For this task, I was asked to look at Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’ piece Sometimes Making Something Leads To Nothing to get an idea of the extremes of what might be termed ‘drawing’ in contemporary art.
Well, when I googled this I was expecting to see a photo of a work of art – not various photos of a man pushing a giant block of ice around a city until it got to a tiny size and then fully melted!
To what extent this can be considered drawing? He is making marks through the physical motion of putting ice-to-pavement so to speak, and you could consider the brief and rapidly evaporating marks of meltwater as a very fleeting temporary mark. Then, this has been captured very permanently on video. But it does beg the question – what is the point? So of course there must be more to it that that… is it reflective of the Greek myth of Sisyphus and his punishment to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, continuously and for all eternity? Is it about consumerism? Is it about the cycle of life? Is it about climate change? It made me think about glaciers and how they melt but still leave their mark on our mountains and hillsides and how their waters continue to bend the land as they flow in rivers to the sea.
So I had various ideas but then read an article that explained it: ‘Though considered an absurd use of one’s effort and time, the act of pushing the block of ice around the city center was done to symbolize the frustration that everyday residents of Mexico City endure in an effort to improve their living conditions. Deceptively unassuming in its simplicity, the video was also created to show that sometimes the only thing that one needs to enjoy their city in a new and unique way is something as modest as a block of ice.’
And so I discovered that Alys is a visual conceptual artist – makes sense! And his reason for this video is compelling and I can relate to it given that I work in the third sector. I find it a really interesting way to evoke social injustice issues and human suffering. In a sector where we mostly speak and write to get peoples attention, this is rather innovative! It reminds me of the artist Saype and his massive biodegradable paintings done in mountains and cliffsides to promote things like waste management and the plight of refugees.
I was asked to reflect on whether this resembles any of my temporary drawings… I suppose I did make colourful ice cubes that melted away into nothing and all for the sake of experimenting with temporary drawings and certainly not with the conceptual focus of Alys! I could certainly scale up any of my drawings into something bigger and more time consuming and exhausting and still just as temporary – though my freezer isn’t big enough for that many ice cubes and I am not sure how to do that with the puddles, perhaps I would need a flash-mob style group effort!
This exercise was yet another pleasant surprise. Being challenged to think so broadly and conceptually about what drawing can be and how it can be employed is really refreshing. While I am still looking forward enhancing my ‘classical’ drawing skills on paper, the fact that Alys also paints, draws and makes such conceptual and meaningful videos opens up my expectations more about what I could potentially achieve if I were much more creative and thinking outside the box when it comes to my own practice.
References
Anonymous (2021). Why did Francis Alÿs push a block of ice for 9 hours. Magazine, [online] Available at: /francis-alys-ice/ [Accessed 5th June, 2021]
Francis Alys, (2021), Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing), Website [online], Available at https://francisalys.com/sometimes-making-something-leads-to-nothing/, [Accessed 5th June, 2021]
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