WALKING THE LINE: THE ART OF FRANCIS ALŸS

https://www.artforum.com/features/walking-the-line-the-art-of-francis-alys-173996/ = WALKING THE LINE: THE ART OF FRANCIS ALŸS Writing in response to Alÿs’s most recent—and perhaps most poetic—intervention to date, art historian and critic Mark Godfrey reflects on the practice of an artist who explores history, culture, and political conflict in eloquently corporeal terms. By treating the string as a code and these illustrations as its key, you could work out the path of the walk that was being described—but only for the fragment of cord visible from the landing. Up and down the string stretched, disappearing into sunlight above and darkness below. Here was a work that provided the tools for its own decryption while making any comprehensive interpretation impossible: a neat allegory for Alÿs’s recent practice. In the show’s catalogue, Alÿs speaks of his wish to explore the “human desire to match up to the perfection of geometry,” and indeed, it’s hard to imagine even the least military-minded viewer failing to be seduced by the order of the guards. In Alÿs’s London exhibition, such complexities were elaborated on in the numerous additional works that were shown alongside the video, slighter projects that had not required permissions, planning, multiple cameras, or months in editing suites. Some, like maps on which Alÿs had drawn the routes of cross-London strolls he undertook on the longest and shortest days of 2005, underlined the playfulness of Guards, while others seemed to take up its political implications: The Path of Most Surveillance, 2005, for example, is a map on which Alÿs marked a route for a walking tour that would keep one constantly in view of London’s countless CCTV cameras. In keeping with his established practice, Alÿs also presented scores of images, e-mails, faxes, and drawings, arrayed in ring-bound files, across tables, and even on mantelpieces. Since these items were not clearly differentiated from the discrete artworks on view, everything seemed to carry equal weight. Visitors could pore over exchanges between Alÿs, Artangel, the Lisson Gallery, and miscellaneous London authorities, and get a sense of the artist’s evolving plans for the project as well as of the obstacles he faced.