The Portrait

Francis Alÿs is the consummate late-century flaneur. A jet-lagged, peripatetic artist, he travels to a city to develop his own narrative. In his role and lifestyle as an itinerant, his method is to employ the city as a studio or laboratory through which to discover himself and the city at the same time. Oscillating in the space between strong definitions (of place and self) that are already institutionalized, Alÿs operates as an interventionist, depending upon artistic collaborations to invent an image which questions itself as it defines itself. In Mexico City, he works with rotulistas, vernacular sign painters, who repaint his original paintings in ways that continue to show individualistic styles in spite of the mostly mechanical nature of their reproduction. Alÿs then reworks some of the copies himself so that the distinction between original and copy, so dear to art, is blurred completely, raising speculations about the nature of art itself. Before coming to New Mexico, Alÿs surveyed Mexico City residents, asking them what they would like to see in a snowglobe of their own city (which does not have one in its tourist shops). Using the iconographic information thus gained, Alÿs made by hand an edition of ninety-four snowglobes. Like other cultural tourists, Alÿs became interested in the painting tradition associated with lowrider car culture in Northern New Mexico. By forming a partnership with Randy, Nolan, and Dennis Martinez, Alÿs was able to design and paint a large mural advertising the snowglobes. The painting was based on the three Chimayo painters' vision of Mexico City, a city none of them had ever visited. He asked them to base their image on what they thought it was like before Colmbus, at the time of Spanish rule, and as it is today. The four artists worked together to exact the image, through a combination of painterly styles used on car bodies. The mural, which bears the legend, "the world's largest city in the palm of your hand." would act to sell the globes. The combination of scales and styles, and the combination of actual and mythical knowledge, transact a strange mapping of the ideas of a particular city, a place mitigated by a circuit breaker (in this case, called "the artist"). Alÿs problematizes the notion of place by replacing it in two artful containers, the mural and the globe, underlining the idea that all places exist simultaneously in minds and minds' eyes, as well as in memories of the actual world.
Text written by Curator Bruce W. Ferguson and Vincent J. Varga for the exhibition catalog.