Monday, May 9, 2011

Modern Art Monday — Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs, born in Belgium as Francis de Smedt in 1959, has made his home in Mexico City since 1985. He initially went there to fulfill his Belgian civil service requirement, and ended up staying, taking the name Alÿs to frustrate the Belgian authorities. He eventually joined up with artists and developed his own unique style.

He has completed numerous projects, including walking through Jerusalem along the 1948 partition lines while holding a can of leaking paint, letting a live fox loose in London's National Portrait Gallery after hours and then using the CCTV footage to make a film, walking through a crowded Mexico City street with a loaded Beretta until he is arrested, and many others. You can view his films, both those in the public domain and those which can only be viewed online, at his official website here (warning: they are addicting).

In the picture above, Alÿs is standing amongst day laborers, who have signs advertising their particular skills.He lists his as tourist. I love this picture; it appeals to my quirky sense of humor.

His latest project, Tornado, was filmed over a ten-year-period and shows a man (Alÿs) repeatedly running into a tornado. Apparently tornadoes in Mexico are different from the those in the northern part of the continent, and only appear a few days every year. Nor are they as big as their northern counterparts, so Alÿs was repeatedly knocked down but never able to levitate, to his great disappointment. The tornadoes mainly consist of ashes and volcanic dust which would then destroy Alÿs's cameras. His doctor complained to him that he must either give up smoking cigarettes or running into tornadoes as his lungs were being destroyed as well. Alÿs, characteristically, chose to give up cigarettes.