Surfaces fall away, the shark breaks loose, and forgotten bodies lurk beneath the concrete: A new generation of artists reach back to the ’60s and revolutionize contemporary art.
By NIKLAS MAAK

It was a warm day in Mexico City and the artist, with his shirt open, stood out on the street in front of a huge block. A Minimalist sculpture – pure, white, and sharp-angled, many shades lighter than the filthy city. Steam rose from the artwork. It was made of ice. Francis Alÿs bent down and shoved it along the dirty hot streets of the capital until it melted and disappeared. In the end, Alÿs stood there where he began, drenched in sweat, a modern Sisyphus standing in front of his invisible work, a late descendent of Jacques Tati.

“Sisyphus,” wrote Albert Camus, “is the hero of the absurd; his contempt for the gods, his hatred of death and his love for life won him this horrible punishment where all of his being was employed to achieve nothing”. Francis Alÿs is his modern descendent. He once drove a VW Beetle up a sandy slope all day while a mariachi band played a few bars of a beautifully sad song, and when the song was over, the Beetle, spent, rolled down the slope as if it needed the music for fuel. The Beetle never made it up over the hill – but that’s not what the artist was after. Alÿs, the happy Sisyphus, steered his bright red Beetle as if to show what spiteful glee could look like in the face of the absurd. No one knows why the Beetle can only move forward when it hears music, but one suspects it’ll never make it up over the hill, just as one suspects that the driver is enjoying driving the car up through the sand: a Sisyphus who’s enjoying his stone.

That, too, is typical of the subtle humor of the Belgian artist, Francis Alÿs: he short-circuits the tragic figure of Sisyphus and the European philosophy of the absurd with the pleasure suburban Mexicans take in aimless driving and revving their engines for no reason. “Rehearsal,” his latest film, is a story about the desire to turn back the clock, a story of great, fruitless plans and the pleasure taken in failure. Alÿs is actually re-staging the amazing history of his vehicle on the sand dunes: the Volkswagen Beetle, after all, began its career as an entirely unsympathetic military car for the Nazis – and it’s thoroughly astounding that the embodiment of the Nazi regime in this car would become appropriated in the United States as a harmless toy – given the nickname “Herbie” – and would eventually, as a sort of hippie-mobile, come to symbolize nonviolence and anti-capitalist contentedness. The Volkswagen, which spread fear outside of Germany in 1938 as the indestructible vehicle that would mobilize the great German masses, is now a hopelessly aged, nostalgic hunk of lead built only in Mexico, and it doesn’t stand a chance against the American cars that cross Alÿs’s path in his film. And of course, the absurd little film is also a melancholic homage to a country in which many never make it over the hill behind which lies the United States and all its hope and promise. It’s an absurd image, the way this car, which was once supposed to conquer the world for the Nazis and which became a symbol of modern Mexico after the War, dances to the endless, empty loops of mariachi music – and it’s this game in the ruins of impossible plans that runs as a thematic thread throughout Alÿs’s work.

Francis Alÿs, an architect, born in Antwerp in 1959, moved to Mexico in 1987 and combines Fluxus with Minimal Art and, working for years out in the field, makes the living conditions of contemporary cities visible in ways that neither politics nor sociology are able.

It’s the surfaces of the city that Alÿs is interested in and, like a sonic depth-sounder tearing secrets from the metropolis, Alÿs’s art probes the streets. For his poetic street research, he develops apparatuses that look as if a classic flâneur of the 19th century had made his acquaintance with some crazed inventor. In 1991, he wandered through the city with a toy dog he’d made out of old tin cans; and since the “Collector,” the sharp-cornered metal dog, was magnetic, it drew everything to it that was made of metal. After one day, the dog was no longer recognizable under its crust of junk. The magnetic dog took on what had been thrown away and forgotten along the edges of the street, and so, became a greedy flâneur apparatus: a little metal Baudelaire in the way that the Beetle in Alÿs’s “Rehearsal” becomes an air-cooled Sisyphus.

With manic precision, Alÿs researches the mechanisms and the invisible cycles of exploitation in the city. On February 4, 1994, he tossed seven small bronze sculptures into the trash; ever since, he’s been looking for them in the city’s flea markets; he’s already found two there. Alÿs’s art thrives on the emphasis on making things visible: the metal dog brings the overlooked rubbish of civilization to the light of day; the camera he set up in 1999 on the Zócalo, the central square of the Mexican capital, revealed the movements of the city to have strange patterns, like furrows across the ocean floor.

Alÿs is the central figure of a new movement in art, melting Minimal Art, Fluxus, and Dadaism into a new contemporary aesthetic. Minimalist forms turn up notably often in these works – and that’s no coincidence. Donald Judd’s perfect boxes have long since become incunabula of the contemporary aesthetic. Today, there’s hardly a designer closet, a fashionable bar or a building of the “second modern” phase that can be distinguished from the artworks in it. Thanks to its across-the-board victory, Minimal Art is in rather dire straits; it’s no longer recognizable as art. In order to overcome this situation, a new generation of artists uses the Minimalist form in order to rattle the very core of the aesthetic of polished surfaces. The Neo-Dadaist Jeppe Hein has Minimalist sofas suddenly race off, and heavy balls, steered by invisible motors, roll over the feet of gallery visitors and crash into walls – the world of objects is fighting back.

Alÿs’s ice-block performance was also an ironic greeting sent to the artists of the Brit Art movement. For years, this art will probably be remembered in the same way that we remember the goings on in the Court of Louis XVI, and the Marie Antoinette of the British art absolutism was Damien Hirst, who created the most important symbol of the boom years in London with his shark preserved in formaldehyde. The shark, frozen in the blue of a Minimalist box, was the perfect image for the ’80s, for the celebration of all that was cold, for capital’s global rampage. Hirst’s shark was for yuppies and dot-coms what the mounted deer was for their grandfathers. It was the icon of cool. The belief that great stories were no longer possible was mirrored in an extraordinarily text-bare refrigerated art.

Alÿs’s block of ice, which lost its form in the streets of Mexico, is the end of this frosty pose. Here, ice-cold superficial art in the clinically white galleries; there, the sweating human being in the streets of the mega-metropolis. This isn’t an aesthetic break only; it’s also an ideological one. With calculated precision, society and aesthetics, the body and art are short-circuited in a new way that no longer has anything to do with the musty political art of past decades. “Political art” sounded like warmed-over Kollwitz pathos, and making visible poverty and suffering and the horror in the face of the devastation on the side of the losers in the global market economy – all of that was no longer a topic for art. But now artists like Santiago Sierra are rousing a social and political furor that even has his defenders suspicious. In one of the best quarters of Mexico City, in Lomas de Chapultepec, he set up hollow cubes open on one side reminiscent of Minimalist spatial sculptures; to the horror of the residents, they were promptly occupied by the homeless. The art became a seed of an anarchic urbanism – and a shelter for threatened bodies. The body is a presiding theme in Mexican film as well. In Amores Perros, the key scene is the crash that throws together a blond model and two dark-skinned youths from the slums – which also serves as a metaphor for the collision of the first and third worlds, of the well-to-do light-skinned with the anonymous bodies.

This art is leaving the preserve of artistic production without giving up its conceptual and formal strictness, it’s sculptural effect, be it Alÿs’s cold cube or Sierra’s boxes: the pure geometry of this Minimal Art collides with the real world outside; that’s what differentiates it from the Fluxus-like dissolution of the separation between art and everyday life, which ultimately led to a situation in which the production of art was barely recognizable as such or distinguishable from ordinary interactivity. The furious play of a strictly formalistic art in social spaces also works the other way around. While the cool objects bearing the aesthetics of the school of Donald Judd go on a transformative journey through the social space of the city in Alÿs’s work and literally evaporate away, Paul Pfeiffer, in his works, eliminates the central figures of public life and the collective projections they engender. In their different ways, Alÿs and Pfeiffer set out on new explorations of the fields of social engagement. Both show spaces: Alÿs, public spaces whose buried structures are revealed by the invasion of the art object; Pfeiffer, the empty stages of collective fantasies.

Pfeiffer plays with absences, the overlooked traces of people in his Minimalist videos and photo installations. One sees shots of empty beaches, no one in sight, just sand, a few waves, clouds disappearing into the hazy horizon, a crown of foam rolling over the sand – but even so, this is far from idyllic. There’s something disturbing in these images – and the fact that the reason for this feeling of discomfort is never revealed is part of its curious beauty. Pfeiffer loves Hitchcock, and traces of this love can also be seen in works that don’t deal with the director’s work as overtly as “Self Portrait as a Fountain,” a shower that looks like the scene of the crime in Psycho. The wide beaches of the photo series, too, cryptically suggest scenes of other crimes – and precisely because these pictures are so empty and quiet, they seem like stills from Antonioni’s Blow Up and arouse the detective tendencies in the viewer. One finds footprints; one finds slight shadows in these images – as if a body has just evaporated in the noonday sun. Who this person might have been, the pictures won’t say, and one can only guess if one is familiar with the famous photos that George Barris took of Marilyn Monroe on the beach: Pfeiffer has painstakingly retouched these photos and has completely removed the central subject of the shots, the iconic body of the star, making the background the main subject, prompting the eye to explore the usually overlooked mound of sand, footprints or cloud formations – revealing another great American myth, the myth of promising emptiness, the endless landscape just waiting to be settled and have meaning conveyed upon it.

The erasure of the body – which is still present in light traces – and its consequences preside over the work of Paul Pfeiffer. The artist, born in 1966 in Honolulu, first became known primarily for his video series, “The Long Count.” After months of diligent work, Pfeiffer had cut the famous boxing matches of Muhammad Ali into electronic frames and removed the boxers from the images. What was left was a spooky, shadowy scurrying in the ring; instead of intently watching the boxers, the viewer looks directly into the crowd following the match behind the ring, and so, sees in a paradoxical movement the image of seeing, the mechanisms and emotions of watching itself. At the same time, the elegiac black and white world of the video reveals a deep socio-psychological layer of the American cult of boxing: Almost everyone in the crowd is white, excitedly watching two black men, Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. The fight between the black men becomes a late colonial adventure blocked off from the real world and assigned to the metaphorical reservation of the boxing ring.

Pfeiffer is a deconstructionist. The moment that Marilyn or Cassius Clay goes missing and the eye is no longer captured by these iconic bodies, the viewer discovers himself as detective and audience. This aesthetic of productive erasure, which nearly always leads immediately to the backgrounds of the American dream, has itself a legendary precedent in recent American art history: in the early ’50s, Robert Rauschenberg asked the renowned artist Willem de Kooning to give him a color drawing. De Kooning agreed and Rauschenberg spent a few months erasing the work as completely as possible. The “Erased de Kooning,” presented in 1953 was, on one hand, an act of vandalism and lack of respect, but on the other hand, bordered on a declaration of love – after all, Rauschenberg didn’t burn the drawing, but rather like an archeologist in search of the secret of the work, removed it, layer by layer until the initial grooves made by the pencil in the paper became visible. Pfeiffer is working in a similar vein when he erases American icons that attract and block the view, making possible a new sort of detective work.

The new Minimalists are making over Anti-Pop. Their work refuses to be commodifiable by the consumerist cycle; it seeks the beauty of the streets and rediscovers the explosive potential of the coincidental encounter between Minimal Art and public space.

Santiago Sierra once rented a truck with a white, twenty-foot-long trailer. He drove the vehicle out onto the Periferico – the main highway in Mexico City – and parked it at a 90-degree angle to the road. Traffic was thrown into a phenomenal chaos. He had the action filmed from a helicopter. From a distance, the video images remind one of filmed Minimal Art: a white stripe on a black surface. As one comes closer, one recognizes that the perfect order is resulting in unbelievable chaos. People are honking, getting out of their metal boxes, arguing and forming a front against the white bar. And suddenly, one realizes that the most beautiful aspect of a strict form is the disturbance it causes.

Niklas Maak is editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.