄4 × 11 inches

Re-enactments, 2000In collaboration with Rafael OrtegaTwo-channel video5:20 minutes

38 39

40 41

I wanted to question the rapport we have today with the medium of perfor-

mance, the ways in which it has become so mediated by other media, film and

photo in particular, and how they can distort and dramatize the immediate

reality of the moment, how they can affect both the planning and the subsequent

reading of a performance. What is supposed to be so unique about performance

is its underlying condition of immediacy, the imminent sense of risk and failure, etc.

Re-enactments is shown as a double projection, with the two performances taking

place simultaneously and side by side. Which one shows Alÿs with a real gun and which

with the replica, however, is not necessarily clear. Alÿs had heightened the risk factor

immensely, not to make a spectacular performance but primarily to explore the degree

to which the documentation of the performance itself would dissipate that element of risk.

By risk here I mean not only the real danger to which Alÿs exposed himself, but also the

sense of unpredictability and potential disaster that is inherent in all live performance.

The real issue with Re-enactments really emerged for him only later, when the piece

was shown outside Mexico. At that point it tapped into stereotypes about Mexico City as

a hotbed of crime and violence. The work seemed to have become about crime rather than

performance. “I forgot a basic rule, “Alÿs says now. “When a work is produced within a

very local context, it can easily acquire a totally different reading abroad, so the parameters

for the piece need to take into account its possible life as an export. I had a similar problem

with the sign-painting project. It was often reduced to an exotic exercise of style.”

Re-enactments itself remains a fairly basic snatch of narrative, but most of Alÿs’s stories

are even more episodic, broken up into little pieces like those The Collector draws to itself.

As Michel de Certeau put it, “Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed

with the world’s debris.”9 But out of such debris things do come. In 61 out of 60 (1999), sixty

plaster figurines of Zapatista fighters from Chiapas were broken into pieces; the pieces were

then combined to create sixty-one guerillas. Out of nothing comes something. Out of these

fragments came another fighter. All the figures are now a little incomplete, missing some-

thing, yet somehow something greater than the sum of the parts has appeared.

61 out of 60 is unusual for Alÿs’s work of the 1990s in that it is easy to read a quite spe-

cific political meaning into the work, although it is certainly not alone in this. Both Housing for All (1994) and Cuentos patrióticos (Patriotic tales, 1997) make overt political references

too. In Housing for All, Alÿs constructed a kind of tent made from election banners, some of

them bearing the title’s slogan, and installed it in the Zócalo on election day: the tent was

held aloft by the hot air blowing from a subway vent. Cuentos patrióticos referred to a politi-

cal demonstration of 1968.

61 out of 60, 1999Plaster figures

Housing for All, 1994

44

More typical, however, is the animated film Song for Lupita (1998), the action of

which consists entirely of a woman pouring water from one glass to another and back again.

Alÿs has described this work as “a kind of demonstration of the Mexican saying ‘el hacerlo

sin hacerlo, el no hacerlo pero haciendolo,’ literally ‘the doing but without doing it, the

non-doing but doing it,’ staging a kind of resignation in an immediate present, inducing a

complete hypnosis in the act itself, an act that was pure flux, without beginning or end.”

Even simpler is the video Perro pelota (2000), which documents throwing a ball for a dog

that returns it, over and over again. The motif expressed here in its most straightforward

form is one that Alÿs has made use of in many different ways: going in one direction, then

returning, then repeating. Caracoles (1999), a precursor of Rehearsal 1 (1999–2004), shows

a young boy kicking a bottle up a steep street, only to let it roll back to him. An equally sim-

ple work, but with a quite different form, is Déjà Vu (1996–the present): a painting and its

exact copy installed separately in an exhibition, so that the viewer sees the painting once,

but then unexpectedly comes upon it again a little later.

opposite:Song for Lupita, 1998Video12 minute loop

Déjà Vu, 1996Oil on canvas10 1⁄4 × 12 5⁄8 inches each

47

opposite:Song for Lupita, 1998Video12 minute loop

above:Song for Lupita, 1998Installation at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

49

Perro pelota, 2000

Caracoles, 1999Betacam SP transferred to video4:20 minute loop

54 55

One of Alÿs’s fascinations has been with the action, sometimes enormously pro-

tracted, that produces no identifiable result. Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997) is the record of an

action carried out under the rubric of “sometimes making something leads to nothing.” For

more than nine hours, Alÿs pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it

completely melted. On one level, this was, as Alÿs explained, “a settling of accounts with

Minimalist sculpture.”14 Like many artists of his generation, perhaps most notably Felix Gon-

zalez-Torres, Alÿs felt the need to (literally) work his way through the powerful legacy of the

dominant art movement of the previous generation. And so for hour after hour he strug-

gled with the quintessentially Minimal rectangular block until finally it was reduced to no

more than an ice cube suitable for a whisky on the rocks, so small that he could casually

kick it along the street. His hours of labor were themselves distilled into a video only five

minutes long.

Both the work that is apparently political and that which is apparently not, however,

are informed by a broad interest in the repeated attempts to impose a Northern concept of

modernity on Latin America. In the speech given at his inauguration as President of the

United States in 1949, Harry Truman announced that he would “embark on a bold new

program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available

for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.”10 It was a sincere version of

that impulse that, in some respects, led Alÿs to Mexico in the first place. But the Northern

program of modernization and growth has met consistent resistance, even as it has been

enthusiastically embraced by elite sectors. Carlos Monsiváis has described this tendency as

pursued with an almost religious intensity: “The Utopia of this century—that which has been

desired above all else, and desired most deeply—has been the modernization of body

and soul…. Efficiency and productivity become not only the requirement of industrial sur-

vival but a call for the rescue of the new Holy Grail, Growth, now in the hands of the

faithless whose major heresy is unproductivity.”11 As Medina has described the results of this

crusade, however:

Southern countries’ economies are the constant expression of failed moderniza-

tion. It is no accident that they seem to be under the curse of an eternal return: to

start a process of development over again every five or ten years and leave it

incomplete after coming across new obstacles. When this happens in conditions

of inequality, degradation, and coercion, the economy never manages to gain

ground. There are more than enough reasons; the wounds left by exploitation

make it impossible for people to believe in an ethics of work and the neo-colonial

extraction of wealth does not generate markets activated by the seduction of

consumerism—not to mention that northern capital and investment actually find

the periodic breakdowns quite profitable.12

This context—social, political, economic, and psychological—underlies and informs the

whole structure of repetition and rehearsal with which Alÿs works. Against the dogma of

modernity, progress, and efficiency, he has placed anecdotes, gestures, and parables. In this

context, the pouring back and forth of the water in Song for Lupita can be, as Alÿs described

it, “a reflection on the struggle against the pressures of being productive.”13

Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997Video5 minutes

9:15 a.m.

9:34 a.m.

9:35 a.m.

12:05 p.m.

3:10 p.m.

3:30 p.m.

3:34 p.m.

5:45 p.m.

6:05 p.m.

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Beyond the specific relationship with Minimalism, though, there is also something

casually insouciant about Alÿs’s performance. Gritty as the context is, there is something of

the dandy in his willingness to put hours of effort into producing a result that is almost liter-

ally invisible. As the great theorist of dandyism Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote, “A Dandy

may spend ten hours a day dressing, if he likes, but once dressed he thinks no more about

it.”15 The dandy, that is, may put an enormous amount of energy into an activity, but if it

should ever appear that he did, or that he was in any way concerned with the result, then

the effect will be lost. Much of Alÿs’s practice reflects a comparable desire to downplay the

results of his intensive labor. Sometimes making something leads to nothing.

Alÿs’s most recent activity in making something that leads to nothing, Rehearsal 3 (2006–07), is actually related to the ancient idea of generating something from nothing. In

his studio, Alÿs and his collaborators have been working on models for perpetual motion

machines, so far without success. The utopian idea of a machine that would produce

energy without consuming it has been a dream of scientists and engineers for centuries,

rather like alchemy. For Alÿs, as sincerely as he produces the wooden models based on

drawings in old texts or from designs of his own invention, this work is also a continuation

of the critique of modernity in its utopian aspect as the panacea that is supposed to cure

all ills.

Mexico City, 1994Photograph

overleaf:Study for Rehearsal, 2002Pencil, pen, and tracing paper on paper11 3⁄4 × 8 1⁄4 inches

Angel Gustavo Toxqui working on models for Rehearsal 3, 2006

6:32 p.m.

6:47 p.m.

62 63

Alÿs’s main vehicle for the exploration of doing something while producing nothing,

however, has been the act of walking. “Walking,” he offered, “in particular drifting, or

strolling, is already—within the speed culture of our time—a kind of resistance. But it also

happens to be a very immediate method for unfolding stories. It’s an easy, cheap act to

perform.” For many years, he kept in his studio a polyurethane board (“As Long as I am Walking…”, 1992) that bears the following text:

As long as I’m walking, I’m not choosing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not smoking

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not losing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not making

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not knowing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not falling

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not painting

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not hiding

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not counting

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not adding

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not crying

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not asking

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not believing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not talking

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not drinking

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not closing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not stealing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not mocking

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not facing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not crossing

“ “ “ “ “ , I’m not changing

“ “ “ “ “ ,

“ “ “ “ “ ,

“ “ “ “ “ ,

“ “ “ “ “ , I will not repeat

“ “ “ “ “ , I will not remember

64 65

There are a number of elements that are significant in this text. The first thing that Alÿs

declares he is not doing if he is walking is choosing. By walking he can put off a great many

things, but the first of them is having to make any decision, any commitment at all. As in a

rehearsal, there may be a plan in mind, but its final resolution is indefinitely delayed.

Indeed, walking itself could be thought of as a kind of preliminary rehearsal, a time when

ideas are sorted, impressions and images gathered up for potential use, not in a systematic

way but as part of an integration of ideas with environment.

It should also be noted that in this relatively early work, Alÿs is still in the role of

observer, not actor. None of these activities or non-activities are specific to any particular

place. As Alÿs said of his early years in Mexico, “I think that my status as an immigrant freed

me of my own heavy cultural heritage, or my debt to it if you like.” But he was not yet quite

ready to engage with the new culture in which he now lived. In “As Long as I am Walking…”

he is still the uncommitted outsider, a position to which he has a tendency to revert, even

as over the years his work has become steadily more explicit in its social and political

engagement. There still remains somewhere in the work a desire to keep the world at arm’s

length. This renunciatory quality cannot help but remind us of the artist’s namesake St.

Francis of Assisi, who gave away all his worldly possessions. It was St. Francis, after all, who

said that “it is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching,” a

sentiment that could not but resonate with Alÿs. And of course, the saint was famous for his

affinity for animals, a trait that the artist also shares (we need only think, for example, of

Sleepers [1999–2006], in which men and dogs are treated with equal sympathy, both

stretched out asleep in the street). But, on the other hand, Alÿs is scrupulous about not preaching. He does not walk to instruct.

Is he then, in his walking, a flâneur? In Baudelaire’s well-known characterization of

“The Painter of Modern Life,” he wrote that:

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up

house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the

midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel one-

self everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and

yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of

those independent, passionate, impartial natures.16

If we can see in Alÿs the holding oneself apart, the pleasure of being an outsider, especially

early on in his work, he never has the aristocratic, aloof quality that Baudelaire ascribed to

the flâneur: “The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”17 For Alÿs,

“the flâneur is a very nineteenth-century European figure. It goes with a kind of romanticism

which does not have much space in a city like Mexico City.” The closest Alÿs has come to

the role of a true flâneur is through his stand-in, Mr. Peacock, the real peacock that Alÿs sent

to represent him at the 2001 Venice Biennale (The Ambassador). Alÿs himself stayed away.

In large part, the trajectory of his work has been to get beyond the isolation of the flâneur, to

feel at home not in the sense of the “man of the world” who feels at home everywhere, and

not to remain simply an observer, but to be at home enough with his own role in specific

settings actually to intervene.

The Ambassador, 2001

66

68

Towards the end of Alÿs’s list, he promises not to repeat. Of course he will repeat; he

does repeat, but each repetition makes something different. And he will not remember, he

says. But he will. And it is the repetition that enables the remembering, not only for the art-

ist but for his audience, as the pattern of circulation continues. In 1995, Alÿs performed The Swap, for which he stood in a Mexico City metro station all day long swapping one object

for another with passersby. Beginning with his sunglasses, he acquired and disposed of a

variety of objects, including shoes, a flashlight, a hat, and a bag of peanuts. Obviously this is

an action that potentially could be extended indefinitely. It is a version of Franciscan renun-

ciation for the market economy, in which each object disposed of reappears in another

form. Comparably, in The Seven Lives of Garbage (1995), Alÿs dropped seven small bronze

sculptures of snails into the garbage. He later found two of them for sale in the streets, dis-

carded but brought back into circulation regardless. He bought one of them back. The

others continue their slow journey through the market.

The Seven Lives of Garbage, 1995

The Swap, 1995

70

Related to the idea of circulation as a way of delaying completion is The Loop (1997).

For the exhibition “inSITE,” held in San Diego and Tijuana, Alÿs’s contribution was a jour-

ney that started in Tijuana and ended in San Diego. Alÿs made the journey, however,

without crossing the border between Mexico and the United States that divides the two cit-

ies. Instead, he embarked on a five-week-long trip that took him from Tijuana to San Diego,

but only after passing through Mexico City, Panama City, Santiago, Auckland, Sydney,

Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Anchorage, Vancouver, and

Los Angeles, circumnavigating the globe to arrive a mere hundred yards away from his

starting point on the other side of the fence. A global version of a walk around the neigh-

borhood, the journey was an enormously elaborate way of producing an absolutely

minimal result, the transit between Tijuana and San Diego. Given the fraught nature of

American debates over the immigration of undocumented Mexican workers in the United

States, however, this piece inevitably took on a politically charged set of connotations.

Although Alÿs himself made a point of not articulating any of these, they were nevertheless

inescapable. Between the long series of refusals documented in 1992 in “As Long as I am Walking…” and the apparently rambling but politically loaded project of The Loop five years

later, Alÿs had learned how to give his endless procrastinations a politics.

The Loop, 1997, Burma

opposite:The Loop, 1997

72

Cuentos patrióticos uses the idea of circulation, but this time it takes place around the

flagpole in the center of the Zócalo in Mexico City. Alÿs walks in a circle around the pole,

followed by a sheep. With each turn around the pole, another sheep joins in, until he is

trailed by a long line of them, forming a circle. Once the chain is completed, the first sheep

that entered leaves the scene, followed by the second, the third, and so on, until Alÿs finds

himself following the last sheep around the flagpole. This work uses the kind of repetitive

structure Alÿs has found useful elsewhere, but here, again, there is now a specific political

reference. In 1968, as Pablo Vargas Lugo described it, “Thousands of bureaucrats were

herded into the Zócalo to demonstrate in favor of the government. Showing their frustra-

tion in an act that was both rebellious and ridiculous, they turned their backs on the official

tribune and began to bleat like a vast flock of sheep.”18

Cuentos patrióticos (Patriotic tales, 1997)In collaboration with Rafael OrtegaVideo24:40 minutes

78 79

In the late 1990s, Alÿs specifically began to examine the mechanisms of rehearsal as

such. His film Rehearsal 1 shows a red Volkswagen attempting to reach the top of a steep hill

in Tijuana. At the same time a soundtrack plays, featuring a brass band rehearsing a danzon,

recorded in Juchitan by Alÿs a few months earlier. The two elements are in fact synchro-

nized. Alÿs listened to the recording on headphones as he drove. While the musicians are

playing, the car goes up the hill. When the musicians lose track and stop, the car stops. And

while the musicians are tuning their instruments and talking among themselves, the car

rolls back down the hill. As Alÿs has described this work, “The stubborn repetition effect

hints at a story that is constantly delayed, and where the attempt to formulate the story

takes the lead over the story itself. It is a story of struggle rather than one of achievement,

an allegory in process rather than a quest for synthesis.”19 The actual rehearsal of the band

turned out to be the perfect vehicle through which to articulate a process that inevitably

involves endless repetition. “There was a very physical way of rendering this constant push-

ing away of the final moment, or climax, or conclusion.” At the same time, however, it

manifests the overt collaboration of a number of people that results in small but incremen-

tal changes towards a better performance.

The focus on rehearsal keeps process itself foregrounded, and any conclusion

deferred. Alÿs has been explicit about the driving force behind this work: “The intention

behind these short films was to render the time structure I have encountered in Mexico,

and to some extent in Latin America. It also recalls the all-too familiar scenario of a society

that wants to stay in an indeterminate sphere of action in order to function, and that needs

to delay any formal frame of operation to define itself against the imposition of Western

Modernity.”20

Rehearsal 1, 1999Pencil and type on paper11 × 8 1⁄2 inches

overleaf:Studies for Rehearsal 1, 1999Pen and pencil on paper8 1⁄2 × 11 inches each

page 81:Model for Rehearsal 1, 1997

80

82 83

Rehearsal 1, 1999–2004In collaboration with Rafael Ortega Video 29:25 minutes

85

86

The political nature of the question of time in Mexico is made clear by the Chiapas

guerilla leader Subcommandante Marcos, who said of his conflict with then-President of

Mexico Vicente Fox that it was “a struggle between a clock operated by a punch card,

which is Fox’s time, and an hourglass, which is ours. The dispute is over whether we bend

to the discipline of the factory clock or Fox bends to the slipping of the sand.” Marcos

also commented, on his unwillingness to actually take power in Chiapas, that “what

we have to relate is the paradox that we are. Why a revolutionary army is not aiming to

seize power, why an army doesn’t fight, if that’s its job.”21 Well, perhaps one might say,

“Sometimes, doing nothing leads to something,” the principle that Alÿs used in Looking Up

(2001), an action in which he drew a crowd simply by standing in a public square, looking

intently upwards.

Rehearsal 1 was the first in a series of works under the rehearsal rubric, but Alÿs’s use

of real rehearsal has not by any means been limited to that series. His 2001 collaboration

with film director Alejandro González Iñárritu was the first work to use the title Politics of Rehearsal (in full, Politics of Rehearsal (or what makes the traffic move at 6pm on a Friday in Mexico City)). This work used as its raw material rehearsal footage from González Iñárritu’s

movie Amores Perros (2000). In Alÿs’s subsequent Essay on the Movie “Amores Perros” (2003–

07), a single brief scene is acted out from multiple viewpoints, all of which are visible

through successive steps: from the first rehearsal with the actors reading their parts around

a table in the director’s office, then standing up, then on location, then later in costume and

going through the multiple takes of the final shooting. The only thing missing is the scene as

it finally appeared in the director’s cut of the film. Everything except the official fiction is

included.

Politics of Rehearsal (or what makes the traffic move at 6pm on a Friday in Mexico City), 2001Installation at Kunst-Werke, Berlin

88

Alÿs has in fact developed an entire repertoire of ways to repeat. His animation The Last Clown (2000) features endless repetition: the work is a loop with no beginning and no

end. Cantos patrioticos is a loop that advances, overlapping itself and creating interference.

Rehearsal 1 is based upon a pendulum movement: “Like a pendulum swaying at the end

of its swing, then returning to the center, regaining speed along the way, the stuttering mel-

ody governs the period of the car, inducing its driver into a quasi state of suspension,

hypnotized in the repeated act, conveying a state of resilience, of patient or frustrated

absorption.”22 R.E.H.E.A.R.S.A.L. (2000) shows an animator working on the word

“rehearsal” itself. It follows a pyramid structure that slowly advances letter by letter to the

whole word, then steps down again. In Rehearsal 2 (2001–06), a stripper performs a zig-zag

stepping backwards and forwards through her constantly delayed performance. For Alÿs,

“It is a metaphor of Mexico’s ambiguous affair with Modernity, forever arousing, and yet,

always delaying the moment ‘it’ will happen.”23 Unlike Rehearsal 1, Rehearsal 2 does finally

reach its climax, albeit after apparently endless delays. The video Politics of Rehearsal (2007,

included with this book) shows raw footage for this work—essentially a rehearsal for a

The Last Clown, 2000Animation1:30 minute loop

following pages:Studies for Rehearsal 2, 2001Pen, pencil, and type on paper11 × 8 1⁄2 inches each

Rehearsal 2, 2001–06In collaboration with Rafael OrtegaVideo14:30 minutes

R.E.H.E.A.R.S.A.L., 2000Video2:30 minutes

90

92

95

Tornado, 2000–presentWork in progress

rehearsal—while the soundtrack consists of a conversation between Alÿs and Medina on

the issue of modernity in Mexico. The structure of When Faith Moves Mountains (2002)

is that of a moving wave pattern. Tornado (2000–present) is an expanding spiral. All are

potentially extendable and repeatable.

Alÿs is very circumspect about any direct political impact his work might have:

Political could be read in the Greek sense of polis, the city as a site of sensations

and conflicts from which the materials to create fictions or urban myths are

extracted. I think being based in Mexico City, and functioning in Latin America or

other places where you find yourself confronted with ongoing economic, social,

political, or military conflicts, the political component is an obligatory ingredient

in addressing these situations. But it would be very hard to say to what extent

your act can have a real echo in those kind of situations, and even more to what

extent there is any relevance for a poetic act to happen.

99

101

In this regard it is worth comparing two versions of what in some ways might be

thought of as a single work. In The Leak (1995), Alÿs walked the streets of São Paulo holding

a punctured paint can that left a thin wobbly line of blue paint behind him as he passed.

That work was a simple gesture, a way of converting the act of walking into something phys-

ical, more lasting than the walk itself. When Alÿs revisited this work in 2004, it was for a very

different context. This time he walked the so-called Green Line, the pre-1967 border

between East and West Jerusalem. And he used green paint, thus literalizing not merely the

fact of his passage but also the idea of the Green Line itself, originally so named because in

1948 Moshe Dayan used a green pencil to draw the border on a map of Jerusalem. The

green line does not really exist any more in practice, but it is constantly referred to by the

different parties of the ongoing dispute. There could hardly be a clearer example of the

infusion of new meaning into an old piece. While The Leak remains a work complete in its

own right, it is also now reconfigured into a rehearsal for the new version. Alÿs acknowl-

edges the change in the title he gave the new work: Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2004). As he

has said, “I had reached a point where I could no longer hide behind the ambiguity of met-

aphors or poetic license. It created a personal need to confront a situation I might have

dealt with obliquely in the past.”24 Clearly, the original “poetic” version of the work has

become “political” by virtue of the highly charged context into which it has been inserted.

It is important, however, to recognize that this is not just a matter of politicizing an earlier

work. The second half of the title is equally important: the insertion of an essentially poetic

gesture into a situation that is almost always seen through the lens of politics. “I am not a

militant,” Alÿs insisted. All the “poetic” gestural elements of The Leak are preserved in the

latter version. The work has, however, become more complex, as he has added layers of

additional meaning to the original action. Always, however, Alÿs avoids didacticism. As he

asks in a text that accompanies Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political, “How can art remain politically significant without assuming a doctrinaire standpoint or

aspiring to become social activism?”

The answer, it seems, to that question is for it to take on an existence as a story. Alÿs

always wants there to be a kind of ideal version of each piece that contains within it a kernel

that is coherent enough, simple enough, and relevant enough that it can potentially con-

The Leak, 1995

103

tinue to circulate far beyond the orbit of the realized action itself. As he put it, “I’ll try to

always keep the plot simple enough so that these actions can be imagined without an oblig-

atory reference or access to visuals...so that the story can be repeated as an anecdote, as

something that can be stolen, or travel orally and, in the best-case scenario, enter that land

of minor urban myths or fables.” In this context, Alÿs cited the early performances of Chris

Burden as examples of works that circulated as much by word of mouth as by any image or

document. Burden, the artist who had himself shot, or Burden, who had himself crucified

on a Volkswagen: these are actions that many people know of only through having heard

about them, and for that reason are fascinating to Alÿs. Is the potential story good enough

to sustain itself in this way? “If the story is good enough,” he explained, “it will get back to

you or reach its shape by itself. If it isn’t, better it dies away.”

The model of the story passed on from one person to another is of course an oral one.

As de Certeau described the ever-more threatened oral traditions, these are the “fragile

ways in which the body makes itself heard in the language, the multiple voices set aside by

the triumphal conquista of the economy that has, since the beginning of the ‘modern age’

(i.e., since the seventeenth or eighteenth century), given itself the name of writing.”25 Yet it

is in stories passed informally from person to person that a great reservoir of resistance to

power persists. “That’s a fundamental aspect of a political strategy in making art,” suggests

Alÿs, “because the institutions and the power structure always try to play down the anec-

dotal. Yet anecdotes weave the fabric of our social existence.”26 Alÿs’s stories are not

histories, because histories tend towards resolution. The events of narrative history lead

towards some conclusion that, it is implied, was the inevitable result of the actions

described. In some ways his stories more resemble the older tradition of the chronicle,

following spread:Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic, 2004Video17:45 miniutes

Map for Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic, 2004

104

106

a series of events that may or may not relate to each other, passed on from one person to

another. In the chronicle, no end is implied, because there are always further potential

events to be added.

There is also a difference, however, between the idea of the chronicle and the idea of

rehearsal. A chronicle is always in the end a series of consecutive events. There may be no

final resolution, but one thing unequivocally follows another and exists prior to the next.

The mechanism of rehearsal proposes a nonconsecutive chronological structure. No con-

clusion is necessarily reached, but nor is the rehearsal a rigidly sequential process. Instead,

the performers, and we as the audience, can go back and forth in time, starting and stop-

ping and beginning again.

The persistence of an oral culture is often related to the survival of old myths. For de

Certeau, “These voices can no longer be heard except within the interior of the scriptural

systems where they recur. They move about, like dancers, passing lightly through the field

of the other.”27 Alÿs is interested less, however, in the persistence of old myths and more in

the generation of new ones. This requires convincing the audience for his work to engage

in a genuinely interactive relationship with it. “Myth is not about the veneration of ideals—

of pagan gods or political ideology—but rather an active interpretive practice performed

by the audience, who must give the work its meaning and social value.”28 The work of the

artist can only go so far, that is, before the response of the audience enters into the action.

It is through them that the work continues into the future, its narrative rehearsed again and

again for as long as the story continues to circulate, changing a little in each telling but

retaining a core of meaning. The work needs to be sustained through an interactive process

that keeps it alive and in circulation. Alÿs expressed this idea very simply in the painting

La Leçon de musique, 2000Oil on canvas on wood23 × 27 inches

108 109

tension and an emerging movement of resistance. This was a desperate situation calling for

an epic response: staging a social allegory to fit the circumstances seemed more appropri-

ate than engaging in a sculptural exercise.”31 The principle that drove When Faith Moves Mountains was “maximum effort, minimal result.” The most apparently minimal change was

effected, and only by means of the most massive of collective efforts.

In a formal sense, just as Paradox of Praxis has a relationship to Minimalism, with

When Faith Moves Mountains Alÿs had in mind the tradition of Earthworks and other inter-

ventions into the landscape.

When Faith Moves Mountains is my attempt to deromanticize Land art. When

Richard Long made his walks in the Peruvian desert, he was pursuing a contem-

plative practice that distanced him from the immediate social context. When

Robert Smithson built the Spiral Jetty on the Salt Lake in Utah, he was turning

civil engineering into sculpture and vice versa. Here, we have attempted to

create a kind of Land art for the landless, and, with the help of hundreds of peo-

ple and shovels, we created a social allegory. This story is not validated by any

physical trace or addition to the landscape.32

Virtues, 1992Oil and encaustic on canvas9 1⁄2 × 13 3⁄8 inches

La Leçon de musique (2000), in which two men sit at a table. Suspended between them is a

sheet of paper, which they keep upright by blowing on it from either side. The sheet is frag-

ile, and sustaining it requires a constantly rebalanced cooperation.

In one unusual case, Alÿs was able to generate an object, a poster, by creating the

story, a rumor, first.

In 1999 I went to stay in a small town south of Mexico City, and, with the help of

three local people—the agents of propagation—we started asking around about

“this (fictitious) person who had left the hotel for a walk the night before and had

not come back”…Alongside the questions and suggestions made by the inter-

viewees, people would naturally start drawing a portrait of the missing (sex, age,

physiognomy, clothing, reason or cause for his disappearance, etc.) and little by

little this invented character became more and more real through the public

rumour, until, after three days I think, the local police issued a poster with a

“photo-fit portrait” of the missing person. At that point, as the rumour had pro-

duced a physical trace of evidence of its existence, I considered my involvement

in the project concluded and I left town.29

This rumor is certainly one of the most extreme examples of Alÿs’s ability to put a story into

circulation. In this case, it is clear that the story was enough. Even in some cases in which a

fairly elaborate action was carried out, the story might have been enough. “In the case of

the trip around the world, The Loop,” Alÿs said, “many people suspected that I’d never ful-

filled the contract, that is, made the trip.” But, he insisted, “The work would have existed

just the same; it didn’t really matter whether I did or didn’t go around the world.”30

In the case of When Faith Moves Mountains, however, one of Alÿs’s most ambitious

works to date, the work did have to be performed. Its physical reality was crucial to its

future existence as something that really, indisputably, happened. Five hundred volunteers

with shovels gathered at a huge sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and over the

course of a day moved it by several inches. Alÿs developed the idea after first visiting Lima

in October 2000. The political context was inescapable: “This was during the last months of

the Fujimori dictatorship. Lima was in turmoil with clashes on the streets, obvious social

Studies for When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002

114 115

The action itself, as documented in photographs and video, is extraordinarily impressive,

but in the end the “social allegory” takes over from the work’s undeniable formal presence.

The action was completely transitory. The next day, no one could recognize that the

huge sand dune had been moved. The true aftermath of the work lies in the ripples of anec-

dote and image that radiate out from it. “We were just trying to suggest the possibility of

change,” said Alÿs. “And it did, maybe just for a day, provoke this illusion that things could

possibly change.” In that sense, When Faith Moves Mountains is a true rehearsal for events

that still remain potential, things that may or may not happen in the future. Looking at the

video of the hundreds of volunteers shoveling together across the dune, we might also think

of Subcommandante Marcos’s suggestion that dominant power might one day have to

bend “to the slipping of the sand.”

1 Virginia Woolf, letter, 1 January 1933, in

Nigel Nicolson, ed., The Sickle Side of the

Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5,

1932–1935 (London: Hogarth Press, 1979).

2 Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967),

reprinted in Art and Objecthood (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1998), 167.

3 Francis Alÿs, interview with the author,

Mexico City, 2005. An edited version of the

interview appears in Francis Alÿs (London:

Phaidon, 2007). All further quotations from

Alÿs are drawn from this interview unless

otherwise indicated.

4 Jean-Louis Barrault, “The Rehearsal The

Performance” (1946), Yale French Studies 5

(1950): 3.

5 Alÿs, “Fragments of a Conversation in Bue-

nos Aires,” in Francis Alÿs: A Story of

Deception (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2006), 99.

6 Alÿs, quoted by Corinne Diserns, “La Cour

des Miracles,” in Francis Alÿs: Walking Dis-

tance from the Studio (Wolfsburg:

Kunstmuseum, 2004), 139.

7 Alÿs, in Francis Alÿs: The Liar, the Copy of the

Liar (Guadalajara: Arena; and Garza García:

Galería Ramis Barquet, 1994), 43.

8 In Alÿs, Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio/

Walking Distance From the Studio (Mexico

City: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso,

2006), 26.

9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday

Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1984), 107.

10 Harry S. Truman, inaugural address, 20

January 1949, published in Inaugural

Addresses of the Presidents of the United States

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1989).

11 Carlos Monsiváis, “Millenarianisms in

Mexico,” in Mexican Postcards, trans. John

Kraniauskas (London: Verso, 1997), 136.

12 “Maximum Effort, Minimum Result,” in

Alÿs and Cuauhtémoc Medina, When Faith

Moves Mountains (Madrid: Turner, 2005), 178.

13 Alÿs, in Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio,

68.

14 Alÿs, in Saul Anton, “A Thousand Words:

Francis Alÿs Talks About When Faith Moves

Mountains,” Artforum (summer 2002): 147.

15 Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Dandyism

(1844), trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York:

PAJ, 1988), 53, note. The dandy may not

be the first figure that comes to mind in con-

nection with Alÿs, who is never overdressed.

But then as Barbey d’Aurevilly also wrote,

“One may be a dandy in creased clothes….

Incredible though it may seem, the Dandies

once had a fancy for torn clothes.” (31, note.)

Baudelaire is said to have scuffed up his suits

lest they look too new. See Charles Baude-

laire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other

Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New

York: Da Capo, 1986), 27 n 2.

16 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

(1863), in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern

Life and Other Essays, 9.

17 Ibid.

18 Pablo Vargas Lugo, in Alÿs, Diez cuadras

alrededor del estudio, 54.

19 Alÿs, “Politics of Rehearsal,” in blueOrange

2004: Francis Alÿs (Berlin: Martin-Gropius-

Bau, 2004), 10.

20 Ibid.

21 Marcos, in Gabriel García Márquez and

Roberto Pombo, “The Punch Card and the

Hourglass: Interview with Subcommandante

Marcos,” New Left Review 9 (May–June

2001), first published in Revista Cambio

(Bogotá), 26 March 2001.

22 Alÿs, “Politics of Rehearsal,” 10.

23 Ibid.

24 Alÿs, quoted in Martin Herbert, “The

Distance Between: The Political Peregrina-

tions of Francis Alÿs,” Modern Painters (March

2007): 87.

25 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday

Life,131.

26 Alÿs, in David Torres, “Francis Alÿs, simple

passant, Just Walking the Dog,” Art Press

(April 2001): 23.

27 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,

131.

28 Alÿs, in Anton, “A Thousand Words,” 147.

29 Alÿs, in James Lingwood and Alÿs,

“Rumours,” in Alÿs, Seven Walks (2004–05)

(London: Artangel, 2005), 24.

30 Alÿs, in “Shoulder to Shoulder: A Conver-

sation between Gerardo Mosquera, Francis

Alÿs, Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc

Medina,” in Alÿs and Medina, When Faith

Moves Mountains, 68.

31 Alÿs, in Alÿs and Medina, When Faith

Moves Mountains, 18.

32 Alÿs, in Anton, “A Thousand Words,” 147.

following spreads:When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002In collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega16mm film transferred to video36 minutes

116

SELECTED ExHIBITION HISTORY and BIBLIOGRAPHY

2007

“Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political

and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become

Poetic,” David Zwirner, New York (exh. cat.)

“Francis Alÿs,” Museo de Arte, Lima

2006

“A Story of Deception, Patagonia 2003–2006,” Museo de

Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires (exh. cat.)

“A Story of Deception,” Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany

(exh. cat.)

“The Sign Painting Project (1993–1997): A Revision,”

Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland (exh. cat.)

“Black Box: Francis Alÿs,” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture

Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

“Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio,” Antiguo Colegio de

San Ildefonso, Mexico City

2005

“Francis Alÿs: (to be continued) 1992–,” Artspace, Auckland,

New Zealand

“Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political

and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become

Poetic,” The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

“Seven Walks,” Artangel and National Portrait Gallery,

London (exh. cat.)

Born 1959, Antwerp, Belgium; lives in Mexico City

eDUcAtion

Institut d’Architecture, Tournai, Belgium, 1978–83

Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice, Italy, 1983–86

solo eXhiBitions

2004

“Walking Distance from the Studio,” Kunstmuseum,

Wolfsburg, Germany; traveled to Musée des Beaux-Arts,

Nantes, France; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona,

Spain (exh. cat.); and Museo de San Idelfonso, Mexico

City (exh. cat.)

“The Prophet,” Lambert Collection, Musée d’Art

Contemporain, Avignon, France

“BlueOrange 2004: Francis Alÿs,” Martin-Gropius-Bau,

Berlin (exh. cat.)

2003

“Francis Alÿs: La obra pictória, 1992–2002,” Centro

nazionale per le arti contemporanee, Rome; traveled

to Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland; and Museo Nacional

Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (exh. cat.: Francis

Alÿs: The Prophet and the Fly)

“The Leak,” Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

2002

“Francis Alÿs: The Modern Procession, Project 76,” The

Museum of Modern Art, New York (exh. cat.)

“Matrix.2,” Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea,

Turin, Italy

“Walking a Painting,” The Project, Los Angeles

“When Faith Moves Mountains/Cuando la fe mueve

montañas,” 3 Bienal Iberoamericana, Lima (exh. cat.)

126 127

2007

“The Eventual,” FRAC Bourgogne, Burgundy, France

“Mapping the City,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

“Dibujos animados,” Fundación ICO, Madrid

“Commitment,” Cultural Center, Strombeek, Belgium

“Doppelgänger,” Marco Museum, Vigo, Spain

LII Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (exh. cat.)

“Idylle,” National Gallery, Prague; traveled to Domus Artium

2002, Salamanca, Spain

“Acquisitions of the Collection,” Tate Modern, London

“La era de la discrepancia,” Museo Universitario de

Ciencias y Arte, Mexico City

2006

“A Show of Prints,” James Kelly Contemporary, Santa Fe

“Ideal City/Invisible Cities,” Zamosc, Poland; traveled

to Potsdam, Germany

“Snafu: Medien, Mythen, Mind Control,” Kunsthalle,

Hamburg, Germany

“Watch Out,” Beaumontpublic, Luxembourg

“Raconte-moi/Tell me,” Casino Luxembourg, Forum d’art

contemporain, Luxembourg

“Faces of a Collection,” Kunsthalle, Mannheim, Germany

“Dark Places,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica,

California

“MODERN©ITE # II,” Le Grand Café, Centre d’Art

Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire, France

“Satellite of Love,” Witte de With, Rotterdam, The

Netherlands; traveled to TENT Center for Visual Arts,

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“Die 90er,” Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen, Germany

“Tokyo Blossoms: Deutsche Bank Collection Meets Zaha

Hadid,” Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

“Bin Beschaftigt,” Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen,

Germany

“Version animée,” Centre pour l’image contemporaine,

Geneva, Switzerland

“Printemps de septembre 2006,” Les Abattoirs–Fonds

Regional d’Art Contemporain Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse,

France

“Sisyphe,” Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand Hornu,

Hornu, Belgium

2005

“Small Pictures,” The Cartin Collection, Hartford,

Connecticut

“Monopolis–Antwerp,” Witte de With, Rotterdam,

The Netherlands

“Performa 05: The First Biennial of New Visual Art

Performance,” New York

“Rock: Daros Latin American Collection,” Irish Museum

of Modern Art, Dublin

“Goetz Meets Falckenberg: Works from the Goetz Collection

and the Falckenberg Collection,” Sammlung

Falckenberg, Hamburg, Germany

“Early Work,” David Zwirner, New York

“EindhovenIstanbul,” Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,

The Netherlands (exh. cat.)

“Ecstasy: In and About Altered States,” The Museum of

Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (exh. cat.)

“Strata: Difference and Repetition,” Fondazione Davide

Halevim, Milan, Italy

“War Is Over 1945–2005: The Freedom of Art from Picasso

to Warhol and Cattelan,” Galleria d’Arte Moderna,

Bergamo, Italy (exh. cat.)

“Crowd of the Person,” Contemporary Museum, Baltimore

“Farsites: Urban Crisis and Domestic Symptoms in Recent

Contemporary Art—inSite 2005,” San Diego Museum

of Art, San Diego

“General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art 1987–2005,”

CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts,

San Francisco

“Roaming Memories,” Ludwig Forum für Internationale

Kunst, Aachen, Germany

“Here Comes the Sun,” Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall,

Stockholm

“Desenhos: A–Z,” Porta 33, Madeira, Portugal

Glasgow International, Glasgow, Scotland

“Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video,” Miami

Art Central, Miami

GRoUP eXhiBitions

2001

“Francis Alÿs,” Musée Picasso, Antibes, France (exh. cat.)

“1-866-FREE-MATRIx,” Wadsworth Atheneum Museum

of Art, Hartford, Connecticut

“L’attente,” Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, Switzerland

“Amores Perros vs. Camera in Collaboration with Alejandro

González Iñárritu,” Kunst-Werke, Berlin

“Douglas Gordon. Francis Alÿs,” Lisson Gallery, London

2000

“Francis Alÿs: The Last Clown,” Fundació “la Caixa”,

Barcelona, Spain (exh. cat.); traveled to Gallery at

University of Québec, Montréal, Canada; and Plug In

Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada

(exh. cat.)

1999

“The Thief,” screensaver website project, Dia Center

for the Arts, New York

“Standby,” Lisson Gallery, London

“Drawings,” ACME, Los Angeles

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, Switzerland

Mario Flecha Galeria, Girona, Spain

1998

“Le temps du sommeil,” Contemporary Art Gallery,

Vancouver, Canada; traveled to Portland Institute

for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon

1997

“Francis Alÿs,” Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

Jack Tilton Gallery, New York

1996

ACME, Santa Monica, California

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Oaxaca, Mexico

“The Counterfeit Subject” (with Yishai Judisman), Boulder

Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado

1995

Opus Operandi, Ghent, Belgium

“El soplon,” Galeria Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil

(exh. cat.)

Jack Tilton Gallery, New York

1994

“The Liar/The Copy of the Liar,” Galería Ramis Barquet,

Monterrey, Mexico; traveled to Arena Mexico Arte

Contemporáneo, Guadalajara, Mexico (exh. cat.)

1992

Galería Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City

1991

Salón des Aztecas, Mexico City

128 129

“Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Fake Estates,’”

White Columns, New York, and Queens Museum of

Art, Queens, New York (exh. cat.)

“Police,” Landesgalerie am Oberösterreichischen

Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria

“Point of View: A Contemporary Anthology of the Moving

Image,” Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell

University, Ithaca, New York

“Theorema: Une collection privée en Italie, la collection

d’Enea Righi,” Collection Lambert, Avignon, France

“What’s New Pussycat?,” Museum für Moderne Kunst,

Frankfurt, Germany

“25: Twenty-Five Years of the Deutsche Bank Collection,”

Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (exh. cat.)

“Realit;-)t,” Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Pfäffikon, Switzerland

2004

“Time Zones: Recent Film and Video,” Tate Modern,

London

“Dedicated to the Proposition,” Extra City, Center

for Contemporary Art, Antwerp

2004 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art,

Pittsburgh

“Who if not we should at least try to imagine the future

of all this?,” BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht,

The Netherlands

“Uses of the Image: Photography, Film and Video in the

Jumex Collection,” Colección Costantini, Museo de Arte

Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires

“30 Años Galeria Luisa Strina,” Galeria Luisa Strina,

São Paulo, Brazil

“Hypermedia,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport

Beach, California

“Die zehn Gebote,” Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden,

Germany

“On Reason and Emotion,” 14th Biennale, Sydney, Australia

(exh. cat.)

“20/20 Vision,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

“Communaute 1+2,” Institut d’art contemporain,

Villeurbanne, France

“Densité ± 0,” FRI-ART Centre d’Art Contemporain,

Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; traveled to Ecole

nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris

“Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image,”

New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; traveled

to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

“Soziale Kreaturen: Wie Körper Kunst wird,” Sprengel

Museum, Hannover, Germany

“Collección de fotografia contemporánea,” Fundación

Telefónica, Madrid; traveled to Museo de Arte

Contemporánea, Vigo, Spain

“Made in Mexico,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston;

traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

(exh. cat.)

“Artist’s Choice: Mona Hatoum, Here Is Elsewhere,” MOMA

QNS—The Museum of Modern Art, Long Island City,

New York

“Cordially Invited,” Centraal Museum, Utrecht,

The Netherlands

“O zero,” Officinal para Proyectos de Arte, Guadalajara,

Mexico

Triennale Poligráfica, San Juan, Puerto Rico

“Gelegenheit und Reue” (with Rafael Ortega), Kunstverein,

Graz, Austria

“Los usos de la imagen: Fotografia, film y video en La

Colección Jumex,” Fundación Telefónica and Museo

de Art Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires (exh. cat.)

26th São Paulo Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil

“Dimension Folly,” Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea,

Trento, Italy

“Gegen den Strich,” Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden,

Germany

“Communauté II,” Institut d’Art Contemporain,

Villeurbanne, France

“Communauté,” Institut d’Art Contemporain,

Villeurbanne, France

“Treble,” Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York

“Edén,” Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City;

traveled to Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá

“Nouvelles Collections,” CentrePasquArt, Biel, Switzerland

“Revolving Doors,” Fundación Telefonica, Madrid

“Elsewhere, here,” Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville

de Paris, Paris

“Moving Pictures: A Video Installation Survey,” Artcore/

Fabrice Marcolini, Toronto, Canada

“Faces in the Crowd: Image of Modern Life from Manet

to Today,” Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; traveled

to Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea,

Turin, Italy

2003

“Outlook: International Art Exhibition Athens 2003,”

Arena–Society for the Advancement of Contemporary

Art in Athens, Athens (exh. cat.)

“Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and

Video,” International Center of Photography, New York

(exh. cat.)

“Terror Chic,” Galerie Sprüth Magers, Munich, Germany

“The Distance Between Me and You,” Lisson Gallery,

London

“Stretch: Artists from Canada, USA, Mexico, Cuba,

Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil,” The Power Plant,

Toronto, Canada

“Somewhere Better Than This Place: Alternative Social

Experience,” Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

“In Light,” Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada

LisboaPhoto, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon

“Peter Kilchmann,” Vacio 9, Madrid

4th Bienal de Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brazil

“Szenenwechsel,” Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt,

Germany

Bienal, Jafre, Spain

“Multitudes–Solitudes,” Museion—Museum of Modern

and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy

“The Labyrinthine Effect,” The Australian Center for

Contemporary Art, Southbank, Australia

“Art>Panama–Radical International Urban Art Event,”

Panama City

“Killing Time and Listening between the Lines,”

La Colección Jumex, Mexico City

“el aire es azul/the air is blue,” Casa Museo Luis Barragán,

Mexico City

“Animation,” Kunst-Werke, Berlin

“Mexico City: Eine Ausstellung über die Wechselkurse

von Körpern und Werten,” Kunst-Werke, Berlin

“Mexico: Sensitive Negotiations,” The Institute of Mexico

in Miami, Miami

“Inter.Play,” The Moore Building, Miami

Shanghai Biennale 2002, Shanghai, China

“Extra Art: A Survey of Artists’ Ephemera,” Institute

of Contemporary Arts, London

“Structures of Difference,” Wadsworth Atheneum Museum

of Art, Hartford, Connecticut

“20 Million Mexicans Can’t Be Wrong,” South London

Gallery, London; traveled to John Hansard Gallery,

Southhampton, England

“Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of

Bodies and Values,” P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center,

Long Island City, New York; traveled to Kunst-Werke,

Berlin; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City

“Multiplicity/Cuidad Multiple,” Panama City

“Imágenes en movimiento/Moving Pictures,” Solomon

R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; traveled to Museo

Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain

“fast forward: Media Art, Sammlung Goetz,” Zentrum für

Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany;

traveled to Centro Cultural Conde Duque and Museo

Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid (exh. cat.)

2002

“Hello There!,” Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich,

Switzerland

“Super Studio,” Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris

“En Route,” Serpentine Gallery, London

“Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions,”

San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California

The 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art, Vilnius

“Sunday Afternoon,” 303 Gallery, New York

“in aktion–performance heute,” Kunstverein, Hamburg,

Germany

130 131

2001

“Videoserie in der Black Box: 6 Künstler–6 Positionen,”

Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany

“Unexpected Encounters,” Galleria Prisma, Bolzano, Italy

“A Walk to the End of the World,” The Foksal Gallery

Foundation, Warsaw

“Höhere Wesen befahlen: Anders Malen!,” SMART Project

Space, Amsterdam

“Loop,” Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich,

Germany; traveled to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center,

Long Island City, New York

“The Big Show,” New International Cultural Center,

Antwerp, Belgium (exh. cat.)

7th International Biennial on the Run, Istanbul

“God Is in the Details: Films et vidéos d’animation,” Centre

d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland

“Looking at You: Kunst Provokation Unterhaltung Video,”

Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany

“Francis Alÿs/Rafael Ortega, Pierre Huyghe, Beat Streuli,

and Gillian Wearing,” Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England

“Squatters,” Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; traveled to

Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“Black Box,” Kunstmuseum, Bern

IL Biennale, Venice, Italy

Galleria Prisma, Bolzano, Italy

“Da Aversida de Vivemos, Lateinamerikanische Künstler,”

Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

“Cuentos patria (Multiplication of the Sheep),” Sammlung

Goetz, Munich, Germany

“Do You Have Time?,” LieberMagnan Gallery, New York

“Painting at the Edge of the World,” Walker Art Center,

Minneapolis

“Exploding Cinema/Cinema without Walls,” Boijmans van

Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“Drawings,” ACME, Los Angeles; traveled to

sommercontemporaryart, Tel Aviv, Israel

2000

“Tout le Temps/Every Time,” Biennale, Montréal, Canada

“Mixing Memory and Desire—Wunsch und Erinnerung,”

Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland

“Erste Arbeiten bei Kilchmann,” Galerie Peter Kilchmann,

Zürich, Switzerland

“Making Time,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach;

traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

(exh. cat.)

“Age of Influence: Reflections in the Mirror of American

Culture,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

“Dream Machines,” Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee,

Scotland; traveled to Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield,

England; and Camden Arts Centre, London

“Dirty Realism,” Robert Pearre Fine Art, Tucson

“Urban Hymns,” Harriet and Charles Luckman Fine Arts

Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles

“Out of Space,” Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany

“9 Kean Street,” Lisson Gallery, London

“Latin America,” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte

Reina Sofía, Madrid

“residue,” Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna

7th Biennial, Havana

“Fuori Uso 2000,” The Bridges, Pescara, Italy

“Art 21/00,” Section Art Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland

International Contemporary Art Biennial, Ekeby Qvarn

Art Space, Uppsala, Sweden

“Europe: Different Perspectives Painting,” Museo Michetti,

Francavilla al Mare, Italy

“Versiones del Sur,” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte

Reina Sofía, Madrid

1999

“Mirror’s Edge,” BildMuseet, Umeå, Sweden; traveled to

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Castello

di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy;

Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; and Carrillo Gil Museum,

Mexico City

“The passion and the wave,” 6th International Biennial,

Istanbul

“Reality and Desire,” Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona,

Spain

xLVIII Biennale, Venice, Italy

1st International Biennial, Melbourne, Australia

“Drawn By,” Metro Pictures, New York

“Thinking Aloud,” Hayward Gallery, London

“Stimuli,” Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“go away: Artists and Travel,” Royal College of Art Galleries,

London

“Rewriting the City,” Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard

College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Mario Flecha Galeria, Girona, Spain

“drawings,” ACME, Los Angeles

1998

“Roteiros,” xxIV Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil

“Insertions,” Arkipelag, Stockholm

“Loose Threads,” Serpentine Gallery, London

1er Salon Internacional de Pintura, Museo de la Ciudad

de Mexico, Mexico City

“Longitude de Onda,” M.A.O., Caracas

III Bienal Barro de America, Caracas

“Imaginarios Mexicanos,” Musée de la civilisation,

Quebec City, Canada

“Mexcellente,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,

San Francisco

“Situacionismo,” Fotoseptiembre, Galeria OMR,

Mexico City

“Play Mode,” Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine

“Cinco continentes y una ciudad,” Museo de la Ciudad

de Mexico, Mexico City

Galeria Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil

Museo Regional, Guadalajara, Mexico

1997

inSITE 97, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego,

and Centro Cultural, Tijuana, Mexico

“Antechamber,” Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

“Body Double,” Winston Wächter Gallery, New York

“Addenda,” Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium

Primera Biennial Tridimensional, Mexico City

2nd Biennial, Saarema, Estonia

“Asi està la cosa,” Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo,

Mexico City

1996

“NowHere,” Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen (exh. cat.)

“Latin American Contemporary Artists,” R. Barquet/

R. Miller, New York

“Pittura,” Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea,

Turin, Italy

Galeria Froment & Putman, Paris

“Interiors: Francis Alÿs, Kevin Appel, Robin Tewes,”

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles

1995

“Longing and Belonging,” SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe

“This Is My World…,” ACME, Santa Monica, California

Espace 251 Nord, Liege, Belgium

1994

Foodhouse, Santa Monica, California

V Bienal, Havana

Galeria OMR, Mexico City

1993

“Lesa Natura,” Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

1992

“México Hoy,” Casa de las Américas, Madrid

“Rueda como naturaleza,” Instituto Cultural Cabañas,

Guadalajara, Mexico

Espace L’Escaut, Brussels

1991

Galería Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City

Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio

Latitude 53 Gallery, Edmonton, Canada

133solo-eXhiBition cAtAloGUes & MonoGRAPhs

BlueOrange 2004: Francis Alÿs. Berlin: Martin-Gropius-

Bau, 2004. Texts by Alÿs, Hubert Beck, Klaus Biesenbach,

Christopher Pleister, and Luminita Sabau.

Francis Alÿs. Antibes, France: Musée Picasso Antibes, 2001.

Francis Alÿs. Lima: Museo de Arte, 2007.

Francis Alÿs. London: Phaidon, 2007. Texts by Alÿs, Russell

Ferguson, Jean Fisher, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and

Augusto Monterroso.

Francis Alÿs: La obra pictoria, 1992–2002. Rome: Centro

nazionale per le arti contemporanee, 2003.

Francis Alÿs: Le temps du sommeil. Vancouver, Canada:

Contemporary Art Gallery, 1998. Text by Kitty Scott.

Francis Alÿs: The Last Clown. Barcelona, Spain: Fundació

“la Caixa,” 2000. Text by David G. Torres.

Francis Alÿs: The Last Clown. Montréal, Canada: Galerie

de l’UQAM, 2000. Text by Michèle Thériault.

Francis Alÿs: The Modern Procession. New York: Public

Art Fund, 2004. Texts by Tom Eccles et al.

Francis Alÿs: The Prophet and the Fly. Rome: Turner, 2003.

Texts by Alÿs and Catherine Lampert.

Francis Alÿs: Walking Distance from the Studio. Ostfildern,

Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005. Text by Annelie Lutgens

et al.

Francis Alÿs: Walks/Paseos. Mexico City: Museo de Arte

Moderno, 1997. Texts by Alÿs, Bruce Ferguson, and

Ivo Mequita.

The Liar, The Copy of the Liar. Monterrey, Mexico: Galería

Ramis Barquet; and Guadalajara, Mexico: Arena Mexico

Arte Contemporáneo, 1994. Text by Thomas McEvilley.

Projects 76. Francis Alÿs: Modern Procession. New York:

The Museum of Modern Art, 2002.

Seven Walks (2004–05). London: Artangel and National

Portrait Gallery, 2005. Texts by Alÿs, Robert Harbison,

James Lingwood, and David Toop.

Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and

Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.

New York: David Zwirner, 2007.

A Story of Deception / Patagonien 2003–2006. Frankfurt,

Germany: Portikus and Revolver, 2006.

A Story of Deception / Historia de un desengaño. Patagonia

2003–2006. Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte

Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2006. Texts by Alÿs,

Eduardo F. Costantini, Olivier Debroise, and Marcelo

E. Pacheco.

Walking Distance from the Studio. Mexico City: Antiguo

Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2006. Text by Cuauhtémoc

Medina.

When Faith Moves Mountains. Madrid: Turner, 2005.

Texts by Susan Buck-Morss, Gustavo Buntinx, Lynne

Cooke, Corinne Diserens, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and

Gerardo Mosquera.

Study for Déjà Vu, 2000Oil and pencil on tracing paper16 1⁄8 × 11 3⁄8 inches

134 135

Alberge, Dalya. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Peacock.”

The Times (London), 6 June 2001, 1, 17.

Alÿs. Francis. “The Loop.” Untitled, no. 16 (summer 1998):

4–7.

———. “The Modern Procession.” Artforum (September

2002): 44, 170–71.

“Ambulantes.” Art Press, no. 306 (November 2004): 9.

“Antibes, Picasso Museum.” Printemps (summer 2001).

Anton, Saul. “A Thousand Words: Francis Alÿs Talks About

When Faith Moves Mountains.” Artforum (summer 2002):

146–47.

Anton, Saul. “One More Step.” Parkett, no. 69 (2003): 34–45.

Aranda Marquez, Carlos. “Frequent Stops: Carrillo Gil

Museum, Mexico City.” Flash Art 32, no. 208 (October

1999): 61.

Arriola, Magali. “Francis Alÿs: The Liar and the Copy

of the Liar.” ArtNexus, no. 28 (June 1998).

———. “Beaux Gestes.” Art Review 3, no. 10 (October–

November 2005): 111–13.

“Art: Performa05.” The New Yorker (14 November 2005): 22.

“Auf Plateausohlen zur Menschheit.” Kunst-Bulletin,

nos. 7–8 (September 2001): 12–17.

Bail, Ralf. “Kurze Geschichte eines langen Schlafes.” Kunst-

Bulletin, no. 5 (May 2003): 34–37.

Balcells, María José. “Reviews: Francis Alÿs: Museu d’Art

Contemporani.” Flash Art (October 2005): 129.

Basualdo, Carlos. “Head to Toes: Francis Alÿs’s Paths of

Resistance.” Artforum (April 1999): 104–07.

Becker, Christoph. “Veränderungen in der Sammlung:

Schwestern treffen Bruder.” Kunsthaus Zürich Magasin,

no. 4 (October 2004).

Benitez Dueñas, Issa Maria. “Francis Alÿs: Hypotheses for a

Walk.” ArtNexus, no. 35 (April–September 2000): 48–53.

———. “Francis Alÿs: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte

Reina Sofía.” ArtNexus, no. 50 (July–September 2003):

135–36.

Bergflodt, Torbjorn. “In Schraglage.” Südkurier,

22 April 2003, 10.

Bhatnagar, Priya, et al. “Focus Mexico.” Flash Art

(July–September 2002): 86.

“La Biennale di Istanbul.” Flash Art, no. 218 (October–

November 1999): 55.

Biesenbach, Klaus. “Hunting Men Hunting Dogs: Fear and

Loathing in Mexico City.” Flash Art (July–September

2002): 82–85.

Bishop, Claire. “Kept in the Dark.” Evening Standard,

22 May 2001.

Boase, Gair. “Faces in the Crowd: Whitechapel Gallery.”

Flash Art 38 (March–April 2005): 58.

Bohlen, Celestine. “Making a Spectacle of MOMA’s Big

Move.” International Herald Tribune, 29 June 2002, 6.

Bonami, Francesco. “The Legacy of a Myth Maker.”

Tate Etc. (spring 2005).

“Boss Prize Short List.” The New York Times, 11 January

2002.

Brodeur, Michael Andor. “Mexico’s Influence on

Contemporary Art.” Boston Weekly Dig (January 2004).

Buchloh, Benjamin. “Control, By Design.” Artforum

(September 2001): 162–63.

Buck, Louisa. “Soldiers as Social Allegory [interview with

Francis Alÿs].” Art Newspaper 14 (October 2005): 36.

Calera-Grobet, Antonio. “Todo lo que entendi o malen-

tendi alrededor de la obra de Francis Alÿs.” Arte al día,

no. 27 (April–May 2006).

Campbell-Johnston, Rachel. “Neither Foxes nor

Commuters Can Evade the Chase by Security Camera.”

The Times, 29 September 2005, 19.

Cerio, Gregory. “Contemporary Art: The New Blue Chips.”

Home & Garden (January 2006): 92–93, 116.

Chaplin, Julia. “Art on the Edge in Mexico City.” The New

York Times, 25 June 2006.

———. “Contemporary Art: In Mexico City, an Edgy (and

Busy) Art Scene Emerges.” International Herald Tribune,

26 June 2006.

Charpenel, Patrick, and Maria Minera. “5 Piezas

fundamentals del arte contemporáneo en Mexico segun

Patrick Charpenel.” dF por Travesías, no. 48 (April 2006).

Art Works: Place. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.

Texts by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar.

Carnegie International. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art,

2004. Texts by Laura Hoptman et al.

Cinema Without Walls. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: 30th

International Rotterdam Film Festival, 2000.

Ecstasy: In and About Altered States. Los Angeles:

The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005. Texts by

Paul Schimmel et al.

Edén. Mexico City: La Colección Jumex, 2004. Edited

by Patricia Martin.

EindhovenIstanbul. Eindhoven, The Netherlands:

Van Abbemuseum, 2005. Texts by Kerryn Greenberg

and Eva Meyer-Hermann.

Goetz Meets Falckenberg. Hamburg, Germany:

Kulturstiftung Phoenix Art, 2005.

Made in Mexico. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art,

2004. Text by Gilbert Vicario.

Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates.”

New York: Cabinet Books; Queens, New York: Queens

Museum of Art; and New York: White Columns, 2005.

Edited by Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances

Richard. Texts by Jeffrey A. Kroessler and Richard.

Other People’s Cities, Other People’s Work. São Paulo, Brazil:

Galeria Camergo Vilaça, 1995. Text by Kurt Hollander.

Parkett: 20 Years of Artists’ Collaborations. Zürich,

Switzerland: Kunsthaus and Parkett Publishers, 2004.

Text by Mirjam Varadinis.

Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video.

New York: International Center for Photography; and

Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag. 2003. Texts by Walter

Benjamin, Georg Simmel, et al.

Tercera Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima. Lima: Municipalidad

Metropolitana de Lima, 2002.

Tokyo Blossoms: Deutsche Bank Collection Meets Zaha

Hadid. Frankfurt, Germany: Deutsche Bank Art, 2006.

Texts by Ariane Grigoteit, Toshio Hara, Tessen von

Heydebreck, Christiane Meixner, Jonathan Napack,

and Mark Rappolt.

25. Twenty-five Years of the Deutsche Bank Collection.

Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Deutsche Bank Art, 2005.

Texts by Ariane Grigoteit et al.

Los usos de la imagen: Fotografía, film y video en

La Colección Jumex. Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte

Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, La Fundación/

Colección Jumex, and Espacio Fundación Telefónica,

2004. Texts by Carlos Basualdo et al.

WAR IS OVER: 1945–2005. The Freedom of Art from Picasso

to Warhol and Cattelan. Milan, Italy: Silvana Editoriale;

and Bergamo, Italy: Galleria d’Arte Moderna, 2005.

Edited by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and M. Cristina

Rodeschini Galati.

GRoUP-eXhiBition cAtAloGUes & otheR PUBlicAtions ARticles AnD ReVieWs

136 137

Colombo, Paolo. “A Silent Presence.” Tema Celeste, no. 102

(March–April 2004): 70–75.

Comer, Stuart. “London.” Artforum (December 2005):

227–29.

Cooke, Lynne. “Venice Biennale.” The Burlington Magazine

143, no. 1182 (September 2001): 589–90.

———. “Best of 2004: 13 Top Tens.” Artforum 43

(December 2004).

Cotter, Holland. “Thoughtful Wanderings of a Man with

a Can.” The New York Times, 13 March 2007, E1, E3.

Cowan, Amber. “Move Any Mountain.” Sleazenation

(October 2002).

Craddock, Sacha. “In and Out of the Sun.” Untitled, no. 21

(spring 2000): 26–27.

“Critic’s Choice.” Time Out London (12 October 2005): 43.

Crowley, Tom. “Mexico City on the Move.” Tema Celeste,

no. 97 (May–June 2003): 22–35.

Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, Geoffrey. “Francis Alÿs.”

The Brooklyn Rail (April 2007).

Cruwell, Konstanze. “Steine im Wasser ziehen Kreise.”

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 September 2006.

“Culture Criticism: Francis Alÿs’ The Nightwatch.”

The Guardian, 5 October 2005, 21.

Dailey, Meghan. “Mexico City: An Exhibition About

the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values.” Artforum

(November 2002): 180.

Darling, Michael. “Francis Alÿs and the Return to

Normality.” Frieze (March–April 1997): 50.

Darwent, Charles. “Art Review: Lisson Gallery @ 9 Kean

Street.” Metro (28 April 2000).

Debroise, Olivier. “The Loop: Diary of a Drifting.” Exit,

no. 19 (August–October 2005).

DeVuono, Frances. “Tout le Temps/Every Time: La

Biennale de Montreal.” New Art Examiner 28, no. 7 (April

2001): 22–25.

Diez, Renato. “Hugo Boss Prize.” Arte, no. 376 (December

2004).

Dorment, Richard. “Medium Well Done.” The Daily

Telegram, 17 May 2000.

Dorn, Anja. “Out of Space.” Frieze, no. 55 (2001): 115–16.

“Douglas Gordon and Francis Alÿs, London.” The Guardian

Guide, 12–18 May 2001.

Edwards, C. “Muralists, No!” Art Review (September

2002): 44.

Emerling, Susan. “Ecstasy: In and Out of Altered States.”

Border Crossings (March 2006): 123.

Escalante, Gabriel. “Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio:

Francis Alÿs en el Colegio de San Ildefonso.” Rim

Magazine, no. 8 (spring 2006).

Fallon, Michael. “Minneapolis.” Art Papers 25, no. 4

(July–August 2001): 51.

Ferguson, Bruce. “Francis Alÿs.” Flash Art (May–June 1996).

“Francis Alÿs: Doppelganger.” Tate (spring 2001): 46–49.

“Francis Alÿs: The Modern Procession.” In > process 10,

no. 3 (2002): 18.

Frankel, David. “Painting at the Edge of the World.”

Contemporary Visual Art (2001): 86.

“Frontier.” Architectural Design 69, nos. 7–8 (1999): 62–65.

Funcke, Bettina. “Francis Alÿs: Martin-Gropius-Bau/

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.” Artforum 43, no. 4 (December

2004): 208.

Gallo, Rubén. “Francis Alÿs at Jack Tilton.” Flash Art

(January–February 1998): 53.

———. “Francis Alÿs.” ArtNexus, no. 27 (March 1998).

———, Magali Arriola, and Issa Maria Benítez Dueñas.

“Flashback: Francis Alÿs.” ArtNexus 51, no. 2 (December

2003–February 2003): 192.

Gardener, Bellinda Grace. “Wolfsburg/Berlin: Francis Alÿs.”

Kunstzeitung, no. 98 (October 2004).

Garrette, Craig. “Multiplecity: Revolution on Panama.”

Flash Art, no. 230 (May–June 2003).

“Gegen den strich: Neue Formen der Zeichnung in der

Staatlichen Kunsthalle.” Kunst-Bulletin, nos. 7–8 (July–

August 2004).

“Ghetto Collector.” Parkett, no. 69 (2003): 58–59.

Gili, Jaime. “Francis Alÿs at the Lisson Gallery, London.”

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“Glaube versetzt Berge.” Berliner Zeitung, 20 February 2004.

Gleadell, Colin. “Contemporary Sales Set All-Time Records.”

ArtNews (January 2006): 84.

Glover, Michael. “Francis Alÿs.” ArtNews (April 2000): 175.

Godfrey, Mark. “Walking the Line.” Artforum 44, no. 9 (May

2006): 261–67.

“Goings on About Town: Francis Alÿs.” The New Yorker

(19 March 2007): 40.

Goldberg, RoseLee. “Be Here Now.” Contemporary,

no. 89 (2006).

Gopnik, Blake. “Here & Now.” The Washington Post,

23 July 2006, N2.

Green, Charles. “Signs of Life.” Artforum (September

1999): 178.

———. “The Labyrinthine Effect.” Artforum 42,

no. 4 (December 2003): 158.

Gronlund, Melissa. “Mexico City: An Exhibition About

the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values.” Contemporary

(September 2002): 89.

Guilbaut, Serge. “Rodney Graham and Francis Alÿs.”

Parachute, no. 87 (spring 1997).

Güner, Fisun. “Art Review: Douglas Gordon and Francis

Alÿs.” Metro Life, 17 May 2001.

———. “Everyday Drive-By Shooting.” Metro Life,

23 September 2002, 26.

Hackworth, Nick. “Francis Alÿs: Seven Walks.” The Evening

Standard, 29 September 2005, 36.

Heiser, Jörg. “Walk on the Wild Side.” Frieze, no. 69

(September 2002): 70–73.

Herbert, Martin. “Francis Alÿs.” Time Out London

(19 January 2000).

———. “Francis Alÿs.” Time Out London (13 June 2000).

———. “The Distance Between: The Political Peregrinations

of Francis Alÿs.” Modern Painters (March 2007): 84.

Herzog, Samuel. “Im Wunderland.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung

(March 2003).

Hollander, Kurt. “Francis Alÿs.” Flash Art, no. 179

(November–December 1994): 99.

Hollersen, Wiebke. “Weit weg von der Toskana.” Berliner

Zeitung, 30 August 2004.

Huberman, Anthony. “Missing in Action.” Art Review

(November 2005): 116–19.

“Ich will ein Zeichen setzen.” Art Hamburg, no. 11

(November 2004).

Iles, Chrissie. “Film Best of 2005.” Artforum 44, no. 4

(December 2005): 58.

“International Shorts Preview: Athlete’s Foot.” Artforum

(May 2000).

Irving, Mark. “A Walk on the Wild Side.” The Times,

24 September 2005, 37.

Jasper, Martin. “Das Soziale als offene Wunde.”

Braunschweiger Zeitung, 3 March 2004.

Jeffett, William. “A Note on Francis Alÿs.” NY Arts Magazine

(July–August 2000): 11.

Jentleson, Katherine. “AI Reviews: Art in Israel.”

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5 February 2004.

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24 October 1997.

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Jusidman, Yishai. “Francis Alÿs, Galería Ramis Barquet.”

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137–38.

Karcher, Eva. “Elektriker, Schlachter, Tourist.” Suddeutsche

Zeitung, 31 March 2003.

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138 139

Knight, Christopher. “Mexico Joins Global Club.” Geo Topic

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2000): 100, 102.

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no. 87 (November 2003).

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———. “Art on Parade.” Art Monthly, no. 280 (October

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———. “Francis Alÿs.” Art Monthly, no. 291 (November

2005): 27–28.

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———. “Recent Political Forms: Radical Pursuits in Mexico/

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———. “Mexican Strategies: Rarefied Painting.” Flash Art

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———. “Zones of Tolerance: Teresa Margolies, SEMEFO

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“Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rate of

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“Mexiko City.” Tema Celeste, no. 94 (November–December

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“Nine to Five: Das Protokoll eines Künstleralltags.” Monopol,

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“Painting the Town—Live from New York: Performa 2005.”

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———. “A Dog’s Life.” Performance Research 5, no. 2 (2000):

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———. “Webscape.” Flash Art 33, no. 210 (January–

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———. “Streets and Gallery Walls: Interview with Francis

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———. “Die Arbeit des Künstlers ist das Reisen.” Die Welt,

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———. “Reinspaziert.” Züritipp, 28 February 2003.

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———. “La rivoluzione non siamo noi: Pierre Joseph et

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