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In my second exhibition at Paul Petro I have grouped a series works in
various media around the bicycle. The bicycle is not only my main vehicle
of transportation but also my urban eyeglass – an extension of my
visual and aural organs. As such it acts as an urban social interface.
While working with my dreams over an 8 month period I came to the surprising
realization that I was constantly dreaming of my bicycle in relation to
the comprehension of my external world. I've been a bicycle rider since
early childhood. My earliest childhood memories include a 4-wheel bicycle
birthday present that was later reduced to 2 wheels. I have never been
able to stay in one place for long without a bicylce, including in Tokyo
where I was harassed daily by the police who presumed me to be a bicycle
thief.
Bicycles have complex social realities and have come to symbolize some
kind of utopian green-friendly mobility. Bicycles were among the first
products that were outsourced to China and other low cost producers, where
bicycling means being poor and being confronted with the exploding class
of new car owners. As a child in the 1960s my father gave me a new bicycle
with which he purchased from a truck driver who had imported it privately
from Prague. At the time Praq was behind the iron curtain and this had
been my first conscious esposure to the inequalities of econoic orders
which today constitute the backbone of globalisation. Most likely that
bicycle was probably diverted from the production line of the former soviet
style economy. This would become the first bicycle stolen from me in rural
alpine Austria. After I moved to New York many years later (and where
I became used to having my bicycles stolen) I was sometimes forced to
purchased bicycles for next to nothing from people I presumed to be bicycle
thieves.
In some countries poverty can make people with bicycles look priveledged.
I observed some of that while I was in Tirana where the streets are mostly
filled with luxury – mostly Mercedes, BMW - cars of which it is claimed
that 60 % are stolen from Western Europe by different mafia. The ink pen
drawing "In Poor Albania, Mercedes Rules Road, by Daniel Simpson,
The New York Times, 10 November 2002, 2003" addresses
this issues of powerty that later on inspired me to make the video “Bicycling
Tirana. ”This video is an 8-minute bike ride pedalling
against the traffic in the center of Tiranawith a camera in hand, violating
traffic laws and risking some accident. During the entire ride, I am not
touching the steering wheel, provoking an additional element of danger
to the filming/performance on two wheels. The capital of the poorest country
in Europe has at its center a complex of buildings built in the early
20th century by the former Italian colonizers.
E-mail error, Monday, December 1, 2003 7:40 PM, 2004 is a pencil
drawing from my E-mail error series that uses my outgoing emails as a
basis for acribic copying. Given the context of this show I'm using a
story about one of my bicycle incidents in the streets of New York emailed
to my Toronto dealer Paul Petro. This story itself shows how a bicycle
can get you into trouble in a highly contested aggressive urban center
where different velocities meet and compete on different wheels.
For a mail art piece "use
a bicycle"2004 sent from New York City before the show, I have
used postcards that show and commemoratie the World Trade Center. In stead
of the usual US postal stamps I glued self made stamps from drawings of
mine that are based on the terminology characterizing the Bush admininistration:
9/11, Al Queda, Operation Enduring Freedom, Homeland Security, Operation
Iraqi Freedom, Shock and Awe, Axis of Evil and others. The postcards simply
display the address and the words "use a bicycle" – words
that can be read and interpreted in a variety of ways. This work with
it legal ambivalence is playing with the notion of symbolic civil disobidience.
To my relief, with the exception of one all cards sent arrived.
The two "news paintings" Forbes.com,
Reuters World News Higlights 1900 GMT, 1/9/04, 2004,and Newsday.com,
bicycle bomb, 1/6/04, 2004 bring a reality to the notion of the bicylce
that is shocking and traumatic: bicyle bombigs that occured only a couple
of months ago. I noticed these bombings in the news and incuded these
news items in my "more news" series. This series is made up
of realistic paintings on canvas of news content taken from mainstream
US news web sites, and all other periferal information including advertisments.
The bicycle is usually associated with non aggression and environmental
friendliness. In these paintings, bicycles are involved in the most horrific
and unsetteling crimes that parade our news horrizons in these days. The
(suicide) bombings that have become so frequent in the last couple of
years are associated with issues of religious fundamentalism, the Middle
East, national self-dertermination and oil. The interpretion and representation
of this theatrics of death and total distruction in the media is as contested
as the complexity of the political, economic, social, religiouis, historical
and ideological problems that create the context for these incomprehensible
and self-annihilating acts of absolute violence. As it is the case with
all of my news releated art works, I only reproduce mains stream news
reports as they are fludding us, the active and passive consumers of media.
I see this freeze framing of news content that changes on the internet
by the second and on the news stand by the day in the tradition of European
history paintings. It is ironic tha the taste of t "Old Europe"'s
for history paintings partially coincidedwith the onset of its imperialist
interests and colonial actions.
Since I have the bicycle as my axis of
reference I also include two works on papers from my study series "My
first 500 Hours Basic Arabic" and "My second 500 Hours Basic
Chinese" that show somewhere in their midst the word bicycle: Basic
Arabic, (study sheet), New York 1/29/04, 2004, Basic Chinese, (study
sheet), New York 2/19/04, 2004
The show is rounded out with a video entitled “bicycling”
that shows me with a person sitting on my steering wheel circling on 51st
street and 8th avenue in New York. It is a game that plays with New York’s
traffic as well as with the street markings and the street crossing pedestrians.
It shows some of the famous beautiful indifference of New Yorkers towards
anything going on in their streets. This street behavior is in stark contrast
to the one in most Western European cities where I get regularly fined
for disobeying traffic rules. I even remember having being aggressively
attacked by car driver that knocked me down from my bicycle an drove away,
because, as he indicated, I had previously crossed a red light. In other
incidents, people left their cars and chased me. Its no wonder then, that
I dream of bicycles.
WORKLIST:
Forbes.com, Reuters World News Higlights
1900 GMT, 1/9/04, 2004
acrylic paint on canvas, certificate
of authenticity, apprx. 88 x 62 inches (220 cm x 160 cm)
Newsday.com, bicycle bomb, 1/6/04,
2004
acrylic paint on canvas, certificate
of authenticity, apprx. 84 x 64 inches (220 cm x 160 cm)
In Poor Albania, Mercedes Rules Road,
by Daniel Simpson, The New York Times, 10 November 2002, 2003
paper, certificate of authenticity,19
x 23 3/4 4 inches (220 cm x 160 cm)
Bicycling Tirana, 2003
video approx. 8 min
E-mail error, Monday, December 1,
2003, 7:40 PM
pencil drawing, graphite on paper, 110
x 75 cm
Basic Chinese, (study sheet),2/19/04,
2004
work on paper, 9 x 12 inches
Basic Arabic, (study sheet), 1/29/04,
2004
work on paper, 9 x 12 inches
Bicycling, 2004
use a bicycle, mail art project with
self made stamps, 2004
16 postcards (8 sent one and 8 empty
one for reference) - certificate of authenticity
these postcards were sent in the mail
and have arrived - one with the stamp'homeland security' has not made
it yet through the mail system.
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