Francis Alÿs
Politics of rehersal, 2004

Rethinking the implication of the rehearsal as a comment on modernity, what becomes immediately obvious is the notion that modernity is pornographic. I mean, there’s this sort of representation of something that looks incredibly appealing, incredibly exciting, but even as it displays itself, it’s impossible to appropriate it, it’s like an exercise in mere arousal, not of coupling or encounter. Somehow, the piece is a constant postponement, what it does is to show that what the spectator wants is precisely to maintain this arousal, not really to arrive anywhere but to keep oneself aroused, which is in some way what the stripper seeks to do, and more so in this case, where time has kind of been diluted and extended.

In the everyday life of society what you have is a combination of falling for the illusion of development and discovering its falsity every so often. That provokes an experience notion of history as a Sisyphean punishment. That is, no sooner do you start a task, no sooner has there been some type of effort, or the sacrifices called for by the elite to be carried out over years, than you have to go back to the original starting point. It always makes me think of a game of snakes and ladders. You advance through the game and suddenly instead of the little ladder they promised you there’s a snake that sends you back to the starting square. And what that produces, in effect, is the notion of a sort of time that—even though there are a multitude of historical moments, a multitude of phenomena, a multitude of changes—is crossed with the notion that history is not advancing, that history is always repeating itself and getting lost.

There are two considerations on the temporality of the rehearsals that I think are interesting to touch on. One is that the rehearsals deal with the territory that isn’t altogether intended, the time of production, as opposed to the time of the product. In other words, they place emphasis on the task more than on the result. And that distinction has a lot to do with the distinction between work and labor that Hannah Arendt formulated in The Human Condition.

Namely that one of the characteristics of the modern world is that we probably no longer know what work is, that is, work as production related to the creation of a definitive and permanent object. What we have instead is a constant reproduction,
which is the constant daily labor to maintain the economic system that is always discarding the product so that nothing ever remains. So there’s a constant exhaustion. And the moment of the rehearsal seems interesting to me because one could probably say metaphorically that it’s processing this aesthetic of labor, that it’s very involved in much of the work that you’ve done, that is, a work that sees production in relation not to the achievement of a result but rather to the question of what is taking place and what intervenes and what establishes the form and the
time of “to be making,” of the organic relation of being}.

It also seems important to me to pose the question of why labor is connected here with inefficiency. Because basically the difference between labor and work is that sometimes well-finished work makes one forget whether it was efficient or not.

But in effect one of the characteristics of this situation—in which everything is labor, as Arendt thinks that it’s the modern world in which there’s no longer any authentic work—is that the only question that comes up is whether the process was
efficient or not. Whether it’s possible to reduce the effort, whether it’s feasible to shorten the time in order to lower the price and increase the production.

But in general terms, the rehearsals have a sort of role in clarifying that what we call labor is the definition of how temporality is experienced; a sort of schema of temporality. While work can be like accumulated time, it seems to be contained, so to speak, in a product; what the experience of labor formulates is a structure of temporality. That is, basically the phases of work, its prolongation, its interruptions, its achievement, what they create is time.