bicycle works - films etc.
apprentice in the sun - drawings
(unedited - more corrections on the way)
Use a bicycle – The apprentice in the sun
It is difficult to measure the impact of a simple machine admit many other
tools in the lives of people. But the bicycle has been changing my life
and for this current decade - my art. Since receiving a bicycle as my
first birthday present, it was the only parental gift I really remember,
I have been a bicycle rider – but perhaps not the most careful one.
Very soon, when I could get rid of the two extension wheels that stabilized
bicycles for toddlers, I started taking pleasure in transgressing rules
by careless riding. This gave me soon a taste for experimental linguistics
and an insight into dyslexia, since I could never distinguish whether
I was in a hospital for “Kopf im Loch” or “Loch im Kopf,”
(“head in a hole” or a ‘a hole in the head.”)
Two wheelers weren’t all that funny, in particular the motorized
ones. Only a couple of years elder, my brother lost his life in a scooter
accident at age 16. This is why I stayed with a bicycle, never even accepting
a driving license for motorcycles.
The bicycle for me opened up a new radius of mobility that brought me
very early in contact with kids from other neighborhoods. Kids with immigration
backgrounds and parents doing jobs I could not have imagined my parents
to do entered my life and gave me a taste and interest in other people,
other languages, other cultures, other social lives and other conflicts.
I realized very early on that I pedaled back and forth between different
social worlds and different classes I wasn’t meant to juxtapose,
to synchronize, to visit together. Sometimes, I came across things and
situations over these visible and invisible borders that I escaped from
quickly in a state of confusion. I remember in particular one late afternoon
in a remote motorcycle club type-of-place outside town with people much
older than I was. In-between the leaves of fall, fruits and beer, there
was a bicycle saddle mounted on a wooden chair with the older sister of
a friend introducing me, at age 13 or so, to her intimate parts in a rather
dissociated way. The displaced and manipulated leather bike saddle, the
half demonstrating, half desiring body parts to animate and play with,
and the curiosity and fear without any affection left me alienated on
my own bicycle at an age far too young for this kind of ad hoc encounter.
A couple of years later, when I was able to compete in speed with cars
on the downhill passages of the narrow medieval streets of our town going
to school, a new dimension of the bicycle became apparent: I could leave
town on my own, without money, without the help of anybody. At age 14,
together with just one friend I spent nearly two months bicycling all
across France and Switzerland from Austria. This trip arose even more
my already vivid interest in foreign people and their languages, in far
away places and their objects, and in different ways of seeing things.
Concerning traveling long distances, the bicycle for me was more of a
spring-board to hitchhiking, something I started the following summer.
I considered the bicycle too cumbersome and too slow. I started reading
extensively, something I could not do on the bicycle. Hitchhiking, then,
became my biggest love affair in travel.
Apart from crossing borders and distances the bicycle taught me something
else: speed and multitasking. I have learned negative speed, i.e. relative
slowliness in seeing things passing and drifting on the always changing
surfaces of cities and beyond, complementing the metropolitan, mostly
subterranean view of the city and the one of extra mural fast trains and
car systems. But there is also positive speed, i.e. the multitasking and
multi-presence bicycles are permitting moving you back and forth between
spread out urban theaters in ways that are not imaginable by foot, with
cars or by public transport. Without a bike, things don’t get done
in my time, geographic priorities have to be set, i.e. life is half as
fast. This relative speeding, slow when others are fast and fast when
others are slow, forms agendas differently and allows velo-cyclists to
set their own pace, form their own rhythms.
Bicycling also keeps me physically in shape and psychologically alert
through a permanent dialogue with cars, pedestrians and the city environment
of traffic rules and its enforcers, red lights, advertisements and other
distractions. Cities offer a different pleasure for each mode of transportation
and the one reserved for bicyclists is often stunning and breathtaking.
In fact, the beauty of the city, with and without interesting looking
pedestrians, is itself a risk to bikers through its distractions and ads
to the dangers of cars and other traffic. It is only last November that
a mini-van hit me from behind and catapulted me through the air. I was
very, very lucky that my injuries were minor and passing. Since this accident,
I am always wearing a helmet and special reflective gear. This incident
heightened my interest in security items – including the lock –
and increased the impression on the fragility of life as such. In high-speed
involuntary encounters, any protection turns fragile, and relative. In
big cities like New York where I have been using pedal-driven spinning
machines for nearly 20 years (with quite some accidents and many bicycles
stolen), i.e. in cities that don’t yet have sufficient bicycle lanes
and lack a culture of respect for bicyclists, life can to a certain degree
be made of porcelain.
My identification with Marcel Duchamp's romantic bicycle sketch of 1914
on a music paper with its hilarious title, “To have the Apprentice
in the Sun” has been electrifying and had therefore be rendered
by me into a neon sign. It is not without interest to point out, that
the first commercial neon sign was sold to a French barber only one year
earlier of Duchamp’s sketch, in 1913. The Neon sign with its bended
glass, its fragile tubes and its noble gasses (neon, krypton and so on)
works on vacuum and high voltage power. It is by appearance nostalgic,
sentimental, “American” and modernist. It is difficult to
handle, expensive and anachronistic. But it is very photogenic and works
well at a time, bicycles shouldn’t be used: at night with low light.
Use a Bicycle and The Apprentice in the Sun
have not only been rendered as neon signs for their esthetic value but
also for their retarded modernist history and near impossibility to kill
it. In Duchamp’s drawing, a bicyclist rides with musical perfection
on a fragmented note uphill towards the sun or towards nowhere, risking
to fall off lines, off the paper, evoking the fate of Icarus, leaving
only title and signature behind. When the Greek bricoleur-machinist flying
hero approached the sun his wings were going to disintegrate due to the
melting wax in the solar heat. Appearing fast and at the same time frozen
and stuck on paper, Duchamp’s apprentice is not quite there yet,
and seems to know what he is doing, where he is going. Historically speaking,
the development of the bicycle was a crucial stage in the creation of
motorized vehicles and the infrastructure needed. The bicycle as a relatively
cheap mass produced object was an importing beginning and passing point
for the mobility of the masses, for the dynamisation of life for all genders,
classes and products. Duchamp’s fascination for this relatively
new vehicle that came into full swing at the turn of his last century
was not unique. The bicycle rode into the imaginary landscape of many
modernist writers, artists and other avantgardists, including the military
avant-garde creating army bike divisions.
Today we know that the Icarus’ wings didn’t melt on the bicycle.
No cyclist could approach the sun. But fuel burning cars, tracks, and
airplanes did touch the destructive sun and are destroying the planet,
leaving the bicycle far behind. This environmental misery lends the bicycle
again a visionary utopian look for self-sufficient, energy independent
autonomous mobility, a vehicle of sustainable, human powered auto-mobility.
In 1914, bicycling as apprenticeship could be understood in anticipation
of the revolutionary avalanche of the car industry with all its effects.,
Today, bicycling ought again be seen as an apprenticeship, a self-evident
way for effectively escaping the rotating malaise of our disastrous car
and track culture, leaving poisonous air breathing, obese populations
in sprawling (sub) urban highway settings anxious over ever rising gas
prices. The slogan “Use a bicycle” is to be seen as an ideology
for ‘back’-revolutionizing mobility, re-thinking urban design,
and for down-machinizing ourselves. Bicycling should be our apprentice,
our model, our metaphor and way of thinking to transportation, housing,
food, health, energy, politics, ideas, life and love. Use a bicycle, live
your bicycle, love with your bicycle.
Duchamp’s drawing was part of the notes in the “Box of 1914”
to his “Large Glass”, a transparent machinist incubator of
onanism and erotic desire. The drawing “Having the apprentice in
the Sun” can thus be seen also as either a self-pleasuring ride
to climax or a ride to somebody promising waiting. Samuel Beckett, Flann
O’Brien, and the bicycle maniac Alfred Jarry, who was known for
nightly drive-by shootings from his bike on Paris monuments, wrote all
love stories for bicycles, through bicycles, with bicycles and about bicycles.
The bicycle is a wonderful companion and accomplice in misery and love,
in despair, delay and hope as well as in fulfillment. It is not by accident
that the bicycle slipped into my art production casually, unplanned, and
gently, after falling in love with Haruko O at the beginning of this soon
ending decade. Letting her sit on my handlebar might have been part of
the seduction game. Playing with the bike initiated my filming and made
me thinking about bicycling, art and love. The first piece staring Haruko
on my bicycle consisted in asking for trouble: we were video taping ourselves
from the 30th floor or so circulating in the middle of the very busy street
corner of 52nd street and 8th avenue in Manhattan, she sitting on my handlebar.
A couple of months later, we filmed on top of the Clocktower, a NYC landmark
building, again circling endlessly – like in Duchamp’s erotic
mill - with Manhattans skyline in the back, she on the handlebar.
Romantically speaking, I could ad, that years later, when our relationship
started to fall apart, my bicycle riding took on more dangerous turns:
alone, I started to ride and film in the middle of the street against
the traffic without holding on to the handlebar. Not that I was consciously
looking for it, but in retrospect I could say, that some of my most daring
for not saying outright craziest rides coincided with the personal misery
of crashed loves. But in these days, I am more lucky and happy, finishing
two video productions with the amazing existentialist and aphrodisiac
texts by Flann O’Brien staring Romana R my girlfriend who inspired
me to two videos. In Bicycling Flann O’Brien, On Housing,
2006/07, Romana sits in a large empty penthouse loft overseeing downtown
Manhattan reading parts of a text on housing from O’Brien’s
“The Third Police Man.” “De Selby has some interesting
things to say on the subject of houses. A row of houses he regards as
a row of necessary evils. The softening and degeneration of the human
race he attributes to its progressive predilection for interiors and waning
interest in the art of going out and standing. This in turn he sees as
a result of the rise of such pursuits as reading, chess-playing, drinking,
marriage and the like, few of which can be satisfactorily conducted in
the open. Elsewhere he defines a house as ‘a large coffin’,
a ‘a warren’ and ‘a box’…” While reading
about “roofless houses” and “houses without walls”
I’m circling with the bicycle around the female reader sitting next
to a large pastoral scenic poster ad for Mount Fuji filming her until
the text comes to an end with the text of a “last place where one
would think of keeping even cattle.”
In “Bicycling Flann O’Brien, It was the grip of a
handle bar – her handlebar”, 2006/07 I’m
circling in the same unusually large penthouse loft above downtown Manhattan,
Romana sitting on the handlebar reciting the text out loud while being
filmed by a camera man from the rotating center. I selected passages from
the last chapter of “The Third Policeman” written in 1940
but not published before this Irish writer’s death, in which the
bicycle becomes eroticized and interwoven with hallucinations, capital
crime, and a philosophy by a bicyclist who has outlived his own death.
In short, it is ‘death man riding a bicycle’ anxious about
his stolen bike. “My brain was brimming with half-formed ideas of
the most far-reaching character but I repressed them firmly and determined
to confine myself wholly to finding the bicycle and going home at once.
… My unpleasant suspicion was dawning on me that the bicycle was
gone …. Then as I stood, something quite astonishing happened to
me again. Some thing slipped gently into my right hand. It was the grip
of a handlebar – her handlebar. …I led the bicycle to the
centre, started upon her gently, threw my leg across and settled gently
into her saddle. … My feet pressed down with ecstasy on the willing
female pedals…” At the very end, when the story eclipses we
are told that the bicyclist had blown himself up with a bomb. “It
was about me. He told me to keep away. He said I was not there. He said
I was dead. He said that what he had put under the boards in the big house
was not the black box ((with the stolen money from the murder)) but a
mine, a bomb. It had gone up when I touched it. He had watched the bursting
of it from where I had left him. The house was blown to bits. I was dead.
He screamed to me to keep away. I was dead for sixteen years.” Needless
to say, not only the production with this circulatory two videos are hallucinatory
even the viewing of it is. For that matter, viewing all the bicycle videos
filmed with a shaky hand cam while balancing on the bike without holding
the steering wheel is not always a pleasant experience and can stress
disorientation and dizziness in the viewer.
It is interesting to me that the Flann O’Brien is fixated on the
handlebar, the saddle and the pedals he attributes as female, and is concerned
about death, loss, and bicycle theft. In the piece “Don’t
steal my Mercedes-Benz bicycle” the handlebar, the saddle
and the pedals are made in heavy bronze, a material that is prominent
for the commemoration of mostly famous dead people and has an inherent
aspect of a historic past while the desirable, unusually expensive light
weight Mercedes-Benz bicycle is anchored in a happy faced leisure time
and present to be worked out. Apart from the fact that most bicycles are
today produced in China, reports about the theft of European infrastructures
– stolen by the tons - for their raw material value ending up in
China add yet another twist to the fear of loss inherent to the material
world, but also to love, live and death. It therefore only logical that
the work entitled “Don’t steal my Mercedes-Ben) bicycle”
is made of the new bicycle plus two bicycle chains – a Kryptonite
chain, the safest and most resisting chain on the market, and one made
of bronze, a relatively pathetic material when it comes to use value,
relatively easy to severe. During the duration of the show, several bicycles
will be placed throughout the city and locked in the streets. In case
of theft, I hope that the severed bronze chains will be left behind. As
with the kryptonite bike chains that usually cost more than the bicycles
in NYC (which can be bought cheap if one doesn’t care about providence),
the bronze chain as an artwork by me should be (in the end) more valuable
then the seductive Mercedes-Benz bicycle which I have never seen outside
the show rooms of Mercedes-Benz dealerships.
Kryptonite is not a real physical element with a greenish appearance but a factious metal taken from the world of comic books, referring to the exploded planet Krypton, superman’s planet of origin. “It is speculated that kryptonite may be located in a hypothetical ‘island of stability’ high on the periodic table, beyond the currently known unstable elements, in the vicinity of atomic number 150” (see: kryptonite, wikipedia.org) The fictive character of this super metal for an expensive bicycle chain with this name, is highly symptomatic of today’s obsession with security, Security thinking and creating “islands of stability” and “green zones” (Iraq) have become the new media and phantoms of power. But safety and security, for which Mercedes-Benz’s corporate identity commands a high price, project also a shadow, mirroring its opposite, i. e. insecurity, destruction, loss and chaos. This phantom element of security I try to capture by doubling important bicycle parts and safety features in porcelain, a material standing for fragility and breaking. Confronting porcelain with bronze and the metals and materials used in today’s bicycle engineering is not only an esthetic game but also a short-circuiting of different histories taken from the social life of these materials and their usage in and outside of the realms of art, industrial production and consumption. From a sculptural point of view, these juxtapositions and interactions with the world of corporate products, bicycling and bicycle stealing is giving the ready made paradigm yet another spin.
Bicycles are not only used for recreation, pleasure or work. As mentioned
earlier, they have played also a military role – military bike divisions
– and are used by the police. Bicycle also play a role in asymmetrical
theaters of violence where they deliver and hide improvised explosive
devices – yet another “use (of) a bicycle”. The internet,
today’s main delivery for all kind of news is the perfect source
to find out more about this terrifying subject. Over the last years with
some kind of Donquixotization, persistence and instincts for “history
paintings” I have been painting web pages with terror content. In
Stuttgart, I have chosen two items that address German issues: One is
a bicycle bomb that exploded in Afghanistan, killing many locals but also
injuring a German soldier; the other concerns one of the last spectacular
events carried out by the German terrorist group RAF that was active mostly
during the 1970s and early 1980s, killing the head of the German bank
Herrhausen in 1989 with a bomb hidden on a bicycle. RAF members have been
mostly imprisoned in Stammheim, Stuttgart. For those who learn for the
first time that such a tragic thing like bicycle bombs exists, I have
made the wall painting searching "bicycle bomb" on Google.com,
a piece that exports web content onto the existing Museum wall. This wall
painting was installed as a performance during the opening simulating
a low bite data transfer. The wall of the museum wasn’t ready for
the trans-mask stencil, - the removal of the vinyl stencil pealed the
paint off the wall - as if the data transfer failed, explaining why parts
of the stencil and the paint are now visible like selected text on a computer,
exposing its mode of production.
Stuttgart is home to two car giants, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche and is
(may be therefore?) not very bicycle friendly. There are very few bicycle
lanes and even important segments of major roads are without them leaving
the bicyclist on relatively narrow quasi- high way lanes or illegally
on side walks which does not please the police with their persistent presence.
Unfortunately, during the few days I have used a bicycle in Stuttgart
following all the traffic rules, I have had several unpleasant encounters
with male car drivers. They cynically aggressed me with their fancy vehicles
scaring me at first before yielding in the last second. As a bicyclist
I was expected to give way to cars even when priority rules clearly were
with me. This could all be called bad bicycle politics and makes me think
of the book entitled "Bicycle Citizens: Political World of Japanese
Housewife" by Robin LeBlanc (University of California, 1999). The
writer draws an ethnographic picture of the politics of average female
citizen in Japan and their role in daily live politics with their own
speed, their own mobility, their own way of seeing, thinking and acting.
The bicycle becomes here a metaphor not only in regard to transportation
and fuel consumption but also to politics and in urban daily life.
If we want to really counter global warming, we better study the logic
of bicycles and start redesigning our cities and rethinking our lives
increasing self-sustainability. It is interesting to observe China which
is still said to have a half billion bicyclists today changing from a
bicycle centered culture to a car centered one, a transformation that
not only reflects practicality but also mirrors shifts in values, in the
perception of wealth, class, culture, the city and its people. Modernization
in China comes with the autobahnization of their cities, demanding not
only the destruction of their neighborhoods, but also massive changes
in shopping, eating and consumption habits. For example: Shopping in fresh
food markets in dense neighborhoods for the traditional Chinese dish is
compatible with walking or bicycling, allowing eye to eye contacts. In
contrast, super market shopping on newly built highways demands for different
modes of transportations as well as different social interactions in more
anonymous settings with different kinds of food making the traditional
fresh food offerings difficult and expensive. A change in diet and a shift
to processed unhealthy but long lasting foot is immanent. Motorization
and autobahnization eventually changes the kitchen, the menu, the body
mass index, the number of heart, lung and mental diseases, and eventually
the well being of a nation.
Needless to say, I myself contradict what I’m advocating since I
am frequently flying long distances, drinking water, eating food and dressing
in clothes that are shipped and flown around the world as it has become
the norm today. In the video Kai Tak International Airport,
the third video presented in Stuttgart, I was bicycling on the decommissioned
Hong Kong Airport Kai Tak, an artificial island which had been already
partially destroyed to be transformed into real estate. In this video,
I wasn’t provoking cars coming against me but put myself in a relationship
with airplanes, even trying to take off. With the camera in hand without
holding the handlebar, I was bicycling along all the airfield markings
I still could find. I followed them as much as I could crossing the concrete
surface and beyond, continuing to the outer barriers of the premise amidst
wild vegetation that takes over after years when nobody cares anymore.
This ride was nearly archeological in nature since I had to search for
these air traffic markings to be gone soon forever. Bicycle technology
was a playing field for motorized and anti-gravitational vehicles. Ball
bearings, metal frames and energy transferring mechanics and other components
invented for bicycles soon became important for the car and aircraft industry
which was developed by the same people who worked and improved bicycles.
In analogy to this history, the bicycle could be not only a fancy subject
in fine arts, an expensive life style accessory for car producers, who
don’t really want to get mixed up with them, but again also a fertilizing
technology leading to new technologies and mechanisms that are as healthy
and self-sustainable as the bicycle. This means we should revisiting the
bicycle with its liberating quality for a new utopia that hopefully doesn’t
turn dystopian again.
>>>>> 
The Apprentice in the Sun, 2006 click to download hi res image
neon light on black plexi
right: small drawing by Marcel Duchamps from 1914 "Having the apprentice in the sun"/ avoir l'apprenti dans le soleil.
bicycle works - films etc.
apprentice in the sun - drawings