I’ll give an example. Off in a corner of the show is a work by Francis Alÿs, a Belgian based in Mexico City. I like Alÿs a lot. His work, like that of many of his peers, is not limited by medium: He makes videos, he draws, he performs, he documents, he displays. He fizzes with ideas.
A lot of his work involves walking the streets of cities. He has dragged a huge block of ice through Mexico City until it melted. He has walked the streets of Copenhagen each day under the influence of a different drug. He has filmed palace guards marching in arbitrary directions through the streets of London until they all met up in formation.
His work is not just witty, it’s political, for it is about the relationship between individual experience and social formation. It takes the experience of the “flâneur’’ - the stroller of city streets, observant, subjective, autonomous, alienated - and reinserts it into social and economic realities.
Alÿs’s piece here is a simple animated drawing, screened on a 12-second loop. It shows a woman pouring water from one glass into another and back again. The animation is accompanied by a gentle, soothing Latin song, and comfortable seating is provided, so we may feel lulled, as if in someone’s living room.
But we are of course in an art gallery, where we are expected to pay attention. And if we do pay attention, what is happening?
Nothing - or something; but it amounts, surely, to nothing.
I take much of Alÿs’s work to be asking: If subjective experience is to be valued (and the idea of art presupposes that it is), how should we measure this value? Does private experience accumulate, as angry citizens might accumulate into a crowd at a protest, or as money accumulates into capital? Does it melt away like ice? Or does it simply remain unchanged, like water poured back and forth between two glasses?
