When Faith Moves Mountains: Ethics and Relational Art

Inspired by the political turmoil he witnessed on a trip to Peru in October of 2000, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs executed a work in 2002 in which he had 500 people, equipped with shovels, move a 1600 foot-long sand dune mere inches. The volunteers, mostly engineering students, received no monetary compensation for their participation in Alÿs’ artwork, nor were the inhabitants of the shantytown in the Ventanilla dunes outside Lima, where the event took place, remunerated. According to Alÿs, the work was an attempt “to translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginal landscape of a place” in order to “infiltrate the local history and mythology of Peruvian society... to insert another rumor into its narratives.”1 1  - Francis Alÿs, “A thousand words: Francis Alÿs talks about When Faith Moves Mountains,” Artforum, (Summer 2002): 147. Alÿs attests that the work is “an active interpretive practice performed by the audience, who must give the work its meaning and its social value.”2 2  - Ibid., 147.

The work of contemporary artist Francis Alÿs can be analyzed within an increasingly popular artistic model. The possibility of an interactive, participation-based practice — or what French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud refers to as a relational art practice — has been explored by a number of contemporary artists and critics. For Bourriaud, relational artworks are those that take interhuman relationships and their social contexts as their theoretical basis.³ 3 - Nicolas Bourriaud, “Relational Aesthetics,” in Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, trans. David Macey (London: Cambridge: Whitechapel: The MIT Press, 2006), 160. Alÿs’ work When Faith Moves Mountains is an intriguing example of a relational artwork as defended by Bourriaud; however, in light of an examination of this work in relation to Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics, there emerge a number of ethical questions that Bourriaud’s model fails to address. I am compelled to question how Alÿs’ audience benefits — if at all — from its participation in his artwork. In the exchange between artist and audience, what is gained on the part of the collaborators? Given the imperceptible, intangible, and contingent success of the project, the ethical problematics of this exchange must be considered. An analysis of Alÿs’ work by means of Bourriaud’s methodology, in contrast with those of Claire Bishop and Grant Kester, reveals the ethical blind spots of Bourriaud’s vision of relational art, and the potential ethical difficulties that reside within collaborative exchange, brought into perspective by relational artworks like Alÿs’ When Faith Moves Mountains.