Paradox of Praxis 1: sometimes making something leads to nothing
“Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997) is the record of an action carried out under the rubric of “sometimes making something leads to nothing.” For more than nine hours, Alÿs pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melted. And so for hour after hour he struggled with the quintessentially Minimal rectangular block until finally it was reduced to no more than an ice cube suitable for a whisky on the rocks, so small that he could casually kick it along the street.”
Francis Alÿs: (s.d.) At: https://francisalys.com/sometimes-making-something-leads-to-nothing/ (Accessed 06/06/2021).
About the Artist
Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium) uses poetic and allegorical methods to address political and social realities, such as national borders, localism and globalism, areas of conflict and community, and the benefits and detriments of progress.
Alÿs’s personal, ambulatory explorations of cities form the basis for his practice, through which he compiles extensive and varied documentation that reflects his ideas and process. As one of the foremost artists of his generation, Alÿs has produced a complex and diverse body of work that includes video, painting, performance, drawing, and photography.
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception | MoMA (s.d.) At: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1091 (Accessed 06/06/2021).
Observation, Reflections, Reactions
Images that jumped out at me, from the video:
- The bells at the beginning are so loud and insistent. In the context of pushing a block, it made me think of Christ carrying the cross to the crucifixion. I’m not sure where that parallel is drawn from, as I see no other religious imagery that I can identify.
- The rest of the video becomes Sisyphean. What is the purpose of pushing this block? At the end, what will have been accomplished? At the end, an ice cube melts into a puddle and curious children’s faces are recorded. Their curiousity and confusion match my own. They have more wonder than I did, watching the event.
- In the various street scenes, the pedestrians and traffic are so utterly disinterested. I must imagine this is curate for the video, but until the end the most interest we see is passing glances. To me, this reinforced the futility of the action — not even an impact on the observers will be left behind.
- As a person with back pain, the first half of this video looks excruciating to me. Perhaps this is where I interpret the Christ imagery, as I interpret pushing this block is not only futile, but also as torture.
- The surface has a significant impact on the block. The hot road is not only melting it, but as it travels over cobbles or down stairs, small pieces chip off and are left behind to melt. The shape of the surface impacts the shape of the melt water left behind, as we’d expect if we were to drag charcoal over rough or smooth paper.
- One of the final shots in the video, a breeze blows dust past the camera before the artist and the ice come into focus. To me, this reinforces the temporality of the work; that the future of this work is destined to fade into dust. Perhaps I’m reading in too far.
If the block of ice is the stylus, then the melt water is the mark left behind however briefly that mark remains under the sun’s glare. However minimally, the ice pushes aside leaves, detritus and dust. Another mark left in that way as well. Once the block became too small, its impact on dust would be imperceptible but some impact is there. Even as it melts into a puddle, it will modify the dirt and leave the impression of the puddle’s shrinking borders.
In the preparation work for Exercise 1, I spent time considering whether a walking path through space could be a drawing. In “sometimes making something leads to nothing”, Alÿs’ mechanically approaches a similar question but solves it with the ice block.
Of the creations I made during Exercise 1 the most similar one, I believe, is that of the charcoal drawing on stone. Although the charcoal did not evaporate under the sun, it did interact with the stone surface in unpredictable ways. The surface itself caught the charcoal, and chipped pieces away in a similar way to the ice block hitting cobbles did. The next day the charcoal marks were gone as the sprinklers in the garden washed them away. Not long after, even the water had evaporated.
Parallels in Other Works by the Artist
Alÿs approaches ambulatory lines in many of his works. I have linked a few that caught my attention from the artist’s website. One, “Prohibited Steps”, was of particular interest. In “sometimes making something leads to nothing” I struggled to understand if the artist was drawing a border around something, or if we were just following a purposeless line.
In “Prohibited Steps” the meandering on the rooftop is the opposite. There is a defined space, and the artist navigates its surface and borders in specific ways. His feet tentatively reach to find its edges.
Where “sometimes making something leads to nothing” brought me images of futility, however, this one is about uncertainty, and confinement.
The imagery of uncertainty are front and center as the video starts blurred, reinforced with tentative footsteps exploring the edge of the roof, and then the final image of the artist blindfolded. Here the artist is confined to a physical and metaphorical island, which their movements define and explore. The final title cards state “Day 11 of quarantine”, and the blind fold evokes an lack of knowing when the current situation ends.