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Bike Art Revolution |
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by David Santos
Child:
"... the lyricism of marginality may find inspiration on the image of the "outlaw", the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile frightened order."
We are reborn Comanches in a new golden age. The bike is a central symbol of a creative nonviolent sustainable future. Human power is obviously the most advanced and sexiest form of energy. Bike nomads roam an infinite universe, a cosmic paradise. Cheap, small, and powerful, the Bike is true underdog technology; escapist, activist, iconoclastic, and libertarian.
Art in all its forms is integral to the exploding bike movement. Bike culture is thriving the world over, given real sustainability, social justice, and quality of life. Modern bike activism includes mass rides, opportunities for youths, recycled bikes for global cooperatives, and local "yellow bikes". Austin's unique bike culture spans world class racing to the latest lowrider and subculture bikes. These emergent tribes create new music, visual arts, and literature centered on the bike.
The art bike is performative visual art. It signifies itself directly, not like some poem or painting of a bike. The bike is the window to the rider's soul. The art gallery is an affront to a world with so much homelessness and resource waste. Cultures create the best art when it is integral with central artifacts. Visual expression runs riot in cultures were the bike is supreme, with every embellishment imaginable. Knowing that the bike is it, we create at the highest level. This is "art for everything's sake"...call it maximalism.
Art began as bodily ornamentation some hundred thousand years ago, before substantial mediums like architecture. Vehicular art dawned with early wheels some ten thousand years ago. Bike art is the most intimate vehicular art, close to costume. Art is cosmetic prosthesis and courtship or ontological display. Ride the right bike and everyone sees you are cool.
Picasso made a bull head from handlebars and seat, as found art, and Duchamp mounted a front fork on a stool to signify absurdity. Solar/computer/communications technology bikes (Behemoth, Winnibiko) designed by Steve Roberts reached a vast audience in the eighties. Bikus, a community bike shop in Phoenix, leads the new wave, producing numerous bike art sculptures and public amenities like bike racks, from salvaged bike parts.
The welder's torch is a universal Promethean wand for creating bike mutants by welding, bending, and cutting. The wizard shop rat brings dead machines to life with simple tricks and tools. Mutant Bike Design/Build, Homebrew Trikes, Cargo Bikes, Tall Bikes, Recumbents, and Trailers. The gene pool is the sum of all bike parts and concepts -- Bike DNA. There is a great genetic diversity in the amateur nursery, with constant geneflow via bike salvage, cannibalism, and copying.
From popular ferment new types emerge, complete genotypes from the streets adopted by manufacturers, and old types die out. Vestigial parts, frozen gears, odd noises, rust and bumps, weird blends of formerly distinct classes; child bikes get tall seat posts and bars and become cool adult bikes, cargo trailers and other mutants spin off the genepool. Frankenstein bikes resurrected in the bone yard follow new rules unforeseen by creators. Every bike part has reuses, just as natives used every part of the buffalo. Specific bike types find special use. For great cargo vehicles, mountain bikes have stronger frames, a super low "granny gear" (a tiny front chain ring), and stronger brakes. Road bikes have fine light parts and big frames suitable for flying bikes, tall bikes, and such.
Female touring frames are perfect for certain recumbent and trailer designs. Step-thru frames are very handy for bikes with high backed seats and loads. Kid's bikes stretch into semi-recumbent choppers, stretching the fork, backstays, seat tube, and bars.
Bike salvage is art evolving into science. Homebrew wheels have a fertile fragrant aura, while an object produced for money sends off a sterile dead vibe. A consumer bike pales next to a one-of-a-kind freak. There are actually more kinds of loner mutants than commercial models. Cherry Mutants are showy, highly groomed, mint condition freak bikes. Lowriders are cherry while freaks are ratty.
The arrow of time flies from profane to sacral. The bike is a compass needle aiming at that sacral future, blazing a path to salvation, a mystery of wheels. The Heavens wheel endlessly; the universe revolves giddily about every wheel, down to the smallest particle. Spin about and one gets dizzy, a profound altered state sought by children, but nauseating to adults. Earth and moon are a cosmic bicycle. However fast a wheel rolls, the point in contact with the ground is stationary in an atom of space-time. Bike and rider are self similar, merging as a hyper-dimensional constellation of vortices.
Relics are sacred manifestations of matter. Bikes make practical relics. Latino and South Asian bikes are hyper-baroque devotional objects complete with altars. Lowrider bikes champion an esthetic of the "unreal" (Lowrider Magazine).
The bike as a mechanical underdog whose social mythology tends toward trickster and wolf. Bikes naturally transgress borders that stop cars and trucks. Even tanks can't follow mountain bike paths. The bike can be carried over walls and cliffs and outrace hounds. Bikes hide out indoors with people. Bullets tend to fly right through them.
A bike can escape imprisonment on the wing, a recurrent theme of cinema. Steve McQueen's or E.T.'s famous jumps (Free Willie, about a killer whale, also fits this theme). Mythic bike outlaws abound; Young Che touring South America. Smuggling ET in flying bike, the seventies urban dope runner's ten speed, Hell's Angels style motorcycle gangs, McQueen's jump from prison camp, Evil Kineval, Easy Rider, and bike courier as crazy counter culturalist, symbiotic yet resistant to power.
Virtually all bikers are outlaws, willfully violating this or that traffic law, since many such laws are flawed. The bike is so inherently free that registration by the state has generally failed. The modern bike activist is often afoul of police, occupying the same space, but of a counterculture. Cultural profiling by police tends to make the eccentric biker a suspect, while the reality is often that the tattooed, pierced, wild haired freak is a gentle pacifist vegetarian.
Austin's bike underground centers on collectives such as the Yellow Bike Project (457-9880) and Bikes not Bombs (926-4725) and the Technomadic Circus, radical gardeners, political activists, artists' circles. Dr. Ellen Spiro of UT is planning a documentary on the Technomadic Circus. Amy Babich, Austin cycling's Joan of Arc, rides an intensely decorated recumbent.. The Nomadic Festival, End of the World Circus, and other performance collectives have seeded Austin. Juan Martinez's energy and genius sparked much of the current art bike scene.
The Cathedral of Junk and other yard art uses bike parts. My new home is a tiny cluster of bubbles of stone, glass, and bike parts, in rebellion to the joyousness of common architecture. Dave Baker and Jeremy Rosen maintain a mutant shop producing mostly awesome cargo bikes. Jay Beeson crafts very fine mutants. Duke is our grand patriarch who has welded cargo trikes for recycling since the early eighties. Ed Sapir, Jake, Troy, Fred Normal, Spencer, Jason and many others build strange rides from old bikes. Bill Twitchel is a noted Austin bike artist. Brooks Coleman made numerous sculptures and robots from bike parts in the late eighties. Bikes not Bombs (BnB) has nurtured the local bike movement since the eighties, spinning off community bike shops in over a dozen countries, gestated the Yellow Bike Project, and continues to evolve new models of bike activism.
Austin has a fine tech art tradition, from Silicon Barrio to the Robot Group. Most importantly, we are believers in the use of muscle-powered steeds which augment the physiology of their riders. After the imminent Apocalypse, gasoline and bullets will be rare. Those who already ride bicycles and shoot bb guns and slingshots today will easily dominate the huddled masses tomorrow. The laws of physics will change as well. Bicycles that are rideable now will be unrideable in the future, while our apparently foolish machines lay waste to the world. And you thought you knew about ART! |
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