This morning we went to the Wiels Museum (worth a visit in its own right) to see the retrospective exhibition of Francis Alÿs’s work, A Story of Deception. Please go and see it if you can. Born in Antwerp in 1956 and based in Mexico City since 1986, Alÿs is chiefly an ‘action artist’. His ‘actions’ are described by the catalogue as being ‘simple, sometimes quotidian gestures that reveal the unspoken logic structures of a society or revise typical ways of doing things – which he documents in various ways.’ I don’t want to give too much away, but just to give a flavour, you can see him pushing a block of ice around Mexico City until it finally melts away (‘sometimes making something leads to nothing’), or accompany him in chasing a tornado and actually running into it, or watch four hundred students with spades shifting a massive sand dune (slightly), or accompany him as, with a leaking can of green paint, he retraces the former ‘green line’ in Jerusalem. I noted down the following wonderful quotation in some of the background information: ‘The lines were sketched on a mandatory 1:20,000 scale map. Moshe Dayan drew the Israeli line with a green grease pencil, while Abdullah Al-Tal marked his front line with a red one. The grease pencils made lines 3 to 4 kilometres wide. Sketched on a map whose scale was 1:20,000, such lines in reality represented strips of land 60 to 80 metres in width. Who owned the ‘width of the line’?’ from Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone. The Hidden History of Jerusalem.