Francis Alÿs: 'Tu subrealismo' (Your subrealism)

Third Text

Volumn 11, Issue 38, 1997, Pages 39-54

  Medina, Cuauhtémoc ^a  

^a UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO   (Mexico)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149177210     PISSN: 09528822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09528829708576657     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Between 1992 and 1996, he had managed to collect around 100 of them, some anonymous, others signed by unknown artists. The Fabiola collection was exhibited in Curare, Critical Space for the Arts, Mexico City, September-October, 1994.
2. Here, I differ from Thomas McEvilley's interpretation in his essay 'Francis Alÿs: Taking Account of the Unaccountable'; in Francis Alÿs, The Liar, The Copy of the Liar, catalogue for the exhibition at Arena Mexico-Galeria Ramis Barquet in 1994. McEvilley wants to see the bourgeois in the protagonist of Alÿs's paintings, describing it as if he were thinking of the '80s yuppie, in part because he doesn't know the context of the Mexican rótulos. The fact that Alÿs's sources stem from a dandified representation of the popular court, means that this icon functions in a distinct way.
3. Another temporal installation was Placing Pillows, 1990: a series of pillows flapping from windows.
4. This relation of copy to copy to copy was expressed in the title which for a time Alÿs gave to the project, 'The Liar, The Copy of the Liar'.
5. It is important that some of Alÿs's collaborators recognise Maestro Burgos - author of the decoration of the Tenampa de la Plaza de Garibaldi bar in Mexico City - as a model of quality which they can achieve. Burgos died in March, 1996.
6. Francis Alÿs, statement for his exhibition at Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo, June 1991.
7. To cite the 'Fourth Reich' of the caricaturist Palomo.
8. On various occasions, Alÿs has pointed out his interest in alienation, which in J P Sartre's Nausea occurs with a doorhandle, an event that triggers the distress in the novel.
9. The titling of that series has had two phases. Firstly it was called 'installation projects'; since 1995 it has been renamed 'City Squats'.
10. Julio Cortazar, Rayuela [1963], Ed. de Andrés Amorós, Cátedra, Madrid, 1989, Chapter 41, p 398.
11. In My Hands Feel Like Gloves/Balloons (Mis manos son como globos), 1991, the sculptor presented a ceramic jar enclosed in an inflated balloon. The piece showed how found objects lose their familiarity on entering the abstract space of art, provoking a desire to strike the enclosed object which, having penetrated disillusionment, would be fulfilled by the explosion of the balloon.