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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
1
Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007)
138-155
Francis Alÿs: the clandestine way Pedestrian everyday under CCTV
or How to walk the path of least surveillance
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
2
-64 Coldstream Guards walk separately in the City of London
entering through
different streets and unaware of one another’s route.
-The guards wander through the City looking for one another.
-Upon meeting, they fall into step and march together looking
for more guards to
join up with.
-When a square of 8x8 guards is built, the complete formation
marches towards
the closest bridge.
-As they step onto the bridge, the guards break step and
disperse. 1
As for all cultural practices centred on the everyday, Francis
Alÿs body of work has for
many years been pointing to the question of how to deal with the
social. In his case, the
street and the city space have become the articulating points
around which aesthetic
actions have been performed, residues for an archive of the
daily life collected, and a
critical spatial poetic developed. But if there is one site
expansive enough to study the
everyday practice of Francis it is the city of London where his
pedestrian production took
off for a five years project entitled Seven Walks. Walking as a
form of social research
into the everyday, is at the core of the London project, and as
a strategy that allows for
the mixing of fiction, and empirical observation, it has the
advantage of always being a
work in progress. Crucially, working in the city commercial and
financial centres, raises
interesting issues to the problem of the everyday, partly due to
the technoscape of
surveillance and partly due to residues from other urban
paradigms that coexist in ways
not always visible.
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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In this text I will focus on a selection of these walks which
culminated with an exhibition
of all the collected material in an empty domestic mansion at 21
Portman Square, and a
video installation in the Main Hall of The National Portrait
Gallery, accompanied by
Francis’ book Seven Walks London, 2004-5 published by the
London-based arts agency
Artangel who commissioned the project. The publication balances
between an artist’s
book (with its emphasis on process and emerging typologies) and
an artist’s monograph
(characterised by the addition of third-party texts attempting
to elucidate such practice),
but of most interest is the unfolding of Francis’ working
methodologies.
Everyday theory
‘The everyday offers itself up as a problem, a contradiction, a
paradox: both
ordinary and extraordinary, self-evident and opaque, known and
unknown,
obvious and enigmatic.” 2
In the book Everyday Life and Cultural Theory Ben Highmore
(2002), outlines the three
axis common to theoretical approaches to the everyday. These
are: firstly, the
development of aesthetic strategies capable to go beyond the
cliché of the everyday to
expose/ reveal/ excavate the familiar and reveal the unfamiliar;
secondly, the
‘everydaying’ of the archive which consists not only in
enlarging the scope of what is
traditionally archivable but most crucially to keep the archive
as an everyday occurrence;
and thirdly, the development of a practical criticism in
attending to the everyday which
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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translates into a set of practices that somehow reverse the
usually ordering of
knowledge in such a way that what was background becomes
foreground, and the
everyday itself becomes the subject of interest.
Whistle challenging the everyday notion of daily life as tedious
and meaningless, the
critical approaches to the everyday embraced by authors such as
Georg Simmel, Walter
Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and the cultural
collectives of Surrealism
and Mass-Observation, became notorious for the methodologies
they developed to
research the unknown, the mysterious, the resistant and the
revolutionary in everyday
life. From this what emerged was a paradoxical picture of the
everyday as a site for both
the familiar and the unfamiliar and a terrain for research that
appears at the core of
Francis’ interests as well.
Unfamiliar aesthetics The first level at which this reoccurs is
precisely in the deploy of aesthetic devices and
representational forms to account for the common and the
uncommon, the proper and
the improper aspects of the everyday. Swapping the safe
institutional realm of fine art
and academia where questions of aesthetics have been for the
most part grounded, for
the uncertain terrain of daily life, art and critical theory
alike need to find forms of
representing the multisensorial character of the everyday, and
this means moving
beyond an ocularcentric and rationalist tradition to locate the
experience of modernity at
a sensory and non-rational level that includes the auditory, the
bodily, the unconscious
and the phantasmatic, the repressive as well as the
transformative.
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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It is within this first aesthetic concern that one can view
Francis’ use of walking as an
artistic strategy that allows for unexpected juxtapositions or
defamiliarising situations, for
example using the outdoor railings to produce sound –whilst
simultaneously poetically
unpacking all the spatial politics involved in the segmentation
of public space and the
accepted standards for proper behaviour in city squares. This
happens in the work
Railings (2004) produced in collaboration with Rafael Ortega,
presented at Portman
Square as a video projection of Francis walking with a stick in
his hand and running it
along the rails to produce a series of accompanying five sound
tracks (Fitzroy Square
3’30”, Sample I 1’40”, Sample II 2’50”, Onslow Gardens 1’40” and
Park Crescent 3’40”.)
In Francis’ words:
“The railings function as a kind of instrument, for example, a
free-standing railing
gives out a richer, longer sound than one grounded in concrete.
The architectural
rhythms had a lot to do with the choice of locations: railings/
column/ entrance/
column/ railings etc. By just walking and drumming a stick
against it, the details of
the architecture automatically generate a sound pattern (…) The
city is a kind of
interlocutor. It was just about listening to the music of the
city…The second stage
was to build some kind of archive of all the different
sonorities that the railings
and the architectural patterns could offer, a kind of
repertoire…Once that had
been done, the logical step was to start playing with the
instrument, to improvise,
to see how far this could get me.” 1
Trash archives
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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Francis’ usage of archives which is introduced in this extract
from a conversation
between him and James Lingwood (Artangel's co-director) brings
us to the second set of
issues problematised by conceptual approaches to the everyday-
that of a methodology
to collect and select the material to include in the archive of
everyday life. An archive of
city sound, based on Francis drumming of the railings might
include, as we’ve seen, all
the variations resulting from the interaction between the
architecture and the walker.
Another suggestion for what an archive of everyday life based on
the act of walking
might include is the project ‘A Personal Repertoire of Possible
Behaviours While Walking
the Streets in London Town’ (July 2005) presented as panels of
text and photography.
Listed under major headings such as To Take, To Make, or To
Alter, one can find a list
of behaviours related to the totality of the psychosomatic
experience:
TO TAKE -to collect, -to steal, -to name, -to document, -to
attract, -to look, - to ask, -to
beg, -to appropriate, -to kill, -to touch…
TO GIVE - to add, -to salute, -to lose, -to bring, -to name, -to
insert, -to spread, -to drop,
-to pee, -to sweat, -to cry, -to shit, -to smuggle, -to caress,
-to die, -to leak, -to fill, -to
dance, -to tag, -to laugh, -to waste…
TO RECEIVE: -to hear, -to feel, -to see, -to smell, -to
taste.
This perspective of the artistic practice as an archive of daily
life brings forward the
implications of dealing with not only the totality of sensory
realm, but also with the totality
of the material culture, including its dejects and in a sense
Francis work has been
punctuated by a trash aesthetics that has a lot in common with
the daily practice of the
ragpicker or the homeless, characters that he has come in
proximity through several of
his earlier works. For example, in ‘The Collector’- a piece
which resurfaced as a set of
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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postcards in 2001 at the exhibition Walk Ways (Portland
Institute for Contemporary Art)-
the following instructions could be read below a photo of
Francis walking a magnetised
collector: For an indeterminate period of time, the magnetised
collector takes a walk
through the streets and gradually builds up a coat made of any
metallic residue lying in
its path. This process goes on until the collector is completely
covered by its trophies.
Such methodological approach to culture, through what has been
discarded, approaches
the artist to an historian of everyday life, looking at the
leftovers from a culture to get to
its core.
In London, this interest for the rejected revealed itself in the
work ‘Nightwatch’ (2004),
twenty videos on twenty individual monitors of an urban fox
walking through the
paintings of the empty National Portrait Gallery at night while
under the surveillance of
the gallery’s own closed-circuit cameras, presented as an
installation at the National
Gallery’s Main Hall. Infiltrating inside one of the most secure
art institutions an animal
that having been excluded from the urban fabric regularly
reappears in the city streets as
a food scavenger, is the equivalent in Francis words of
inserting a clandestine in the
gallery for a night walk:
“As part of my studies in architecture, I used the animal as a
sign of the crucial
moment in cities when the urban space was transformed from a
medieval model,
where there was a co-existence of humans and animals in close
proximity to the
old city centre, to the new kind of urban space projected in the
model of the
Renaissance City. Animals found themselves extra-muros,
literally outside the
city walls (…) We’re back to the basic mechanics of the rumour,
inserting the
right hero where he is the least expected but might somehow show
up…”
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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Critical poiesis
This strategy of ‘rumour making’ that reoccurs in his practice
of mixing factual research,
fiction, speculation, and empirical observation to develop an
intervention, brings us back
to the third element in a theory of the everyday, and that is
the activation of a critical
practice that intervenes in the daily life to provoke some
reversal in the situations or the
expectations one has of it. Against the idea that the work of
art is a resolutely material
project tied to managerial bureaucracy for its completion, the
trick consists in using the
logistics of an arts organisation like Artangel to propagate the
rumour, putting it into
circulation, so to speak. The rumour has the quality of a viral
marketing campaign,
capitalising in the power of the word-of-mouth to spread and
start to happen.
‘Guards’ (2004-5) is the 28’ video by Francis and Rafael Ortega,
resulting from this wish
to provoke a conscious alteration in the daily life, this time
the displacement of the
Coldstream Guards from their usual territory – around Buckingham
Palace, where they
serve as the Her Majesty's Coldstream Regiment of Foot Guards
(The Regiment's formal
title)- into the terrain of the city of London, the financial
district where the corporations’
safety is maintained by private security companies and the
highest concentration of
CCTV in the world. The initial idea was to work with the
real-time documentation by
requesting the footage from the CCTV companies operating in the
city. However, in spite
of the individual’s right of access proclaimed in the Data
Protection Act 1998, Francis
was unable to obtain the tapes, thus the détournement was
re-enacted second time for
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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the video cameras of a professional crew, and the final cut made
into a video projection
for Portman Square.
‘A Section of Guards’ (2002-5) appears in the book as a series
of components that
include notes, diagrams, maps of the paths of most and least
surveillance, drawings and
photographs to articulate the practical and conceptual shaping
of the video. One can
follow both the associative flow, emerging from disparate
sources which include
literature, newspaper clips, site-visits, walking, and a lot of
negotiation, operating within
the parameters of an arts organisation with a reputation for
large-scale, sometimes even
monumental, site-specific and publically-based artistic output.
Via conversations and the
email exchanges between Francis and the project coordinators, it
is possible to follow,
the way an idea for a city action (in this case, the spreading
of a rumour) was
transformed into a large-scale video production, involving 64
guards marching through
the Mile Square (the über-surveilled financial city centre where
most UK-based
corporations have their headquarters). Deeply aware of the
limitations of working in the
most surveilled city of the world, the work goes beyond the
cultural material London to
focus on a global assimetry of power partly invisible to daily
life.
Evidencing the shared similarities between everyday theory and
Francis’ work is different
from describing him as a theoretician of the everyday which he
is not as he prefers to
describe his practice as one closer to a poiesis: “I’m trying to
use my language, the
language of an artist. It’s a poetic approach if you will, not a
militant discourse…maybe it
will have a social dimension or become a political comment, but
that has to happen
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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within the experience of the poetic act, when the poetics
provoke a sudden loss of self
that allows a distancing from the immediate situation, a
different perspective on things,
and might then have the potential to open up a political
thought.” 1
Considering Francis background as an architect, the pedestrian
methodology appears as
a resistant approach to the problem of space as envisaged by a
dominant form of
knowledge production such as architecture, while it is a
practical operation
transformative enough to allow for interesting juxtapositions
such as the fox/ National
Portrait Gallery or Royal Guards/ Financial District to occur
that destabilize even if only
momentarily the patterns of daily life. Writing about wandering,
Alexandre Laumonier
advances a proposition that might enlighten Francis use of
walking as an approach to
the everyday:
“The wander, term at the same time explicit and vague, is
usually associated
movement, and singularly with walk, the idea of mislaying, the
loss of oneself.
However, the principal problem of the wander is anything but
that of the
acceptable place. The wanderer in search of the acceptable is
placed in a very
peculiar space, an intermediate space. To the intermediate space
corresponds in
fact an intermediate time, a temporality which one could
describe as floating. This
floating time is the time of the glance over history, where the
wanderer wonders
about the past at the same time as he reflects on his immediate
future.” 3
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Roush, Paula. Francis Alÿs: The Clandestine Way. Dardo Magazine
n.4 feb-may (2007) 138-155
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1 Alÿs, Francis. Seven Walks London, 2004-5. London: Artangel.
2005
2 Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, London:
Routledge. 2002
3 Laumonier, Alexandre. “L’Errance ou La Pensée du Milieu”.
Magazine Littéraire,
L’Errance de Cervantès aux Écrivains Voyageurs, Avril 1997( 21).
(author’s translation)