A Bold Line - Bicycling New York by Rainer Ganahl

In this video I try to strictly "follow the line" and bicycle the bold line that devides the bus lane from the regular one on Madison Avenue between 42nd and 59th street, a one way street. The camera is suspended on a metal stick of about 4 meters, a rather heavy item that makes it difficult to balance while riding (50% against traffic) mostly without holdilng the stearing wheel. This performative video comes with a good bit of danger since the unusual side wind and the heavy stick make me rather unstable towards the unpittable Madison Avenue Friday early afternoon traffic.. But due to the limited camera view the street danger is less visible than in other bicycling pieces where I also film against the confronting traffic. This creates a certain discrepancy between a rather scary bicycle/filming performance and the telescopic visual result fixated to a flying horse view.

I also wasn't stopped by a surprised police car, though they were passing me on my return against traffic - visible slightly on one still image. The suspended camera mimiks somehow the many regulatory police views accross cities as well as the antenna of mobile news stations. It also produces some poetic bird perspective with unusual images of the city and me navigationg common waters in strange ways.

Last but not least, I love modernism (footnoting a legacy by bike away from the desk top) and its obsessions with streight lines and grids - manifest also in my early works with communicational (digital) interfaces. Street lines are interfacing traffic and regulate our behavior. Reading the city practically against its grain is exciting and demands quite some acrobatic discipline and courage (or reckless madness - if you want to accuse me as some people do) to surpress common sense usage.

rainer ganahl

PS: I got two interesting comments: somebody called it "mad" .. which makes me think "mad on madison"; and another friend, Adrian Notz, told me that the camera extension stick reminded him of a painting brush drawing the line while bicyclling. my own after-thoughts - while on the bike / always the best time for thinking - go a bit along the modernist line of the famous inversed bicycle wheel on a chair, still on show just 2 blocks from where I performed. the camera substitutes for the chair since it is the replacement of the beholder usually sitting on a chair. so somehow one has to imagine Duchamps' piece again hitting the road. the hight melts the two wheeler into a mono wheel. (mad?)

ps: interesting observation by Carly Busta: " the stripe abstracts the space. as though it was marker on a film reel, and the perspective makes it seem as
though you are this singular man in a very large world running like a hovercraft above it. the space created is bizarre and it almost feels like a structural film or something."

more: www.ganahl.info
www.ganahl.info/useabicycle.html

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• bicycling
• new
• york
• fine
• art
• rainer
• ganahl
• madness
• street
• behavior

[shaazad]

He is homo from France

[Globini]

@shaazad Your words are really funky, was that your own idea to write that? Wow...

[shaazad]

He is Homo from France

[bielicky]

we call this blind activism, this stereotype of a happening would have been interesting 45 years ago

[bielicky]

we call this blind activism, this stereotype of a happening would have been interesting 45 years ago

[Narcissisticone]

LOOK at ME! Pointless. I can ride a bike too.

[graymonday]

he is an artist from Austria.

[philsh11]

Just because you consider this performance art doesn't make it art. The "interesting comments" you say people have made are laughable. Evidently their lives are so mediocre that they find some value or parallelism to something greater in this piece of film work.

[Blackisthecolour]

good to see american cyclists are as stupid as edinburgh right on road warriors

[matyohimzes]

suicide tendencies :-D