Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal, the first large-scale museum exhibition in the United States devoted to the career of Mexico Cit –based artist Francis Alÿs will be on view at the Hammer Museum through February 10, 2008.
Alÿs is widely considered to be among the most important artists working today He works in a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, performance, film, video installation, animation, and photography. No matter the medium he chooses to employ, all his work has a simplicity that makes it instantly accessible and a complexity that continues to resonate long after the work has first been seen. Alÿs is a teller of visual stories, potent myths that can be told and re-told. 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.
About the Exhibition
To date, exhibitions of Alÿs's work have emphasized issues of place, particularly connections to Mexico City, his adopted home. In contrast, this thematic retrospective will focus on concepts of rehearsal and repetition, failure and success, storytelling and performance, exploring how these ideas inform Alÿs's varied practice.
Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal is organized by Russell Ferguson, Chair, Department of Art, University of California, Los Angeles, and Adjunct Curator, Hammer Museum, and the exhibition's conceptual framework of rehearsal and related themes arose from conversations between Ferguson and Alÿs over several years. Alÿs has described the work as "a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors or parables, staging the experience of time in Latin America."
In the late nineties Alÿs began specifically to examine the mechanisms of rehearsal as such. His film Rehearsal 1, (1999) shows a red Volkswagen attempting to reach the top of a steep hill in Tijuana. At the same time we hear a soundtrack that consists of a danzon band attempting to learn a new song. The two elements are in fact synchronized.
Each time the band break down and abandon the attempt to play through the song, the car's driver (Alÿs) also gives up, and the car rolls backwards down the hill again. As Alÿs has described this work: "The stubborn repetition effect hints at a story which is onstantly 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." -- www.hammer.ucla.edu
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