Becoming Other Being Oneself: Francis Alÿs Inside the Borderline

Were it possible to sum up the work of Francis Alÿs in a very few words, it might be said that it consists of [the] drawing [of] a line. In fact, many are the works in which the drawing of a line emerges as a decisive, foundational factor. Without pretense of exhausting examples – or even systems – about this, one need only recall the line created by the artist’s footstep upon chewing gum in The Moment Where Sculpture Happens; the blue line of his sweater as it unravels through the streets in Fairy Tales; the dripping line of paint during his stroll through São Paulo in The Leak, later taken up again in the redesign of Moshe Dayan’s Green Line in Jerusalém, in The Green Line; the line of ice water melting through the streets of Mexico City in Paradox of Praxis 1, a line that moves from everything to nothing; the line of cigarette butts „sculpted“ by the street cleaner in Para R.L., already preparing for the line of street cleaners (likewise in the Mexican capital) in Barrenderos (Sweepers), later to be re-wrought in another dimension and with another meaning by the line of hundreds of youths moving the mountain in the outskirts of Lima, in When Faith Moves Mountains; the line in The Loop, which connects the neighboring cities of Tijuana and San Diego, preferring to embrace the Pacific Ocean instead of crossing the border between Mexico and the United States; the line of the fuite en avant, running after mirages that extinguish the line of the horizon at the end of the world in A Story of Deception; the line of the fox‘s perambulation captured by the security cameras in London‘s National Portrait Gallery in The Nightwatch; the line tugged by the artist as he takes The Collector for a walk around the city; the line of the now-present/now-absent pearl necklace in the series of paintings that make up Set Theory; the invisible line that links the evolution of merchandise exchange in Trueque (The Swap); the line of lambs following the artist and surrounding the flagpole in the Zócalo in Cuentos Patrióticos; the shadow line of the mast itself, projecting a sundial onto the ground at the Zócalo square; the line of the demonstrators‘ steps, as drawn in Manifestación; the memory lines of the promenades in Knots; the boats lined up from Key West, Florida to Santa Fé, in Havana, building a Bridge/Puente between the two enemy countries; the melodic line of Western modernization, eternally imposed, interrupted and restated as suspended promise in Rehearsal 2, defining „Mexican time“; the „lost“ line of the Cantos Patrióticos; the circular line of the animated Song for Lupita, a vicious circle; the tenuous line between documentary and fiction, re-working the material of Iñarritu’s flm Amores Perros, in Rehearsal; the crossed lines interconnecting the gerund and words in The Logic of Ñandú; the lines of thought and the lines of collective action in various works.

Yet once the importance of the line has been established, evidence of its paradoxical nature immediately imposes itself, for the diversity and profusion of lines appears – first and foremost – to contradict linear logic by assigning multiple connections and meanings to its design, inscribed within a disconcerting variety of levels as well as in the intervals that link one level to another. For this reason, the drawing of the line is never one-dimensional and its expression may never be exclusively attributed to the literalness of a gesture. After all, the line may be created as well as found, drawn, sculpted or simply conceived, made or unmade; done or undone, visible or invisible, continued or interrupted, affirmative or negative, intuitive or the object of reflection, individual or collective – but it is always aesthetic-political, whatever the levels at which it is found. As if their mode of existence were characterized by infinite variation and, yet, as if each time it marked the power lines of lines of action in constant transformation. Thus, the line is always actualizing the virtualities of some relationship between man and his environment through some event; and yet, by affirming itself, it simultaneously predisposed itself as potential in making way for new resolutions. In this manner, as in all processes of crystallisation, Alÿs‘ lines are realizations occuring at the boundary of what is, what has already been created, and what is still to come. This may be why – in the drawing a line of action by Franci Alÿs – it is impossible to separate what alludes to art and what alludes to life, such is the symbiosis between these two dimensions in the artist’s work.

Alÿs draws a line. But what does the verb to draw mean here? Everything happens as if, falling short of (or beyond) intention, Alÿs enters the line by drawing it, inhabiting and living inside it as though it were a space to be traversed rather than a drawing upon on a surface, like a city, a painting („walk the painting“), or the border between Israel and Palestine. It then results that the line marks and demarcates simultaneously, marking as it demarcates and demarcating as it marks. In other words, inscribing in man and in the world the constitutive trait that establishes the artist’s body and mind in its attunement to and resonance with the environment which becomes, like them, qualified as unique. In this sense, drawing a line is the equivalent of finding a breach, a fissure in the unbreathable space of the already-given and, penetrating it, to open the reconfiguration of time-space within a new perspective, opening itself up to it. Therefore, to draw a line is the equivalent of practising and exercising full freedom within a context of oppression. To draw a line stems from a demand – for, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Alÿs does not tolerate the intolerable.

The line is, therefore, a borderline in various senses. Everything would appear to indicate that Alÿs insinuates himself inside it in order to create conditions that will allow life to flow and break down, however slightly, the obstacles and barriers of every sort that restrain it in the stagnation of repetition, of subjection and submission. The art of drawing a line demands an absolute commitment to the transformation of the world and to creative freedom. Hence the artist’s doubly political engagement: political in the arena of men and of the pólis, political in the field of the arts.

Alÿs is not a First World artist who adopted the Third because he identified with underdevelopment or because he wants to „help“ the poor and the oppressed. His line of action is other: Alÿs knows it is only possible to liberate the First World and to liberate himself from it if the Latin American, his Other, also liberates itself, liberating the Third. Thus, his aesthetic-political action is of great value to us, Latin Americans. Alÿs becomes an accomplice to the most rebellious apsect of the underdeveloped, in terms of creation as well as resistance. He understands his affects, his sentiments and his reasons, embraces the positivity of his strengths, but does not conspire with his weaknesses. Thus, the sharing of it, mixed with criticism, is so intense that his mind seems at once (and paradoxically) to fuse with that of the other without ever ceasing to be himself, by mantaining maximum distance. By this point, Alÿs would appear to be a sort of interface in which Western man and the Latin American meet in order to exorcize colonialism and neo-colonialism, for the interface encompasses and absorbs both perspectives. Yet it must be realized that such transcendence occurs not only in the colonizer-colonized sense but, equally, in the inverse sense, given that sympathy for the peripheral also leads him to see the European from outside and to cast a ferociously critical gaze upon the situation in the Center. For this very reason, his work may be grasped from the double perspective of North and South, or of Center and Periphery. This is why it is also necessary to capture and understand it as a political exercise in affirmation that involves both the creative artist and the spectator, to a degree in which these two categories become interchangeable, given that – through [the] work – they both take on a critical awareness of their own limitations and a disobstruction of their potentialities.

Alÿs‘ art is the manifestation of a liberating encounter between Self and Other, in which Self becomes Other in order to finally become itself – an operation that converts negativity into affirmation. In drawing the line within the borderline, in no man’s land, the individual, the transindividual and the collective are enmeshed and give birth to one another.

Published in

Santos, Laymert Garcia dos, “Becoming Other to Be Oneself: Francis Alÿs Inside the Borderline”. In Godfrey, Mark; Biesenbach, Klaus; Greenberg, Kerryn (eds.) Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, London, Tate Publishing, 2010, pp. 188-189. Translated by Steve Berg. On the occasion of the exhibition Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, Tate Modern, 15 June – September 2010; Wiels, Brussels, 9 October – 30 January 2011; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 11 May – 1 August 2011.