Francis Alÿs
Paradox of praxis (sometimes doing something leads to nothing)
On view at MoMA and MoMA PS1
May 8–August 1, 2011
Francis Alÿs (Belgian, born 1959) trained and practiced as an architect in Venice before moving to Mexico City, where he has lived since 1986. Alÿs’s artwork ranges in scale from simple, ephemeral actions such as pushing a block of ice through the city streets until nothing but a puddle of water remains, to epic and complex events—for example, inviting 500 volunteers to collectively move a mountain in Peru. With allegorical and poetic gestures, Alÿs confronts issues critical to contemporary societies: urbanism, economic cycles, and differing concepts of modernity and progress. Alÿs produces many of his works in and around Mexico City, commenting on the patterns of development and crisis that persist in Latin American society. The artist documents his projects extensively in a number of mediums, providing a variety of perspectives on the work through drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures, and texts.
This exhibition, on view at The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, presents a range of Alÿs’s works from the mid-1990s to today, drawn primarily from MoMA’s collection. In the most recent work, filmed episodically over a decade, the artist chases tornadoes in the dusty Mexican countryside, trying to enter the eye of the storm. Embracing poetry, futility, and self-conscious irony, his actions allude to change as an ongoing process of advancement and regression, and honor human persistence in the face of crises. The title of the exhibition, A Story of Deception, is inspired by the fundamental human desire to chase the unattainable and ever-escaping—a concept at the core of Alÿs’s practice, illustrated by Samuel Beckett’s words, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
