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Seeing the city with news eyes To walk around a city is to truly get to know it: to wander and get lost, before finally stringing familiar landmarks together along navigable lines. In London, however, this is often easier said than done. Due to crooked junctions, labyrinthine Tube exits and unexpected kinks in the River Thames, the capital is an enigma that leaves newcomers miserably reliant on the A-Z. The A-Z, with its’ familiar tangles and turns, makes numerous appearances in the exhibition ‘Seven Walks’ by Francis Alÿs, as an invaluable tool in the research for his five year project for Artangel. Alÿs has been able to explore London at a more leisurely pace than most, picking out peculiar details of the city and expanding them into intriguing investigative performances. The Belgian artist is a well-seasoned walker, having worked on projects in a variety of locations over the past 15 years. He walked the streets of Copenhagen in 1996 under the influence of seven different drugs in as many days to produce the project ‘Narcotourism’. At the Venice Biennale of 1999 he spent two days wandering the streets, carrying one half of a tuba, searching for his collaborator who had the other half: when they eventually met the instrument was reassembled for the performance of a single note. His most ambitious project to date, performed in 2002, involved hundreds of people ‘moving a mountain’ in Lima by shovelling the peak of a giant sand dune the grand distance of four inches. The presentation of ‘Seven Walks,’ in a neo-classical townhouse at 21 Portman Square, is markedly unembellished. The exhibition space seems more of a field station than an art show, with plans and maps displayed on table tops and roughly gathered binders of research left out for visitors to flick through. The works themselves are accompanied by small type-written methodologies, reminiscent of recipes. Having had no formal art training, Alÿs is not bound to one particular medium, using video, photography and drawings to record his experiments, and often working with collaborators to realise his ideas. A lot of the work seems unfinished, or rather, under-finished; these experiments remain experimental, not drawn to any neat conclusions. Like the city itself, the work is still ‘in progress’. Alÿs explores London in a variety of different ways. One walk is illustrated by a length of string hung from the ceiling, in which the artist has tied particular knots to codify his movements. Another, recorded on video, investigates the possible sounds and rhythms that can be made from the architecture of the city as Alÿs drags a drumstick along various surfaces. Sketching his path on maps, he documents a journey made only in daylight: in summer he covers the whole of London from corner to corner, in winter he can only manage half of this distance. In all these works, the artist’s sense of play is inescapable. For the most publicised work of the show, ‘The Nightwatch’, Alÿs ‘filmed’ the journey of a fox released into the National Portrait Gallery at night, using the gallery’s network of CCTV cameras. The result is a strange affair – the contrast between the interloper and his surroundings is stark, but the fox trots nonchalantly around the brightly lit, polished floors of the gallery, apparently unaffected by this new environment. Another major project is the film ‘Guards’, for which Alÿs asked a troop of Coldstream Guards to take part in a convoluted game of hide-and-seek. In this video, we watch the soldiers, positioned separately around the Square Mile, searching for their colleagues. On finding one another the guardsmen begin marching together, until the entire troop has reassembled. Displaced around the streets, the guardsmen look out-of-place and lonely, despite their full red regalia, and it is only when they begin to group together, becoming machine-like marching units, that they seem more at ease with their actions. The noise created by their polished boots is also intriguing as the sound builds from isolated footsteps to a crescendo of unified marching, until, as instructed, they break formation and the rhythm of their feet breaks into a random clatter. Under the auspices of the Artangel commission Alÿs has been given an enviable opportunity: the time and space that commissions can bring to walk, wander, and muse. Seeing him strolling, cigarette in hand, the flaneurs of 19th century Paris are understandably brought to mind. However, his walking is a distinctly purposeful activity with an eye far more alert to the possibilities of subversion than that of his historical forebears. Some may also feel that Alÿs’s
engagement with London is a surface affair. Many of the experiments are
ones that could be carried out in any major city, and the details that
he picks out as specifically ‘London’ - the guardsmen with
their bearskin hats and the iron railings around Regency squares - are
not exactly the sexy metropolitan signifiers that Time Out would highlight.
However the actions that he has performed, as an artist commanding a military
unit or playing unorthodox music on street furniture, transgress accepted
rules of movement within the city, and propose entirely new ways of negotiating
its terrain. Alÿs’s work describes a place where strange and
poetic things can be conjured around any corner. For once being lost in
London doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.
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