La dépense
Francis Alÿs

Publisher • Rockbund Art Museum & Sternberg Press
Year • 2019
Pages • 160

Published by Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai and Sternberg Press, ‘La dépense’ is an accompanying publication to Alÿs’s first large-scale solo exhibition of the same name, presented at Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai, back in 2018.

Images of some of Alÿs’s 1,300 works presented in ‘La dépense’ are intricately bound together with an essay by curator Yuko Hasegawa, who writes about Alÿs’ work as having a “deliberately amateur, handmade quality of bricolage, or a generally anti-logical attitude based on intuition as if modelled on children’s play… thus [appearing] to criticise entrenched systems and values, such as modernism and capitalism, attempting to derail, transform, and criticise the logic of economic thinking”. More specifically, Alÿs’s referencing of French philosopher Georges Bataille’s writing on the “paradox of utility” in the title ‘La dépense’, centres the exhibition in the artist’s interrogation of the meaning of consumption of labour, a theme especially relevant in the context of present-day China.