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.
Director’s Foreword 7
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form by any electronic or mechanical means
Acknowledgments 8
(including photocopying, recording, and information
storage or retrieval) without permission in writing from
the publisher. Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal 11
Russell Ferguson

ISBN 978-0-943739-32-8 frontispiece: study for Rehearsal, 2007

Selected Exhibition History and Bibliography 125
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007931757
DVD (back cover):
Printed and bound in Germany 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, 1996

Oil on tracing paper on cardboard
7 1 ⁄ 2 × 6 3 ⁄ 8 inches
 acknowledgments
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 Russell Ferguson

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

Study for Song for Lupita, 1998

Pencil on tracing paper
13 3 ⁄ 4 × 11 1 ⁄ 2 inches
12
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.” This process means that
4
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.
13
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, 2003–06
In collaboration with Rafael Ortega and
Olivier Debroise
16mm film
4:20 minutes
 15

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.

La logica del ñandú, 2005 following spread:

Pencil and pen on postcard Study for A Story of Deception, 2005
6 1 ⁄ 4 × 4 3 ⁄ 8 inches Pencil and pen on paper
6 3 ⁄ 4 × 9 inches
A Story of Deception, 2003
Oil on canvas
Studio view
 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.

Untitled (Sign Painting Project), 1993–97 following spread: pages 22–23:

Oil on canvas and enamel on sheet metal
8 5 ⁄ 8 × 10 5 ⁄ 8 inches
36 1 ⁄ 4 × 47 5 ⁄ 8 inches
36 1 ⁄ 4 × 45 1 ⁄ 8 inches
Untitled (Sign Painting Project), 1993–97 Sign-painting studio,
Acrylic on board and oil on canvas Mexico City, 1996,
63 3 ⁄ 4 × 43 1 ⁄ 2 inches Juan Garcia at right
47 1 ⁄ 2 × 36 3 ⁄ 4 inches
11 1 ⁄ 4 × 8 5 ⁄ 8 inches
9 3 ⁄ 8 × 7 1 ⁄ 8 inches
20 21
24

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

Set Theory, 1996

Mixed media Turista, 1994
 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, 1996
Video
10 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, 1991–2003
Map mounted on wood, photographs,
graphite, and oil on vellum

right and following spread:

The Collector, 1990–92
In collaboration with Felipe Sanabria
Magnets, metal, and rubber wheels
8 5 ⁄ 8 × 4 × 12 5 ⁄ 8 inches

pages 32–33:
Study for The Collector, 1991
Pen 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, 2000

Pencil and pen on paper
8 1 ⁄ 4 × 11 inches
Re-enactments, 2000
In collaboration with Rafael Ortega
Two-channel video
5:20 minutes
38 39
40
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.”
61 out of 60, 1999
Plaster figures
41
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.
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.

Déjà Vu, 1996 opposite:

Oil on canvas Song for Lupita, 1998
10 1 ⁄ 4 × 12 5 ⁄ 8 inches each Video
12 minute loop
 47

opposite:
Song for Lupita, 1998
Video
12 minute loop

above:
Song for Lupita, 1998
Installation at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
 49

Perro pelota, 2000

Caracoles, 1999
Betacam SP transferred to video
4:20 minute loop
54 55

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.” It was a sincere version of
10
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:
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.

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
Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997
the periodic breakdowns quite profitable.12 Video
5 minutes

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 9:15 a.m.
it, “a reflection on the struggle against the pressures of being productive.”13
9:34 a.m. 12:05 p.m.

9:35 a.m. 3:10 p.m.

3:30 p.m. 5:45 p.m.

3:34 p.m. 6:05 p.m.

 61

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
6:32 p.m. all ills.

Mexico City, 1994

Photograph

overleaf:
Study for Rehearsal, 2002
Pencil, pen, and tracing paper on paper
11 3 ⁄ 4 × 8 1 ⁄ 4 inches

Angel Gustavo Toxqui working on models

for Rehearsal 3, 2006

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 yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of
declares he is not doing if he is walking is choosing. By walking he can put off a great many those independent, passionate, impartial natures.16
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. If we can see in Alÿs the holding oneself apart, the pleasure of being an outsider, especially
Indeed, walking itself could be thought of as a kind of preliminary rehearsal, a time when early on in his work, he never has the aristocratic, aloof quality that Baudelaire ascribed to
ideas are sorted, impressions and images gathered up for potential use, not in a systematic the flâneur: “The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”17 For Alÿs,
way but as part of an integration of ideas with environment. “the flâneur is a very nineteenth-century European figure. It goes with a kind of romanticism
It should also be noted that in this relatively early work, Alÿs is still in the role of which does not have much space in a city like Mexico City.” The closest Alÿs has come to
observer, not actor. None of these activities or non-activities are specific to any particular the role of a true flâneur is through his stand-in, Mr. Peacock, the real peacock that Alÿs sent
place. As Alÿs said of his early years in Mexico, “I think that my status as an immigrant freed to represent him at the 2001 Venice Biennale (The Ambassador). Alÿs himself stayed away.
me of my own heavy cultural heritage, or my debt to it if you like.” But he was not yet quite In large part, the trajectory of his work has been to get beyond the isolation of the flâneur, to
ready to engage with the new culture in which he now lived. In “As Long as I am Walking…” feel at home not in the sense of the “man of the world” who feels at home everywhere, and
he is still the uncommitted outsider, a position to which he has a tendency to revert, even not to remain simply an observer, but to be at home enough with his own role in specific
as over the years his work has become steadily more explicit in its social and political settings actually to intervene.
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

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 Ortega
Video
24:40 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, 1999 overleaf:

Pencil and type on paper Studies for Rehearsal 1, 1999
11 × 8 1 ⁄ 2 inches Pen and pencil on paper
8 1 ⁄ 2 × 11 inches each

page 81:
Model for Rehearsal 1, 1997
80
82 83

Rehearsal 1, 1999–2004
In 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), 2001
Installation 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

R.E.H.E.A.R.S.A.L., 2000 The Last Clown, 2000 following pages:

Video Animation Studies for Rehearsal 2, 2001
2:30 minutes 1:30 minute loop Pen, pencil, and type on paper
11 × 8 1 ⁄ 2 inches each

Rehearsal 2, 2001–06
In collaboration with Rafael Ortega
Video
14:30 minutes
90
92
95
 99

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.

Tornado, 2000–present
Work in progress
 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,

Map for Sometimes Doing Something Poetic following spread:

Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing
Something Political Can Become Poetic, 2004
Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can
Become Political and Sometimes Doing
Something Political Can Become Poetic, 2004
Video
17:45 miniutes
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, 2000

Oil on canvas on wood
23 × 27 inches
108
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
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, 1992
Oil and encaustic on canvas
9 1 ⁄ 2 × 13 3 ⁄ 8 inches
Studies for When Faith Moves Mountains,
2002
114
The action itself, as documented in photographs and video, is extraordinarily impressive, 1 Virginia Woolf, letter, 1 January 1933, in
Nigel Nicolson, ed., The Sickle Side of the
but in the end the “social allegory” takes over from the work’s undeniable formal presence. Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5,
The action was completely transitory. The next day, no one could recognize that the 1932–1935 (London: Hogarth Press, 1979).
huge sand dune had been moved. The true aftermath of the work lies in the ripples of anec- 2 Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967),
dote and image that radiate out from it. “We were just trying to suggest the possibility of reprinted in Art and Objecthood (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 167.
change,” said Alÿs. “And it did, maybe just for a day, provoke this illusion that things could
3 Francis Alÿs, interview with the author,
possibly change.” In that sense, When Faith Moves Mountains is a true rehearsal for events
Mexico City, 2005. An edited version of the
that still remain potential, things that may or may not happen in the future. Looking at the interview appears in Francis Alÿs (London:
Phaidon, 2007). All further quotations from
video of the hundreds of volunteers shoveling together across the dune, we might also think
Alÿs are drawn from this interview unless
of Subcommandante Marcos’s suggestion that dominant power might one day have to otherwise indicated.
bend “to the slipping of the sand.”
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.
following spreads:
9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002
In collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univer-
Medina and Rafael Ortega sity of California Press, 1984), 107.
16mm film transferred to video
36 minutes 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.
115
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.
116
 selected exhibition history and bibliography

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

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.)
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
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
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
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
127
“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
128
“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
129
“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
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 Spain 2nd Biennial, Saarema, Estonia
“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 1998 “Interiors: Francis Alÿs, Kevin Appel, Robin Tewes,”
“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,
XLVIII Biennale, Venice, Italy
1st International Biennial, Melbourne, Australia
131
“Drawn By,” Metro Pictures, New York “Asi està la cosa,” Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo,
“Thinking Aloud,” Hayward Gallery, London Mexico City
“Stimuli,” Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
“go away: Artists and Travel,” Royal College of Art Galleries, 1996
London “NowHere,” Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen (exh. cat.)
“Rewriting the City,” Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard “Latin American Contemporary Artists,” R. Barquet/
College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York R. Miller, New York
Mario Flecha Galeria, Girona, Spain “Pittura,” Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea,
“drawings,” ACME, Los Angeles Turin, Italy
Galeria Froment & Putman, Paris
“Roteiros,” XXIV Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles
“Insertions,” Arkipelag, Stockholm
“Loose Threads,” Serpentine Gallery, London 1995
1er Salon Internacional de Pintura, Museo de la Ciudad “Longing and Belonging,” SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe
de Mexico, Mexico City “This Is My World…,” ACME, Santa Monica, California
“Longitude de Onda,” M.A.O., Caracas Espace 251 Nord, Liege, Belgium
III Bienal Barro de America, Caracas
“Imaginarios Mexicanos,” Musée de la civilisation, 1994
Quebec City, Canada Foodhouse, Santa Monica, California
“Mexcellente,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, V Bienal, Havana
San Francisco Galeria OMR, Mexico City
“Situacionismo,” Fotoseptiembre, Galeria OMR,
Mexico City 1993
“Play Mode,” Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine “Lesa Natura,” Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
“Cinco continentes y una ciudad,” Museo de la Ciudad
de Mexico, Mexico City 1992
Galeria Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil “México Hoy,” Casa de las Américas, Madrid
Museo Regional, Guadalajara, Mexico “Rueda como naturaleza,” Instituto Cultural Cabañas,
Guadalajara, Mexico
1997 Espace L’Escaut, Brussels
inSITE 97, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego,
and Centro Cultural, Tijuana, Mexico 1991
“Antechamber,” Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Galería Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
“Body Double,” Winston Wächter Gallery, New York Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio
“Addenda,” Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium Latitude 53 Gallery, Edmonton, Canada
Primera Biennial Tridimensional, Mexico City
 SOLO-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.
Study for Déjà Vu, 2000
Oil and pencil on tracing paper
16 1 ⁄ 8 × 11 3 ⁄ 8 inches
133
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.
 GROUP-EXHIBITION CATALOGUES & OTHER PUBLICATIONS
134
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. Metropolitana de Lima, 2002.
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
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.
ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
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.
135
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).
136
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.”
LondonArt.co.England (1999).
“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.
137
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.”
Artinfo.com (12 March 2007).
Jimenez, Carlos. “Alÿs, um exilado curioso.” El país,
5 February 2004.
Johnston, Ken. “Francis Alÿs.” The New York Times,
24 October 1997.
Jolles, Claudia. “Brütende Leere.” Kunst-Bulletin, no. 5
(May 2003): 5.
Jusidman, Yishai. “Francis Alÿs, Galería Ramis Barquet.”
Artforum (January 1995): 92.
Kantor, Jordan. “Loop.” Artforum 40, no. 8 (April 2002):
137–38.
Karcher, Eva. “Elektriker, Schlachter, Tourist.” Suddeutsche
Zeitung, 31 March 2003.
Kent, Sarah. “Watch this Space.” Time Out London
(17 May 2000).
Klaas, Heiko. “Francis Alÿs.” Artist Kunstmagazine,
no. 4 (2004).
138
Knight, Christopher. “Mexico Joins Global Club.” Geo Topic
(23 June 2004).
Kontova, Helena. “Mirror’s Edge.” Flash Art (March–April
2000): 100, 102.
Kreis, Elfi. “Ein Preis, der Massstäbe setzt.” Kunstzeitung,
no. 87 (November 2003).
Krepler, Ute. “Francis Alÿs.” Kunst und Markt, no. 2 (2004).
Kuoni, Carin. “Gerüchte, Fährten und Trophäen: Auf
Spurensuche mit Francis Alÿs.” Kunst-Bulletin (June
2000): 10–17.
Kurjakovic, Daniel. “Finten des Geistes.” Die Weltwoche,
no. 37 (16 September 1999).
Laddaga, Reinaldo. “Almost Brothers.” Flash Art 38, no. 243
(July–September 2005): 110–12.
Lafuente, Pablo. “Francis Alÿs.” Frieze, no. 80 (January–
February 2004): 108–09.
———. “Art on Parade.” Art Monthly, no. 280 (October
2004): 1–4.
———. “Francis Alÿs.” Art Monthly, no. 291 (November
2005): 27–28.
Lamm, April. “I Feel Therefore I Am.” Modern Painters
(spring 2004): 34–35.
Lasnier, Jean-François. “Francis Alÿs: Marcher, Créer.”
Beaux Arts Magazine, no. 248 (February 2005): 26.
Laurence, Robin. “Geometries of Conjecture.” Border
Crossings 17, no. 4 (October 1998): 80–82.
Lavrador, Judicaël. “Francis Alÿs.” Beaux Arts (2002): 50.
Lefkowitz, David. “Edgy Painting at the Edge of the World.”
New Art Examiner 29, no. 1 (September–October 2001):
66–71.
Levin, Kim. “Voice Choices.” The Village Voice (22–28
October 1998).
Loers, Veit. “Auf Marlenes Spuren.” Kunstzeitung
(March 2004).
“Loop.” The New York Times, 11 January 2002.
Lorés, Maite. “The Prophet and the Fly.” Contemporary
(2003): 101.
139
Lunn, Felicity. “Focus: Switzerland.” Contemporary,
no. 52 (2003).
Maak, Niklas. “Minimal Mensch.” Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 22 March 2003.
Mahoney, Elizabeth. “Mirror’s Edge.” Art Monthly
(April 2001): 39–40.
Manchester, Clare. “Group Shows: Ailleurs.” Flash Art
(March–April 2004).
Marí, Bartomeu. “Francis Alÿs: Lotgevallen van een groot-
stedelijk slaapvandelaar.” Metropolis M (December
2000): 38–41.
Marrón, Lorena. “Francis Alÿs: Soy como un perro
caliejero.” La tempestad, no. 47 (March–April 2006).
Medina, Cuauhtémoc. “Francis Alÿs: Tu subrealismo.”
Third Text, no. 38 (spring 1997): 39–54.
———. “Recent Political Forms: Radical Pursuits in Mexico/
Formas políticas recientes: Búsquedas radicales en
México/Santiago Sierra. Francis Alÿs. Minerva Cuevas.”
Trans>arts.cultures.media, no. 8 (2000): 146–63.
———. “Mexican Strategies: Rarefied Painting.” Flash Art
(January–February 2000): 76–78.
­­­———. “Zones of Tolerance: Teresa Margolies, SEMEFO
and Beyond.” Parachute, no. 104 (October–December
2001): 31–52.
Mendelssohn, Joanna. “The Biennal of Sydney.” Tema
Celeste, no. 105 (September–October 2004).
“Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rate of
Bodies and Values.” ArtNexus, no. 46 (December 2002):
156–58.
“Mexiko City.” Tema Celeste, no. 94 (November–December
2002): 117.
Mitchell, Charles Dee. “Francis Alÿs at Lisson.” Art in
America (May 2000).
Moreno, Gean. “Polis as Playground: Contemporary Artists
in Urban Space. Art Papers 24, no. 5 (September–
October 2000): 28–35.
“News & Around: Francis Alÿs & Stanley Brouwn.” Tema
Celeste, no. 110 (July–August 2005): 105.
The Liar/The Copy of the Liar, 1994
Studio view
140
“Nine to Five: Das Protokoll eines Künstleralltags.” Monopol,
no. 3 (August–September 2004).
Noriega, Carlos O. “Instrucciones para desarmar una
ciudad: Entrevista a Príamo Lozada.” Fahrenheit
(February–March 2007): 47.
O’Reilly, Sally. “In View—Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon
Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates.” Modern Painters (November
2005): 104–05.
Oberholzer, Niklaus. “Gang durch die vertrackte
Bilderwelt.” Neue Luzerner Zeitung, 3 March 2003.
Orzessek, Arno. “Du sollst nicht begehren deines Nächsten
Leber.” Suddeutsche Zeitung, 21 June 2004.
Packer, William. “Screening Time.” Financial Times
Weekend (6–7 May 2000).
“Painting the Town—Live from New York: Performa 2005.”
Time Out New York (3–9 November 2005): 80.
Pearman, Hugh. “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The Times,
18 September 2005, 22.
Phillips, Andrea. “‘A Path Is Always Between Two Points.’”
Performance Research 2, no. 3 (September 1997): 9–16.
———. “A Dog’s Life.” Performance Research 5, no. 2 (2000):
125–30.
Phillips, Christopher. “Report from Istanbul: Band
of Outsiders.” Art in America (April 2000).
Pignatti, Lorenza. “Reviews–Francis Alÿs: MACBA
Barcelona.” Tema Celeste, no. 111 (September–October
2005): 88–89.
Pinto, Roberto. “Subjectivity, Passion and Excess in
Everyday Life.” Work in Progress, no. 10 (autumn 2004).
“The Poetics of Politics.” Vmagazine.com (15 February
2007).
Pohlenz, Ricardo. “Leisure @ Jumex.” Flash Art 34, no. 224
(May–June 2002): 69.
“Postcards from the Edge.” The Royal Academy Magazine,
no. 77 (winter 2002): 59–61.
Preuss, Sebastian. “Lasst uns Berge versetzen.” Berliner
Zeitung, 21 June 2004.
Romano, Gianni. “Why Not Painting?” Flash Art, no. 218
(October–November 1999): 86–89.
———. “Webscape.” Flash Art 33, no. 210 (January–
February 2000): 57–58.
———. “Streets and Gallery Walls: Interview with Francis
Alÿs.” Flash Art (March–April 2000): 70–73.
Rondi, Joëlle. “Various Places.” Art Press (June 1997).
Rosenau, Mirja. “Was also soll ich im Museum.” Frankfurter
Rundschau, 17 March 2004.
Rubinstein, Raphael. “Francis Alÿs at Jack Tilton.” Art in
America (November 1995).
Ryser, Emmanuelle. “La beige de Mexico.” Accrochage,
no. 46 (22 April 2003).
Schindler, Anna. “Der Wert des Lebens.” Kunstzeitung,
no. 81 (May 2003).
———. “Die Arbeit des Künstlers ist das Reisen.” Die Welt,
6 March 2004.
Schneider, Peter. “Kunst des Gerüchts: Francis Alÿs,
Spaziergänger.” Züritipp, 17 September 1999.
———. “Reinspaziert.” Züritipp, 28 February 2003.
Schroeder, Mariana. “Basel Schaulager Doubles as Storage
and Museum for Rats, Angels.” Bloomberg.com (3 July
2006).
Scott, Andrea K. “High Interest Rate.” Time Out New York
(8–15 September 2005): 134.
Scott, Kitty. “Francis Alÿs: A Portrait.” Parkett, no. 69 (2003):
20–33.
Sepúlveda, Luz. “Group Shows: Only the Characters
Change.” ArtNexus 3, no. 55 (2005): 169–71.
Shearing, Graham. “The 54th Carnegie International.”
Angle 2, no. 17 (November–December 2004): 4–5.
Shier, Reid. “Pause and Reflect.” Vancouver (March 2000).
“The Shock of the Live.” Art Review (November 2005):
108–11.
Siegel, Katy. “2004 Carnegie International.” Artforum
(January 2005): 175.
Silver, Joanne. “ICA’s Mexico Reveals a Land of Contrasts.”
Boston Herald, 30 January 2004.
Smaldone, Andrew J. “Francis Alÿs.” ArtSEENJournal
(spring 2007).
Smith, Trevor. “Francis Alÿs.” Art & Australia (June–August
2004): 580–85.
Stefanowski, Michael Aspekte. “Francis Alÿs/BlueOrange
Prize.” ZDF (27 February 2004).
Stoeber, Michael. “Soziale Kreaturen: Wie Körper Kunst
wird.” Kunstforum (May–June 2004).
Storr, Robert. “Strange Attractor.” Parkett, no. 69 (2003):
46–57.
———. “Francis Alÿs.” Villeurbane Semaine, no. 12
(July 2004).
“Tacita Dean and Francis Alÿs at Schaulager.” artdaily.com
(18 May 2006).
Tappeiner, Maria. “Francis Alÿs.” Kulturzeit (September
2004).
Tatley, Roger. “Contemporary Art: Place.” Modern Painters
(June 2005): 128–29.
“The Thief.” Flash Art, no. 210 (January–February 2000): 57.
“This Just In: Painting Is Back.” New Art Examiner
(September–October 2001): 68–71.
Torres, David. “Francis Alÿs, Just Walking the Dog.” Art
Press, no. 263 (December 2000): 18–23.
Trainor, James. “Walking the Walk: The Artist as Flaneur.”
Border Crossings 22, no. 4 (November 2003): 82–92.
“Unter Menschenjägern.” Frankfurter Allgemeine
Sonntagszeitung, 10 February 2002.
“Very New Art 2004.” Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha (Tokyo)
(April 2004).
“Video Work.” Frieze, no. 54 (September–October
2000): 128.
Volk, Gregory. “Report From Pittsburgh: Let’s Get
Metaphysical.” Art in America (March 2005): 62–69.
Von Burg, Dominique. “Mit geradezu diebischer Freude.”
Zürichsee-Zeitung, 7 May 2003.
Von Däniken, Hans-Peter. “Ein Poet mit grandioser
Verführungskraft.” Tages-Anzeiger, 1 March 2003.
141
Von Egmond, Nadima. “Deux artistes deux univers.”
La Provence, 25 October 2003.
Von Twickel, Felicitas. “Spots Aspekte.” ZDF (October
2003).
Vossenkuhl, Katharina, “Realit;-)’—30 Videoarbeiten
aus der Sammlung Goetz in München.” SeedammKultur
Zentrum Bulletin, no. 73 (2005).
Wagner, Thomas. “Von der Wirksamkeit des Gehens.”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 March 2003.
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