International art star Francis Alÿs once tried to build a floating bridge that would symbolically link Cuba and the United States. It was a frustrating exercise.
In 2006, he assembled local fleets in both Havana and Key West, Fla., asking fishermen to position their boats side to side to create a line that would reach across the water, but because of the politically sensitive relationship between the two countries he couldn't tell them what shape they were actually building.
"We had to pretend we were doing choreography, a water ballet rather than an image of a bridge to the other shore," Alÿs said during a recent interview at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, where a major exhibition of his work is now showing. "When you are trying to say something about communication and you are having to lie, there is a blatant contradiction."
Worse, the two sides of the line were uneven: Because Alÿs had put more effort into the delicate task of working in Cuba and engaging that community, about 100 boats showed up in Havana but only 30 in Key West. This created the impression that Cubans were more eager to reach the United States than vice versa, not the unifying image the artist was seeking.
Yet, from this paradoxical attempt at bridge-building, an idea was born. And Alÿs, a native of Belgium who lives in Mexico, took that idea to Spain and Morocco, where he eventually assembled two groups of children on either side of the 13-kilometre Strait of Gibraltar, the narrowest point between Europe and Africa. Each child was given a toy boat with a colourful sail and the two groups paraded simultaneously into the ocean in a long line, creating a symbolic bridge to the other continent.
A symbolic attempt at bridge-building between Spain and Morocco was orchestrated at Gibraltar, where Alÿs organized groups of children with toy boats to paraded simultaneously into the strait in a long line, creating a symbolic bridge to the other continent.
Francis Alÿs In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Felix Blume, Ivan Boccara, Abbas Benhim, Fundación Montenmedio
The children's delighted laughter and joyful splashing fill the fifth-floor galleries at the AGO these days as several video works based on that project play at high volume. There's also a display of the boats themselves, 67 little vessels created by mounting a sail on a flip-flop or Moroccan leather slipper.
Beneath this good cheer, however, there lie much darker themes. With the eerie political foresight that often marks Alÿs's remarkable social interventions, the 2008 Gibraltar project took place just as the surge of Middle Eastern and African migrants was beginning to build toward the crisis of 2015. In photographic works, small-scale paintings and a few wood figures also included here, Alÿs juxtaposes newspaper stories of the migrant crisis with haunting images of people and water. Some of these small studies are darkly witty: A paper cut-out of a woman with a vacuum is glued on the map, her body in Europe, her machine reaching into Africa. Others are quietly poignant: The artist evokes the iconic St. Christopher, carrying the Christ child across a river to safety, but he also paints human figures simply disappearing into the waves and positions a fragile sculpted body on nothing but an inflated plastic baggie.
Colour bars from an old TV sets pasted onto a photograph evoke a contradictory moment when no picture is available and yet the very building blocks of imagery are on display.
Courtesy of the artist © 2016 Francis Alÿs
This meditation on the power and the perils of migration is typical of Alÿs's art, an impressively broad endeavour that encompasses both profound social action and a masterful studio practice to produce work that is both politically engaged and aesthetically engaging.
If his sense of political timing seems remarkably astute as he travels to sites of current conflict or simmering tension, perhaps it is more a question of commitment than of serendipity: The second body of work in this exhibition features a project that began when Alÿs went tornado-chasing in the dry highlands above Mexico City, often inserting himself into the still centre of the spinning whirlwinds of dust that travel the landscape like towering beasts. He pursued the dust clouds for a decade from 2000 to 2010, a period during which the Mexican government's war on drug trafficking imposed increasingly heavy costs on those caught in the crossfire.
And so the tension between the moving cloud and the still centre, between chaos and order, became a metaphor for the Mexican polity. Here, the video of the storm-chasing is accompanied by another series of small paintings that juxtapose symbolic abstract patterns and delicate views of the Mexican landscape as Alÿs explores that idea.
In an earlier work, Francis Alÿs had filmed young boys rolling old bike tires through the streets of Kabul; in his film Reel-Unreel, which is being shown at the AGO, he asked the boys to do the same with spools of film.
Francis Alÿs In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi REEL-UNREEL 2011 Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner
His thought process is also fascinatingly revealed by the third and final body of work in this exhibition, which Mexico City's Museo Tamayo is touring across North America. Invited to Afghanistan by the international art exhibition documenta, Alÿs filmed young boys using old bike tires as hoops, rolling them through the streets of Kabul with the aid of sticks or lengths of wire. For his 20-minute film Reel-Unreel, he asked the boys to do the same with spools of film: In 1996, the Taliban, in their drive to destroy all idols and icons, had entered Afghanistan's film archives, seized hundreds of reels and burned them. People said the bonfire of all that celluloid lasted for days, but the archivists had actually hidden the crucial negatives and the Taliban were only burning prints.
At the AGO, Reel-Unreel produces a large-scale spectacle of both physical and emotional power. It is screened with crystalline immediacy thanks to a Panasonic projector usually reserved for venues as large as concerts or amusement parks and shown on a big screen in a vast gallery where you can lie on the floor on cushions, Afghan-style. There you will witness an unusual travelogue through Kabul as the boys encourage their film reels ever forward. In the film's most poignant moments, they stop and examine the films themselves, recounting what images they can discern from their scratched surfaces.
Francis Alÿs Untitled (color bars) 2011-2012
Courtesy of the artist © 2016 Francis Alÿs
It's impressive stuff, but the kicker is sitting in a gallery alongside it. Inspired by an old video monitor he saw in Afghanistan, Alÿs has also created a series of small paintings in which he plays with the theme of the colour bars on old TV sets, that once-familiar test pattern of coloured stripes that appeared when no programming was aired. Created in the midst of a culture ravaged by fanaticism but now sheltered in a high-art shrine, here is a compelling retort to iconoclasm, a work that quietly evokes a contradictory moment when no picture is available and yet the very building blocks of imagery are on display. Any citizen can take those colour bars and turn them into art – but perhaps none so powerfully as Francis Alÿs.
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Negotiation runs through April 2 at the Art Gallery of Ontario (ago.net).