{"id":1859,"date":"2016-06-12T18:51:15","date_gmt":"2016-06-12T18:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/?page_id=1859"},"modified":"2017-05-21T16:32:55","modified_gmt":"2017-05-21T16:32:55","slug":"francis-alys-spirit-conviviality","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/francis-alys-spirit-conviviality\/","title":{"rendered":"Francis Al\u00ffs: In the Spirit of Conviviality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Francis Al\u00ffs: In the Spirit of Conviviality<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

Few commentators would dispute that, on the face of it, Francis Al\u00ffs\u2019s project When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em>, 2002, was a ludic, if not ludicrous, gesture. A huge deployment of voluntary human labour with nothing to show for it \u2013 on site, at least \u2013 except some tracks in the sand, sooner or later to be obscured by the forces of wind and gravity. And few artistic gestures so lucidly lay bare the Sisyphean absurdity of the human condition, caught between utopian aspiration and frail endeavour in the larger space-time schema of the world. The very play of grounded and groundlessness, materiality and immateriality in the work, conjures up that abyssal gap between the burden of everyday existence and the weightlessness of the imagination, in which the sheer gravity of the former in most regions of the world, including Peru, lends the latter at times an air of the frivolous. Kant himself may have appreciated the extent to which Al\u00ffs\u2019s project colludes with his assessment of art as \u2018purposiveness without purpose\u2019, a characteristic that Gadamer also significantly attributed to play: he described both in terms of \u2018movement as<\/em> movement\u2019, setting its own rules and existing in an \u2018autonomous temporality\u2019 \u2013 a time-out-of-time; and they expressed an overabundance of life.1<\/strong> Art \u2013 like play, garbage and wastelands in general (notably the outskirts of cities where most shanty towns of the world are sited) \u2013 is an \u2018excess\u2019 or \u2018unproductive\u2019 expenditure, a continuous production of \u2018otherness\u2019, neither reducible to commodification nor wholly subject to the disciplinary mechanisms of the socio-political system that engenders it. And as such, it always presents a latent form of resistance to prevailing structures of power.<\/p>\n

We should not, then, underestimate the role of the gratuitous in Al\u00ffs\u2019s project: it was a collaboration \u2013 a working together \u2013 between the artist, the critic, the filmmaker, the volunteers and the local people in a spirit of free will and conviviality, a sharing of a space of existence, if only momentarily, to perform a seemingly inconsequential act. But there is, of course, more to it than this. What grabs our attention here, and what cuts to the heart of what we may mean by art practice nowadays, is the very freedom to think and act upon such a thought. In what sense can praxis<\/em> \u2013 in the classical sense, an act that is an end in itself and pertains to the labour of everyday existence \u2013 be at the same time poiesis<\/em> \u2013 an act whose end is not in itself but in the pro-duction (in the sense of a bringing-into-being) of a \u2018truth\u2019? What kind of \u2018truth\u2019 is at stake in the work? And what can be the relevance of a poetic act in the context of sustained political crisis, such as that experienced in Peru itself, of which the displacement of people and the coming-into-being of Ventanilla, and other pueblos jovenes<\/em> like it, is but one of its consequences \u2013 a symptom, in fact, of a fundamental void of meaning in the structure of polity to which the entire play on displacement in the work alludes? The argument I should like to advance is that the space of freedom opened up by When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> provides the conditions of possibility for a new thought of the political, here understood not simply as the mechanism of political discourse or the structures of power and the state, but as \u2018conviviality\u2019, or, the founding moment of community.<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> was not, of course, without purpose or consequence. We know of it through its meticulous documentation \u2013 aerial footage of the overall topography showing the work in progress as a serpentine chain of workers battles up and down the dune in the heat of the noonday sun; and on-the-ground footage of the volunteers, their shovels scraping through the gritty surface and throwing up clouds of sand. We are given a sense of both its material and immaterial conditions. Based on its re-presentation through video, photographic and written documentation, knowledge of the work has already been disseminated through art publications, gossip and various interpretative commentaries. This \u2018absence\u2019 of any tangible \u2018art object\u2019, the displacement of preparatory work to event to re-presentation (what Al\u00ffs describes as the three successive and distinct lives of the project), entangles us again in the dilemma of where between concept and object \u2018art\u2019 lies, which has been unresolved since the 1960s. But in any case, the mythopoietic effect of dissemination is how we \u2018know\u2019 the vast majority of the world\u2019s cultural productions, especially site-specific ones, from Easter Island to Giotto\u2019s Arena Chapel to the Land Art projects of the late 1960s and 1970s.<\/p>\n

In some respects When Faith Moves Mountains <\/em>invites comparison with earlier Land Art and Conceptual practices. Just as they were born out of the politicised climate of the 1950s and 1960s, so the forces of globalism have confronted us again with the question of the nature and place of art practices and their relevance to the social and political networks in which we are all now irrevocably entangled. And yet, despite their ambitions to \u2018democratise\u2019 art through its redefinition (as in the case of Kosuth), or through avoidance of its elitist institutions (as in the case of Land Art), these earlier practices nonetheless produced image-based objects still conventionally encoded as \u2018art\u2019 in exclusive, modernist terms. Typically, Land Art projects sought out remote and seemingly unpopulated landscapes; among the most infamous of these we can cite Michael Heizer\u2019s Double Negative<\/em>, 1969 \u2013 a displacement of 240,000 tons of earth in the Nevada desert; Walter de Maria\u2019s Lightning Field<\/em>, 1977 \u2013 400 steel lightning conductors set in a grid over a square mile of the New Mexico desert; and Robert Smithson\u2019s Spiral Jetty<\/em>, 1970 \u2013 over 5000 tonnes of earth and stone curling into Utah\u2019s Great Salt Lake. As with When Faith Moves Mountain<\/em>, Spiral Jetty<\/em> is known to us through the documentary film of its making, and similarly, Smithson\u2019s concern with entropy meant that it was not intended to survive the forces of nature.<\/p>\n

All of these earlier sculptural sites were realised through the use of backhoes and other heavy earthmoving machinery, in contrast to the shovel and manual labour of When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em>. The difference, however, is more than the macho affluence of the US versus the material poverty and labour-intensive necessity of Latin America. To understand the fuller significance we might think also of Richard Long who, like his American counterparts, trekked around what he liked to call \u2018empty landscape\u2019,2<\/strong> but manually moved rocks or driftwood into configurations that nostalgically invoked a prehistoric or pre-industrial arcadia. Nonetheless, these practices retain a residue of the colonial mentality that assumes the right to make one\u2019s mark on or exploit the land as material for art no matter whose territory, \u2018empty\u2019 or not, it may be. By contrast, When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> was an act without possession. One crucial distinction, then, between these earlier practices and Al\u00ffs\u2019s project is that the former are authorised, delimited reconfigurations of nature that draw the world into the orbit of the privileged subject rather than engage the self with the space and rhythm of the world. They remain consistent with what Agamben describes as modernism\u2019s progressive displacement of poiesis by praxis, which gave rise to the notion of art as an expression of the artist\u2019s creative will, and in the process detached aesthetics from ethics. And yet, as Agamben continues, \u2018what the Greeks meant with the distinction between poiesis and praxis was precisely that the essence of poiesis has nothing to do with the expression of a will (with respect to which art is in no way necessary): this essence is found instead in the pro-duction of truth and in the subsequent opening of a world for man\u2019s existence and action.\u20193<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Faith Moves Mountains <\/em>is consistent with Al\u00ffs\u2019s tendency to withdraw as the artistic subject of the work. This does not at all mean that he also withdraws responsibility for it, but is an acknowledgement that the significance of an artistic event lies in its potential to open a world \u2018for man\u2019s existence and action.\u2019 Al\u00ffs shares this reticence with certain Conceptual practices of earlier decades. For instance, his paseos<\/em>, although derived from a different set of parameters, recall Adrian Piper\u2019s 1970-71 Catalysis series of absurd street performances; intended to elicit surprised responses from the passers-by, these interventions were, as she has said, not \u2018art\u2019 in so far as she was not posing herself as the object, but \u2018propositions\u2019 about art. Or, one might invoke Lawrence Weiner\u2019s text \u2018sculptures\u2019 about form or materials, and Luis Camnitzer\u2019s text-based work of the late 1960s. Rather than impose an image or object, these works were intended to activate the individual imagination of the viewer, since anyone could visualise the work according to her or his own experience. This attentiveness to the way the viewer imaginatively negotiates the work, although still based in formal concerns, is already \u2018political\u2019 in so far as it posits a concept of art as inherently dialogical and non-hierarchical. And yet Al\u00ffs\u2019s projects (like Piper\u2019s and Camnitzer\u2019s subsequent work) extend this propositional dimension of art much further into the socio-political sphere, such that the very absence of tangible object in When Faith Moves Mountains <\/em>brings the frame, or socio-political context<\/em> in which the work was produced, into sharper relief. For this reason it also poses some rather difficult questions regarding the ethical responsibility of the artist, questions that also demand that we rethink the aesthetic and the political as not inherently irreconcilable categories of experience.<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

To make art more answerable to \u2018real life\u2019 has been a persistent drive of the politically conscious artist at least since the 1960s, but politically motivated art has always been caught in a dilemma between the desire for artistic freedom and the demands of political activism, in which poiesis has too often ceded to praxis. And yet one has to ask whether this is not a false antinomy based on old assumptions that the aesthetic was necessarily detached from everyday life, which is tantamount to claiming that the creative act could have nothing to say of the truth of existence, a patent absurdity. Art may be an excess of life, but in our encounter with it, it brings its world to ours in what Gadamer described as a \u2018fusion of horizons\u2019. It is a space of interpenetration between these two worlds, where rather than the one mimicking the other, they are both put into mutual crisis. The need of contemporary art to understand and test the limits of this horizon, which I take to be one of the drives behind When Faith Moves Mountains,<\/em> was also manifest in the recent Documenta11 in 2002. The exhibition\u2019s curators deliberately set out to interrogate the relation of artistic practices to neo-colonial globalisation; against the historical convention of such international events to showcase formally inventive work, they selected practitioners who sought ways by which to confront real social and political issues. The consequence, however, was a slippage between documentary and artistic practices that begged the question of their respective efficacy in producing new truths for understanding reality.<\/p>\n

Among the primary goals of the documentary \u2013 and activist art \u2013 is persuasion and clarity of transmission, which means that the language it uses must be unambiguous and already commonly understood; that is, there is an assumption that words and images are directly communicable. But if one reproduces the language of established, hegemonic discourses without challenging the ideological motives that underline both their structures of representation and forms of reception \u2013 in effect, their claims to \u2018truth\u2019 \u2013 then one ends up conforming to the conservative politics one wants to oppose. Hence the rhetoric of politically motivated art has tended either to reconfirm authority \u2013 often by seeking to occupy its place \u2013 or to become appropriated and neutralised by it, a problem that dogged activist art of the 1960s and 1970s.<\/p>\n

If, however, we take the view that the poetic and political efficacy of art lies beyond the transmission of mere information in what Heidegger called the \u2018unconcealment\u2019 of truth, then its modus operandi<\/em> must involve a suspension<\/em> of signification. This may be experienced as liberatory joy or intense anguish, but in either case it mobilises the feelings and imagination of the viewer, an affectivity that depends less on its status as a physical image per se than as an encounter with an event and a vector of a thought. By this route, we come closer to appreciating the subtlety Al\u00ffs\u2019s work. Art, for Heidegger, \u2018institutes a world\u2019, meaning, that art as poiesis produces a hitherto unthought configuration of reality. To do this art needs to provide the conditions of an \u2018event\u2019; but for it to be an event it cannot strictly speaking present what is already known. Thus the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of \u2018meaning\u2019; or rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its \u2018truth\u2019. This<\/em> truth is not something already there to be discovered \u2013 like the laws of gravity, or how many civilians were killed in the American bombing of Baghdad \u2013 but is created in response to a world and a self in a continuous state of transformation. What this means, as Bakhtin recognised, is that each act performed in the world at each singular moment has its transformative consequences, however localised, and herein lies the ethical responsibility of not only the artist but of us all: that the ethical arises in our answerability to our own actions, not in any prior moral rules.<\/p>\n

Typically, Al\u00ffs\u2019s work does not attempt to fill this unconscious void with a plethora of images but to hollow it out, and this is the trait we see playfully excavated in, amongst other works, Magnetic Shoes<\/em>, 1994, the artist\u2019s paseo<\/em> around La Habana wearing magnetic shoes to attract metallic street debris (a deliberately ironic gesture given that Cuba, like much of Latin America is, out of economic necessity, a nation of opportunistic collectors and recyclers of \u2018garbage\u2019); Paradox of Praxis 1: Sometimes doing something leads to nothing<\/em>, 1997, in which the artist pushed a block of ice round the streets of Mexico City until it melted; and The Loop<\/em>, 1997, in which the artist took an airplane detour from Tijuana around the world to San Diego to avoid crossing the notorious US-Mexico. What thereby emerges as ludicrous and meaningless is not the poetic gesture itself but what it discloses of the geopolitical conditions that frame it. Deleuze maintained that, contrary to conventional opinion, the artist was not so much the patient (suffering some form of psychosis in need of treatment) but rather the \u2018diagnostician\u2019 of civilisation, capable of identifying the symptoms of a social pathology prior to any general awareness of it.4<\/strong> And it is precisely this moment of artistic insight, when our habitual structures of reality are shown to no longer make sense that the potential arises for a collective demand for change.<\/p>\n

When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> relates to Al\u00ffs\u2019s earlier \u2018demonstration\u2019, Cuentos patri\u00f3ticos<\/em>, 1997, a video staged in the Z\u00f3calo in Mexico City, in which the artist led a line of sheep in a circle round the square\u2019s central flagpole, a rallying point for Mexico\u2019s public demonstrations. The work speaks in general of the coercive effects of power, but also alludes to a historical event in 1968, in which government officials, forced to rally in the Z\u00f3calo against the student movement, began to bleat like a flock of sheep.5<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> also relates to a \u2018happening\u2019, Lava la bandera<\/em>, staged two years earlier in Peru by a group of artists and writers, the Colectivo Sociedad Civil. Outraged by the Fujimori government\u2019s election fraud, they assembled round the fountain in Lima\u2019s Plaza Major to wash the stains of corruption from the national flag. The recommended brand of soap was B\u00f3livar, named after Latin America\u2019s most famous liberator. This metaphor, well understood by the populace, sparked off spontaneous flag washing in towns all over Peru, contributing to the downfall of the government. This event in turn recalls the \u2018scrubbing piece\u2019, an unofficial performance by the Guerrilla Art Action Group (an activist group engaged in street protests and letter campaigns) conducted in the Whitney Museum in New York in 1970 as a protest against both the elitism of the institution and the Vietnam War, their slogan: This place is a mess. We\u2019ve got to wash it up.6<\/strong><\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

What these events have in common to various degrees is the articulation of a poetic metaphor with collective agency. The question is, what is it that links a movement seemingly originating in individual sensibility to collective response: what is it about When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> that enables an apparently absurd thought to gather to it a body of unpaid participants and then touch the imagination of an art world displaced at some considerable distance from its site of execution? Agency is experienced in the decisions subjects and communities make in mapping and positioning themselves relative to sites of power. This is precisely the point of articulation of the ethical where this is understood not as a pre-given set of rules, which are by no means universal, but in something produced in the encounter with an event for which one has no ready-to-hand explanations. This is the moment of the ethical that Bakhtin refers to and that Zygmunt Bauman describes as preceding<\/em> the moral law.7<\/strong> Alain Badiou relates this moment to Lacan\u2019s notion of the Real: a realisation of a \u2018truth\u2019 \u2013 a void of meaning at the core of any situation, which is nonetheless its unacknowledged or hidden foundation.8<\/strong>The subject is seized by a realisation that alters its existing perception of the world and sense of self within it, producing a \u2018becoming-other\u2019 than itself. The subject is what the intuition produces. Hence, if each act performed creates a new configuration of self and world, then it also animates a new ethical evaluation. Badiou\u2019s famous example is Saint Paul\u2019s conversion on the road to Damascus; and we might add that both artistic insight and faith, referred to in Al\u00ffs\u2019s title, are experiences of the human spirit that exist in excess of scientific proof, or instrumental reason in general. What this means is that art as insight does not render up a subject of knowledge, since it is precisely the privileged subject that is dissolved here, but access to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the \u2018origin\u2019: neither the origin of the world nor of a psychological self, but of each moment in its singularity, where artist and viewer find common ground.9<\/strong><\/p>\n

Central to all these accounts is the proposition that each singular moment is constitutive of shared existence. As Bakhtin insists, \u2018To live from within myself, from my unique place in Being, does not yet mean at all that I live only for my own sake\u2019; as I approach the other in its own singularity I acknowledge my answerability to that other and to myself as a responsible participant in the always becoming world-as-event.\u201910<\/strong> As Nancy argues, we must forge a different path from the post-Enlightenment privilege of Being, which conceals the fact that \u2018I\u2019 is mutually constituted with others. \u2018I\u2019 is always and already \u2018us\u2019, \u2018being-together\u2019: \u2018Being does not have meaning\u2026 there is no meaning if meaning is not shared.\u201911<\/strong> From this point of view, art\u2019s origin and destiny no longer move from and to an autonomous self, the assumption of modernism, but in \u2018being-together\u2019, an essential sharing of existence in which the Western notion of the privileged artistic subject is no longer sustainable.<\/p>\n

This spirit of conviviality is, for me, the motivating force behind the event of When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em>, initiating and uniting community as a shared experience of a thought, from the group of mostly engineering students who participated in the event at the site, to the people of the pueblo j\u00f3ven<\/em> who took it upon themselves to protect the site from interference while the work was in progress, to the art world, which receives the idea through the chain of documentation and commentary: a movement connecting the local to the global. In other words, as several commentaries have pointed out, When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> initiates a storytelling function, and Al\u00ffs himself has spoken of the work\u2019s potential to become a \u2018fable or urban myth\u2019, consistent with the intentions of his work in general.12<\/strong> Deleuze calls this \u2018fabulation\u2019, which he emphatically places in the domain of collective utterance.13<\/strong> Fabulation concerns neither psychological nor historical memory as such (although it may draw on this), but the event through which teller and listener, or image and viewer, enter into a mutual relation of transformation. For the author, it is the task of the artist to invent new uses of language through which the collective may see the possibility of reinventing itself.<\/p>\n

Every new community needs its myths and storytellers on which to found its cohesion, or right to exist against the forces of fragmentation, as Patrick Chamoiseau\u2019s epic novel Texaco<\/em>, set in the post-slavery conditions of Africa\u2019s descendants in Martinique, <\/em>perfectly describes.14<\/strong> As it happens, both Texaco \u2013 the jumble of \u2018hutches\u2019 on the outskirts of City (Fort-de-France) \u2013 and the pueblo j\u00f3ven<\/em> of Ventanilla on the dunes outside Lima are founded in the unpromising shadow of an oil refinery. Sand, an organically inert material, provides little sustenance for life, but is nonetheless an ingredient in material for building foundations. Both When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> and Texaco<\/em> invite us to consider that in repressive regimes, the cruellest act is perhaps not to deprive a people of its body but of the ground and will to imagine new possibilities of life. Art, of course, does not produce grand revolutions; but as an event that opens up a new narrative about reality it provides the conditions of possibility for a nascent political consciousness, one born from conviviality, a being-together as a coming-into-being of community: the realisation of shared existence.<\/p>\n

When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> is a reminder that, faced with the ever-increasing instrumentalisation of life under globalisation, the responsibility of artistic practices is not to relinquish the right to imagine, but to invent new uses of language and new tactics of engagement with community \u2013 in other words, not the patronising notion of \u2018bringing art to the masses\u2019, which still inscribes the attitudes of Western institutions and \u2018social\u2019 art practices, but a reconfiguration of practices capable of penetrating different social spaces and collective imaginaries. Or, as Camnitzer puts it: \u2018The discussion is not one about the ethics of art-making under dire circumstances, or the measurement of its direness, but about the possibility and duty of sustaining a useful militancy and, further, society\u2019s critical ability and sanity. That is, keeping alienation in check, everybody\u2019s alienation, no matter what.\u201915 To keep alive the will to imagine is also to invent new ethical landscapes, new narratives and new agents of social change; it is utopian without promising Utopia.<\/p>\n

The Green Line<\/em>, 2004, Al\u00ffs\u2019s paseo<\/em> through Jerusalem, revisits the question posed in When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em>: what can be the relevance of a poetic act in the context of sustained political crisis?16 As such, The Green Line<\/em> functions as an extended and complementary exploration of the earlier work. The difference is that Jerusalem is a more militarised political context than Ventanilla, problematizing any notion of \u2018aesthetic neutrality\u2019. To perform an act objectively in Jerusalem would be to succumb to the compromised liberal strategy favoured by Western media of reporting a \u2018balanced view\u2019 when the prevailing unequal relations of power demanded an ethical critique. Given that, as an outsider, the artist could also not be partisan, and direct collaboration with local communities, as in When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em>, was not an option, what position was available to him? Al\u00ffs\u2019s solution was to retrace the map drawing made by Moshe Dayan in 1948, known as the \u2018green line\u2019, that inaugurated the partition of the city, but which topographically represented a sixty to eighty metre wide tract of land. Al\u00ffs was filmed walking the \u2018green line\u2019 with a leaky tin of green paint, and the film was then combined with recorded commentaries on Al\u00ffs\u2019s action by both Palestinian and Israeli interviewees. By making a minimal intervention in a \u2018cartographic gap\u2019 no one can possess and hence from which no one can speak, the artist offered another position from the paradoxical ground of groundlessness.<\/p>\n

In both When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> and The Green Line, <\/em>meaning lies not in Al\u00ffs\u2019s gesture but in what its absurdity discloses of the historical and socio-political framework that surrounds it. A poetic gesture intrinsically does not state a political position from which any determinate meaning can be derived, on the contrary, its value is its capacity to \u2018put meaning on trial\u2019 (as Adorno once said of Beckett\u2019s plays), to induce in its interlocutor a momentary loss of control of meaning from which a new insight and configuration of reality can emerge. Both When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> and The Green Line<\/em> speak to questions of human belonging and dispossession, of the cartographies of colonialism. But this is not simply a territorial matter; it touches those relations that dehumanise feeling on both sides of a repressive divide. If the effect of conventional politics and its technologies is to disable human exchange and shrink existence to the limited world of \u2018interests\u2019, the effect of Al\u00ffs\u2019s poetics is subversively political in its gift of the gesture as a potential catalyst for working through and reconfiguring reality, from senselessness to sense, impasse to passage, inhuman to human, towards a more expansive politic of solidarity and conviviality.<\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/h4>\n

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays<\/em>, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p 22-23.<\/p>\n

2. Richard Long interviewed by Colin Fitzpatrick: \u2018There is some comment on the lack of people in my work, but it is just a question of choice, the subject of my work is walking, or making sculpture in empty landscape. Most of the world\u2019s surface is still open landscapes. I feel I\u2019m a realist working in the real spaces of the world. dundee.ac.uk\/transcript\/volume2\/issue2\/long.<\/p>\n

3. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content<\/em>, trans. Georgia Albert, California: Stanford University Press, 1999, p 72.<\/p>\n

4. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense<\/em>, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp 237-238.<\/p>\n

5. For a full analysis of this work see Cuauth\u00e9moc Medina, \u2018Action\/ Fiction\u2019, in Francis Al\u00ffs<\/em>, Antibes: Mus\u00e9e Picasso, 2001, pp 16-20.<\/p>\n

6. See Lucy Lippard, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change<\/em>, New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1984, p 43.<\/p>\n

7. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics<\/em>, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1993, pp 47\u201361.<\/p>\n

8. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil<\/em>, trans. Peter Hallward, London & New York: Verso, 2001, pp 47-52.<\/p>\n

9. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural<\/em>, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O\u2019Byrne, California: Stanford University Press, 2000, pp 1- 22.<\/p>\n

10.M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act<\/em>, trans. Vadim Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas, 1993, p 48. Bakhtin\u2019s reading of the ethical as mutual answerability derives from his attempt to reconcile the seemingly insurmountable gap between lived experience and its cultural representation, which is also the trajectory traced through the three \u2018lives\u2019 of When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em>.<\/p>\n

11. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural<\/em>, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O\u2019Byrne, California: Stanford University Press, 2000, pp 1- 22<\/p>\n

12. Francis Al\u00ffs, \u2018A Thousand Words\u2019, Artforum International<\/em>, Summer 2002, XL no 10, p 147.<\/p>\n

13. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image<\/em>, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: The Athlone Press, 1989, pp 215\u2013224. In speaking of the critique of disabling myths in Brazilian Glauber Rocha\u2019s cinema, Deleuze says, \u2018[\u2026] the agitprop is no longer the result of a becoming conscious, but consists of putting everything into a trance<\/em>, the people and its masters, and the camera itself, pushing everything into a state of aberration\u2026\u2019 This echoes Al\u00ffs\u2019s desire for the event of When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em> to provoke a \u2018collective hallucination\u2019. See Cuauth\u00e9moc Medina\/Francis Al\u00ffs, \u2018Maximum Effort, Minimum Result\u2019 in Francis Al\u00ffs<\/em>, Phaidon, 2007.<\/p>\n

14. Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco<\/em>, trans. Rose-Myriam R\u00e9joulis and Val Vinokurov, New York: Vintage International, 1997.<\/p>\n

15. Luis Camnitzer, \u2018Conflict\u2019, Art Nexus<\/em>, no. 47, March 2003.<\/p>\n

16. The Green Line was designed to test the axioms \u2018sometimes doing something poetic can become political\u2019 and \u2018sometimes doing something political can become poetic\u2019.<\/p>\n

The essay was first commissioned in 2004 to focus specifically on When Faith Moves Mountains<\/em>. It was subsequently revised for the publication Francis Al\u00ffs<\/em>, London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2007, pp 109-120. Presented here is a synthesis of both versions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francis Al\u00ffs: In the Spirit of Conviviality Few commentators would dispute that, on the face of it, Francis Al\u00ffs\u2019s project When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002, was a ludic, if not ludicrous, gesture. A huge deployment of voluntary human labour with nothing to show for it \u2013 on site, at least \u2013 except some tracks in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1860,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"yst_prominent_words":[127,114,128,119,120,112,111,116,126,122,113,121,123,118,130,125,117,124,129,115],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=1859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}