Francis Al˙s: The Politics of Rehearsal
Los Angeles: Hammer Museum and Steidl, 2007
In 2000, artist Francis Al˙s walked the streets of Mexico City holding a loaded handgun until he was arrested. The next day, he repeated the walk with a fake gun and convinced the police officers to reenact their roles from the day before. Although the two-channel video is not included in Al˙s’ retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, its description in the accompanying catalog illustrates the complex relationship between an artwork and its representation. Exhibition curator Russell Ferguson writes that “actions that take place in real time are always susceptible to being recuperated by their own documentation.” Suitably, the exhibition catalog is a self-reflexive record of Al˙s’s dynamic work.
Born in Belgium and based in Mexico City, Al˙s has spent the past seventeen years exploring the political implications of poetic actions. His work, consisting mostly of videos, sketches, and notes, rejects satisfying denouements in favor of the conventions of rehearsal: false starts, repetitions, and revisions. In the video Rehearsal 1 (1999–2004), he drives a VW bug up a hill to the soundtrack of a brass band practicing. When the musicians play, the car goes up; when they pause, it slides back down. Presented in the catalog as a series of stills, it visualizes the labor of refining a performance, albeit one that will never be realized.
While the stills reproduced in the catalog can’t capture the comic frustration embodied in the video, the publication as a whole does attempt to capture the feel of Al˙s’ layered installations. One spread includes Al˙s’s notes—with sketches and calculations—while another page features a photograph of a maquette of the hill and a toy car that Al˙s used to run through the action. For his part, Ferguson situates the piece within a suite of works aimed at debunking the myth of progress.
In this endless striving, Al˙s finds a metaphor for under-development in Latin America. The video Politics of Rehearsal (2005–07), included on DVD with the catalog, is an incisive political allegory. It begins with footage of a speech by U.S. President Harry S. Truman extolling the virtues of modernization in the developing world. This is followed by a singer rehearsing an aria while a stripper steps forward and backward through her act according to the music’s starts and stops. Overlaid on the soundtrack to this stuttering seduction is a conversation with critic Cuauhtémoc Medina comparing the striptease to the continually deferred promise of Mexican modernity: tantalizingly visible, but always just out of reach.
The inclusion of the DVD with the catalog turns the publication into an extension of Al˙s’ practice, further blurring the line between documentation and finished artwork. Indeed, the book’s rounded corners and matte black cover (resembling a filmmaker’s clapper) feel more like a workbook than a glossy souvenir, while inside, generous full-color images interleaved with the text recall a polished scrapbook. Ferguson’s essay—with references as diverse as Saint Francis of Assisi, Charles Baudelaire, and Subcomandante Marcos—is as quixotic as Al˙s’ wide-ranging work.
What emerges from this charming cacophony is the guiding principle behind Al˙s’ practice. Whether tracing Jersualem’s dividing “Green Line” with a dripping can of paint or organizing 500 volunteers to move a sand dune outside Lima, he aims to generate a simple, easily communicable story that in the best cases approaches urban myth. For Al˙s, the anecdotes generated by his work are more effective than traditional activism at spreading narratives of political and social change. “It is in stories passed informally from person to person that a great reservoir of resistance to power persists,” Ferguson writes. While an exhibition catalog is hardly the stuff of back-alley rumor, it is, in this case, just another way in which Al˙s’s provocative stories continue to circulate.
