This is the fourth instalment of our August 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first looked at Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’, the second ‘Returnity’ by Elin Wikström and Anna Brag and the third was ‘Shedding Light’ from Tutti Arts Oz Asia Festival. Here we look at how the UK’s activist organisation ‘The Lab‘ use bicycles to assert creative civil disobedience to subvert dominant power structures. Enjoy! NG.
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Bike Bloc (2009)
Also using public space creatively, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination in the UK have mobilised bicycles to serve quite different ends.
The Lab is an activist organisation that has devised inventive forms of creative civil disobedience to assert an alternative to the nexus of capitalism, consumption and environmental destruction.
They try “to open spaces where the imaginative poetic spirit of art meets the courage and rebelliousness inherent to activism”.
In 2009, the Lab developed the Bike Bloc as a form of direct action for the UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen (the unsuccessful forerunner to the recent Paris Climate Talks).
Hundreds of people worked over several weeks to design and weld activist bicycles and practise “street action cycle choreography”.
Double Double Trouble – a Dissent Bicycle-Object
Some of these were paired tall-bikes that gave riders a great height advantage (confiscated by police before the protest), while others were equipped with megaphones that played music, sirens and abstract sounds in synchronicity.
One such bike recently featured in Disobedient Objects, an exhibition developed by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London which toured to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
As the video documentation shows, the Lab embraced the model of an insect swarm in order to create a dispersed field of sound and activity that drew police attention in different directions.
What makes this action so compelling artistically is the intersection of DIY cycle culture and the lessons of radical theatre and performance.
The bicycle was assessed for what kind of form it might contribute to coordinated protest, notably creating a fluid field of assembling and disassembling bodies and sound.
Laura Fisher is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. In October 2015 she co-curated Bespoke City with Sabrina Sokalik at UNSW Art & Design, a one night exhibition featuring over 20 practitioners celebrating the bicycle through interactive installations, sculpture, video, design innovation, fashion and craft. This event was part of Veloscape, an ongoing art–research project exploring the emotional and sensory dimensions of cycling in Sydney.
The contents of this post was written by Laura Fisher and first published online by Artlink (2015). Minor edits and hyperlinks added and footnotes removed to aid short-form continuity. Images from Makery unless attributed.