Car Crash

Vocho, Francis Alys, March 20-22 2011

Close to a year ago, the Belgian-Mexican artist, Francis Alys, created a short video entitled Vocho.¹ The video documents the process of Alys driving an old VW beetle into a tree at the botanical gardens in Culiacan, Mexico, and then getting out of the car and walking off. This is followed by a brief inter-title explanation and a concluding statement, “Nature will do the rest.”

The botanic gardens commissioned Alys to produce the work, which he conceived as a kind a road movie, in which he’d drive his car the entire way up to Culiacan only to crash it into a tree. He initially pitched it in terms of its capacity to establish “empathy between nature and culture”:²

The plan was for the car to remain in the site and devolve into a sort of giant flowerpot for the garden’s flora and fauna, becoming integrated with the local ecosystem.³

However, the absurdity and violence of the act clearly lends it wider poetic implications. The town of Culiacan and Sinaloa state generally are notorious for drug-related crime. But even more than acknowledging this violent social background, the work emerges as a reflection on the dilemmas of socially engaged art. As he is driving intently towards the “wretched tree”, Alys describes a sudden moment of realisation:

It was as if I’d been punched in the chest by the absurdity and tragedy of this art mission in this lost town of Sinaloa. I don’t know; a lot came to my mind . . . ⁴

Despite its neat finality, the car crash confronts an awkward, unresolved problem. Fond dreams of art-driven, ecologically inflected, social amelioration fail to adequately speak to the complex and intractable local situation, so in typical style art adopts a deliberately perverse, destructive guise. But this is still not sufficient – still cannot hope to constitute an effective form of social critique and transformation. The strength of Vocho is that it pushes critique to a meta level – acknowledging its own limits through sardonic bathos and a minimal, self-deprecating poetry. In this manner the work appears as a charged crystalisation of the contradictory forces which shape it.