33 Artists in 3 Acts (21 page)
Many of Alÿs’s works start with solo performances that take place in these streets. These “actions,” as he calls them, which are recorded in photos and videos, have resulted in a rich succession of portraits of the
artist. In
Turista
(1994), for example, Alÿs stood among the electricians, plumbers, and carpenters touting for work in the Zócalo, the city’s premier square. Towering over the real workmen, the artist advertised his services as a tourist with a hand-painted sign, effectively posing as a kind of misfit nonworker, forever on holiday. By contrast, in
Patriotic Tales
(1997), Alÿs’s willowy figure leads twenty-five sheep in single file around the main flagpole of the Zócalo. Here the artist is, among other things, a shepherd, a frontrunner, a manager even, with a flock of followers. In
Paradox of Praxis
–
I
(1997), a work whose subtitle is
Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing
, the artist pushes and kicks a block of ice around the Centro Historico for nine hours until it melts. The video distills the Sisyphean chore into an agreeable five minutes, portraying the artist as a tenacious sculptor set on demonstrating the “dematerialization” of the art object in the age of conceptualism.
Along with at least a dozen others, these three self-portraits are also representations of Mexico City. Alÿs’s accumulation of actions, photographs, and videos brings some magic to the otherwise forlorn heart of the metropolis in a way that no Mexican artist of his generation has. Perhaps it’s no accident that this task fell to a foreigner. A Mexican artist doing the same might have been perceived as making local art. In recent years, Alÿs has shot an increasing number of his videos outside Mexico—in Jerusalem, London, Lima, and Panama City—but he always likes to come back here “to reset the clock and rethink the project from the perspective of this place.” Additionally, of late, he has been appearing in fewer videos, opting instead to cast children as stand-ins.
Alÿs’s studio is a three-story townhouse built in 1736. Although he once called it the “purgatory” of his artistic production, there is little evidence of agony here. The front door opens into an open-air courtyard where Babouche, a French bulldog, greets guests by sweeping his pink tongue across their toes. On the ground floor are a couple of workshops, one with lathes and other woodworking equipment where Daniel Toxqui, a sculptor and restorer of colonial art, sometimes works. At the back is an old kitchen where Mercedes, the cook, is preparing shrimp taquitos and guacamole. Alÿs stops to discuss the timing of lunch, telling her to expect two extra people.
We walk up the main stairwell, where the walls are green below waist level and turquoise above. The stairs themselves are ocher on the sides, with an orangey-red strip of paint flowing up the center like a faux runner carpet. Although Alÿs trained as an architect, he has done little to the building since he moved in a year ago besides rewiring the electricity and adding skylights. “These colors were here,” he tells me. “I have enough visual decisions to make.” On the second floor, the bedrooms, which are punctuated by odd bits of vintage furniture from the local street market, are given over to editing suites and painting studios. The warm, calm atmosphere of an eccentric but well-run family business pervades.
One room is exactly the same terracotta color as the backgrounds of a dreamy series of 111 tiny paintings titled “Le Temps du Sommeil” (1996–2010) that I saw at Tate Modern in the artist’s retrospective. Alÿs describes the paintings, on which he worked for fourteen years, as fantasies meant to evoke “a god’s vision” looking down from the clouds at “little people performing vain acts.” Contemporary paintings tend to be large, but Alÿs’s works in oil, encaustic, and crayon on wood are often less than five inches high by six inches wide. Miniatures are easily portable, he explains, allowing him to work on them at home or on the road. “In one suitcase, I can pack a whole series.” Some of Alÿs’s videos, such as his hand-drawn animation loops, are made in editions of four (plus two artist’s proofs), then sold to museums and collectors. Most of his videos, however, are free for download from his website, www.francisalys.com. Alÿs finances his videos through the sale of his paintings, which occupy “a therapeutic space” where, ironically, the artist feels that he can step “out of the race of production.”
Alÿs stoops next to a large Pampers box that is being used as a makeshift coffee table-cum-desk to pick up a satchel. (Alÿs is divorced and his son is ten years old; he is not sure where the diaper box came from.) The artist extracts two black sketchbooks held together with an elastic band. Inside, a mix of wispy drawings, diagrams, and handwriting cover the grid. He can’t use plain paper because it would result in “chaos.” Some projects drag on for years; it can be difficult to remember one’s original intentions. “Drawings are mood notes,” he says. “They help me remember the state of mind I was in when I drew them.”
Along the hallway is a room used by Juan Garcia, a commercial painter who often collaborates with Alÿs. The two men met in the early 1990s when Alÿs conceived his
Sign Painting Project
, in which the artist commissioned three commercial painters—Garcia, Emilio Rivera, and Enrique Huerta—to make larger versions of his own paintings, most of which depicted a man in a suit interacting in surreal ways with domestic objects in a monochrome void. The aesthetic qualities of the resulting works underline the distinction between the creating artist and the executing artisan. Indeed, the commissioned copies intensify the aura of Alÿs’s originals in the way that postcards of the
Mona Lisa
(1503–17) augment the uniqueness of the Leonardo da Vinci canvas that hangs in the Louvre.
In the adjoining rooms are “the kids,” as Alÿs calls them: Julien Devaux, a hirsute video editor in a hoodie, and Félix Blume, a fair-haired sound editor in a T-shirt promoting a Belgian jazz club. Both men appear hypnotized by their computer screens. Devaux helps chronicle Alÿs’s actions and has become “crucial to how the stories are told,” while Blume is highly skilled at interpreting sound. “I trust his judgment more than my own,” says Alÿs, who prefers to collaborate rather than delegate. “The key to good collaboration is that everyone has their own projects on the side,” he says. “It’s not so much about financial independence as the general health of relationships and the exchange of ideas.”
Alÿs sees his studio set up as “a small community, based on belonging.” People come together for a project, then go back to their own life. “It’s a bit like cousins,” he says. “Sometimes you want to be more professional, less personal, less incestuous, but it doesn’t happen. These are strong bonds.” Beyond the studio, Alÿs says that key individuals at his main gallery, David Zwirner, feel like another community. “It is probably one of the last business fields that is entirely based on trust,” says Alÿs. “It’s about your word.”
Alÿs’s phone rings. It’s Cuauhtémoc Medina, a curator, art critic, and professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is at the front door, here to join us for lunch. As we descend the staircase,
Alÿs tells me he has two long-standing colleagues who are “alter egos of sorts.” Medina is integral to the “argumentative side” of his work, while Rafael Ortega, an artist and cameraman, has been essential to the “operative side.” (Ortega is married to Melanie Smith, an artist who was Alÿs’s girlfriend for six years, and Ortega’s younger brother, Raul, is Alÿs’s assistant.)
After a hug at the front door, Medina, Alÿs, and I settle into the kitchen. Visually, Alÿs and Medina bring to mind the old “Jack Sprat could eat no fat” rhyme. They are both six-foot-four; Alÿs resembles, as far as is humanly possible, an emaciated Giacometti sculpture, whereas Medina looks like a rotund bronze Botero.
The kitchen table is covered with a gray and white checked tablecloth. Running down its center like a spine is a row of bowls containing the taquitos, guacamole, sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, large chunks of avocado, fried cactus, grated cheese, sour cream, tomatillo sauce, and a number of other condiments. On a wooden shelf next to the table is a postcard of Kabul International Airport with a blue sky in which the artist has drawn a schematic airplane. “I need to go to Afghanistan again soon,” he says. “I won’t call it a ‘shoot.’ It would probably not be the right word for the occasion. But I have an idea for a film that unravels through the city.”
One of Alÿs most famous works is
The Green Line
(2004), a video in which the artist strolls through Jerusalem along the 1948 armistice border between Jordan and Israel, dribbling a line of green paint from an open can. I wonder whether the prospective Kabul film will echo the earlier work. Alÿs presses his lips together and thinks for a minute. “The main motor behind many of my projects is a deep incapacity to understand,” he says as he walks his long fingers on the table, inadvertently suggesting that traveling on foot is a reliable path to enlightenment. “Religion is a strong, sometimes overwhelming presence in the daily life of both cities,” he offers. Alÿs was raised Catholic and doesn’t think he could ever be an atheist. “It’s too deep in my soul. I don’t know how to explain it,” says the artist, who is also very interested in Buddhism. Upon reflection though, Alÿs sees
The Green Line
in terms
of a monumental clash of clans rather than religion per se. “Jerusalem represents, in such a universal and atemporal manner, human conflict,” he says. “It’s a struggle that affects the whole of humanity in one way or another.”
Alÿs often draws lines through geopolitical zones, as if his whole body were a pencil or a brush. In
The Loop
(1997), Alÿs travelled from Tijuana to San Diego, towns that are less than twenty miles apart across the Mexican–American border, by circumnavigating the entire Pacific Rim. The artist flew clockwise, starting in Tijuana, stopping fourteen times in places such as Panama City, Santiago, Auckland, Singapore, Shanghai, Anchorage, and Los Angeles, before arriving in San Diego. It’s a conceptual piece that pushes the arbitrariness of national borders to an absurd extreme. The work is best known as a black-and-white postcard of a map of the world with the Pacific at its center. I often think of
The Loop
when I sit on long-haul flights for my research.
Alÿs asserts that artists are granted “poetic license,” which, once given, can be hard to take away. Medina, who has been listening while he feasts, notes that although artists enjoy an astounding degree of freedom, that doesn’t mean that their behavior is ungoverned by norms. “Eccentricity used to be the code,” says Medina. “Now, fake normalcy prevails. You’re not allowed to be a nutcase like Salvador Dalí anymore.” Alÿs looks on with amusement. “Francis’s case is slightly odd,” adds Medina. “He has been allowed to grow outside the trade.”
“For the first time in four centuries,” offers Alÿs, “the artist has regained fully integrated social status. It’s a liberal profession like it was at the time of Rubens. I’m glad the romantic myth of the starving artist is virtually dead.”
Medina folds his arms across his chest and leans back. “Yes,” he says, “that has happened in the last twenty years. There is little conflict between most artists and the powers that be. It’s back to pleasing the court.” However, the curator disagrees with Alÿs’s use of the term “liberal profession.” “Artists are an internal ‘other,’ ” he says. “They occupy a place in the social order that is essential for the system to be able to look at itself.”
Exactly what kind of an artist are you? I ask Alÿs. The question seems
to surprise him. He hums half a tune and claims not to have given it much thought. “A catalyzer,” he says finally, as church bells chime over the whir of a freestanding fan. “That’s where the artistic component, strictly speaking, comes into play. I’m a
partera
. What do you call a
partera
in English?” he asks vaguely. “Yes, a midwife.” The metaphor is a welcome shift from the commonplace that artworks are the artist’s own offspring. “I am not an inventor. I’m just the one on the side!” he adds with a laugh.
Medina looks a bit embarrassed by the comment, but he eventually brightens and raises his finger. “It’s a Socratic trope,” he says with relief. “Socrates saw himself as the midwife of thought because he brought forth the truth through his questions.”
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #413
2003
“I
don’t like to have people around,” says Cindy Sherman, shortly after my arrival at the Soho penthouse that is her studio. “It makes me too self-conscious. Only occasionally has an ex-boyfriend or a cleaning lady seen me working.” Sherman has been taking photographs of herself by herself for almost thirty-five years. The characters she enacts in her pictures are over-the-top, affected, stagy, crazy, or unwell. They are either performing a role or have just stepped out of one. In a plain gray T-shirt and jeans with a face free of makeup, Sherman is looking every bit the all-natural artist. Only the highlights in her long blond hair, which is tied back in a casual ponytail, hint at artifice.
