2 The Green Line

Abstract

Jerusalem is one of the places where the personal concerns of artist Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959) have coincided with local circumstances. Like many other artists in today's age of globalization and biennial culture, Alÿs travels the world like a nomad, creating his artworks-or 'interventions' , as he calls them-in response to the places he visits, often situations of societal and economic crisis or political impasse. Not infrequently, his interventions, in the artist's own words, 'hit a nerve' in the local community and beyond, usually when his own preoccupations 'meet' the situation he encounters with a fruitful 'clash' .1 The confrontation between Alÿs's narrative and Jerusalem, which took place on the fourth and fifth of June 2004, received the title The Green Line: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic. For this piece, which has also been referred to as Walk through Jerusalem, Alÿs walked through what he has identified as the archetypal city of conflict with a pierced can of green paint in his hand, creating a line that traced his journey (Fig. 2.1).2 The artist's route roughly followed the section within Jerusalem of the armistice demarcation line that has separated the Israeli and Palestinian communities since the end of Israel's War of Independence in 1948: a contested border that was internationally ratified under UN supervision in 1949, and has therefore been dubbed 'the 1949 armistice line' , but lost official boundary status in 1967 (Fig. 2.2). Both concept and structure of The Green Line are markedly simple, yet the work evokes a complex network of associations, regarding the history, present, and future of Jerusalem as well as themes prevalent in much contemporary art, including Alÿs's own work. The work first and foremost inspires reflection on the contemporary status of the 1949 armistice line Alÿs partially traced 56 years after its institution in 1948. The line has been viewed both as an undesirable, arbitrary source of conflict and division and-contrarily-as a relatively