Francis Alÿs
Ghetto Collector
Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett, 2003
16 × 23 × 12.5 cm.
Edition of 99 signed, numbered and dated copies
Francis Alÿs' 1991 work The Collector was a performance in which the artist walked through the streets of Mexico City pulling a small toy dog behind him, on wheels. The object was magnetized and - over the course of the journey - collected metallic debris as a kind of souvenir.
The Ghetto Collector for Parkett #69 is made of tin, magnets, plastic string and rubber wheels. There are 25 design variations.
“Each of Alÿs’s disturbances in the normal traffic patterns of everyday life spans a portion of the city, most involve a process of accumulation or depletion, all are willful, deadpan, understated, and efficient with regard to their apparent aimlessness. And, whether documented in videos or photos, all are visually memorable.”
- Robert Storr, Parkett #69
"In his “action” The Collector, 1990–92, Alÿs took a series of promenades with homemade magnetic “dogs” that attracted bottle caps and other bits of detritus. Displayed at the Tate on shelves, the contraptions were records of purposeless walks, walks that took place for no reason other than for the sake of walking. For Alÿs, walking is a negation of “productive” action, of rational decision making. “As long as I’m walking,” he declares in a totemic work of 1992, “I’m not choosing . . . smoking . . . losing . . . making . . . knowing. . . .” The list goes on. For Alÿs, to walk is not to do. The walker walks: That is all she does. And yet his practice reveals, à la Cage, the logical impossibility of an artist doing nothing, just as the Minimalist work, in opposition to its negative discourse, reveals the very impossibility of making an artwork that means nothing. Each form of nothing posits a different “something”: The nothing is productive in spite of itself.”
- James Meyer, Artforum
"I discovered fables in the early ’80s, while studying in Venice. My interest was related to certain urban contexts, places which I felt were impossible to intervene in physically, whose history felt untouchable. It seemed that the only way to have any interference or dialogue with their history and their daily life, of stirring up their inertia, was by introducing a narrative or a fable as if it were a verbal virus. The idea came up to intervene in the place’s imagination without adding any physical matter to it, but instead playing at the level of metaphor or allegory. I think the first experiments with that concept were my walks for The Collector, from 1990–92. I’d walk around the streets of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico with a toy of sorts made of magnets on wheels. After three days people started talking about the crazy gringo walking around with his magnetized dog, but after seven days, the story, the anecdote, had remained even though the characters were gone. That’s how I started developing the idea of introducing tales and fables into a place’s history at a particular moment of its local history. This became a potential method to interact with places that I stumbled upon during those years, mainly in Mexico City, but also outside, as when I tried to spread a rumor in the town of Tlayacapan, Morelos."
- Francis Alÿs
