Bicycle is a commentary on movement, stasis, and modern art history. Many artists have worked with bicycles. Most of them have been male artists, and most of the bikes have been racing bikes. What about portraying the shadow of an immobile woman’s bike over the diurnal course of the Sun?
We would need seventy-two nails and magnets and sixty-five pieces of drawing paper (each 0.4m²) to cover a surface of twenty-eight square meters. In order to capture the bicycle’s shadow, it is necessary to record a period of time as well as a set of movements from two astronomical cycles: a sample of the circadian rotation of the bicycle around the axis of the Earth, starting at about 7 a.m. and ending at about 8 p.m., and a stretch of the larger orbit of the planet around the Sun. Both cycles create an anticyclical movement during the daytime, of which the shadow of the immobile bicycle is the immediate projection.
Ironically, the formal language of the shadow recalls the Futurist representation of movement, although the reproduction of the shadow is determined by the very opposite: the stasis or the apparently non-transient state of the object and the source of light. The Futurist obsession with movement is slowed down by the empirical impression of a standstill. Futurism was a propulsive movement carried by mechanical and industrial means, men and machines, whereas Bicycle is the record of retrograde motion.
In reference to modern art history, it can be considered an antifuturist torque. It seems as if the whole movement started at the end, the stretched forms of a blurry shadow, in order to culminate in the chaotic center while heading towards its beginning, the sharp shadows of the morning Sun. Like the Futurist who paid attention to movement but not to any goal, the drawing is about the end of finalism.
