Lessons in Futility: Francis Alÿs and the Legacy of ... - Grant Kester

we were making a metaphorical political comment instead of just undertaking
another futile political action.” 31
This notion of futility and waste brings us back to the ambivalent lesson of
May ’68. Political or social progress is always already destined for frustration and
deferral, impurity and compromise, due to the inevitable cooption of the forces of
organized resistance. The improvements in social justice and economic equality
that have been achieved in the Latin America polity through a century or more of
contestation against the logic of modernity [I’d like to keep this as it is since Alÿs
continually references “modernity” in his discussion of this performance. Also, I
think the phrase “neo-colonial exploitation” that follows helps clarify what’s at
stake] and the forces of neo-colonial exploitation fall away in this narrative, which
reduces critique to a simple logic of inversion: modernity's demand for efficiency
and productivity will be subverted by a deliberate embrace of inefficiency and
futility. 32 Alÿs’s metaphoric construction of modernity thus entails a hollowing out
of Latin American history, as well as a detached relationship to that history as a
subject of poetic contemplation.
The symbiotic relationship between efficiency and inefficiency in Alÿs’s
work is paralleled by a second set of oppositional terms associated with its
critical and theoretical framing in the art world. This opposition is neatly captured
by Jean Fisher in the essay cited above. Activist art, according to Fisher,
operates on the basis of a naïve faith that “words and images are directly
communicable”. Alÿs, for his part, refuses the semantic labour of meaning and
engages instead in a Heideggerian “suspension of signification,” producing a
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