Francis Alys at the Hammer, part three

A few weeks ago a curator friend of mine asked me what I thought of "Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal" at the Hammer. I told her that I liked it at lot more than I thought I would. She shot me an oh really look, sighed, and continued.

"What did you think of the stripper?" She was referring to Rehearsal 2 (2001), a video in which a clothed woman rehearses a strip-tease. At the end of the 15-minute piece, she's clothed pretty much how you'd expect a woman to be at the end of a strip-tease.

"Well, the installation, in a completely darkened room, was a little clichéd, especially after the rest of the show was installed in white cubes," I said. "But installation aside, it worked for me."

"That's because you're a man," she said, and promptly lectured me on the male gaze, male artists, male curators, the male-dominated art world, and how of course a man would like Rehearsal 2 because there were breasts in it, and so on. (At this point a thought bubble was over my head; inside it was a can of Duff beer. Mmm... beer.)

I resisted the urge to point out that the conversation we were having -- or, rather, that she was having at me -- was probably about as old as the myths of the doomed that are the progenitors of much of Alys' work, and that the same male-behavior-angry-female feedback loop was metaphorically in line with them too, but I thought better of it.

Rehearsal 2 is, in many ways, a typical Alys. "It is a metaphor of Mexico's ambiguous affair with Modernity, forever arousing, and yet, always delaying the moment 'it' will happen" Alys says about the work in the show's catalogue. Curator Russell Ferguson picks up where Alys leaves off: "Unlike Rehearsal 1, Rehearsal 2 does finally reach its climax, albeit after apparently endless delays."

I don't think so. A strip-tease is a tantalization: The man in the audience is trapped in a cycle of perpetually delayed gratification. The object of his desire remains at a distance, beyond his grasp. By the end of her performance she may be nude, but that's all he's getting. He never gets precisely the climax he desires.

So to my curator friend who saw male-centric exploitation: In Rehearsal 2 I see less a rehashing of male desire than I see an allegorical examination of repeated and endless frustration, the portrayal of global relations between rich and poor as part of a Sisyphean cycle. Maybe that's a more fatalistic reading of the work than the Mexico City-based Alys offers up, but I think his metaphor goes a little deeper than he wants to admit.

Related: Alys at the Hammer part one, part two.