A jolly event-as-art piece in on bicycles around Essex and Suffolk
Meet, behind the Martello Tower at Jaywick. That was all the instructions
that I had a week ago last Saturday, when I set off to the Essex coast
to find artist Gavin Turk, and a collection of blinged up bicycles that
he has created.
What to expect, I had no idea - not least because Turk is one of Britain's
leading conceptual artists. He once signed his name on a brick, plonked
it down in an art gallery and stuck on a price tag for £4,000. Charles
Sataachi might have bought it, as he has much of Turk's work, had the
brick not been stolen and replaced with one worth just ninety pence before
the eminent collector had the chance.
Turk is currently acting as the lead artist on a programme of events
in the coastal towns of Essex and Suffolk under the banner Fleet
- art in the Haven Ports. He has mounted exhibitions and art events
in such improbable venues as the Martello Tower in Jaywick, an Edwardian
cinema in Harwich and Landguard Fort in Felixstowe. Part of the idea for
this bike ride, was to find a way to linking these venues.
The bikes are extraordinary. Turk, and the staff from his studio, started
out with a collection of Pashley roadsters - the kind with hub gears and
moustache handlebars. On to the frames of these they threaded fat, beads,
all painted in a dazzling array of contrasting colours, and applied bright
enamel paint to most of the other surfaces. The overall effect is like
something from an Indian carnival.
And so we set off, on a route that threaded between the tiny, rather
rackety, houses of Jaywick. Then along the seafront, though a bustling
throng of day trippers, arriving for a morning on the beach at Clacton.
We climbed up it to Frinton - past the grand houses of this most select
of sea side resorts, and then we cut inland, riding beside corn and wheat
fields, traversing some of Essex's least known roads and lanes.
We ended up - after a quick dip in the sea at Dovercourt - in Harwich
- the ferry terminal, whose outlook over the water is dominated by the
vast container port of Felixstowe where gargantuan ships deliver tens
of thousands of containers each day. And it was there that I managed to
catch up with Turk, and ask him what it was all about.
I have called the series of twenty bicycles Le Bikes de Bois Ronde.
It is a terrible bit of Franglais, but what I have done is borrowed
from a Polish/French artist called André Cadere who made a series
of staffs in the 1970s. His were basically made from coloured beads
and he used to parade with them with these staffs and claim that by
doing he was creating a kind of art that didn't have to exist in a gallery.
He was breaking down the walls of the gallery and suggesting that art
could be suggested through context, that the process of simply carrying
something could be an art work in itself.
What I wanted to do was to extend the idea and say, let's make
the bicycle an artwork and maybe we could even make the activity of
cycling the bicycle an artwork. I am hoping that our bicycle journey
of twenty bikes was somehow an artwork in itself.
The stripes on my bikes are made with either three of four colours
- mainly three. They exist in a perfectly randomised way. There is not
a regimented in anyway. Cadere always had a mathematics about the colour
synchronisations and the way that he would always include a deliberate
mistake. For me, because I have taken the bicycle and made it appear
slightly like the bike has come apart, it as though there are a series
of beads that don't quite line up with each other. And then they are
painted in what seemed to be the best version of a randomised form.
Cycling is an incredibly important, and becoming a more important,
means of transport, as everyone becomes aware of the environmental hazards
of driving. This event obviously has a local element to it. It only
happens in a specific location. For me, because the bicycles are part
of this commission - Fleet - Art in the Haven Ports, on which I am the
lead artist, which consists of a series of artworks that happen along
the Essex and Suffolk coastline. I wanted something that would link
these exhibits and experiences together and the bicycles were the perfect
way to join all these experiences together.
It allows the audience - or the artworks, we could call them -
the experience of the landscape around here, which is part of the remit
of the cultural exercise.
There is an element of cycling which - its not that it is anti
social - but it returns you to yourself. It also occupies quite a lot
of your body as you are doing it, which then allows thoughts...it is
a bit like reading between the lines. Thinking while you are cycling
is a bit like reading between the lines when you are reading a book.
It is obviously possible to cycle for an amount of time, and then suddenly
to go - oh, I am cycling. That is because there has been a moment where
you have been able to access other parts of your mind.
I wasn't actually conscious that this perfectly varied experience
[the route from Jaywick to Harwich] was about to unfold itself, in terms
of the cycle ride. I realised that we have a varied coast line here.
But just because the nature of the route - which was designed by Sustrans
-suddenly it was possible to see all these different experiences. Suddenly
there was that wonderful moment where there were all these organised
bus trips from Peckham and all these people coming off the busses with
all their picnic stuff. Then there was the festival on the beach and
we cycled through that. Then at other points we were cycling through
really quiet country roads, past fields of blooming linseed plants.
It was very exciting - much more stimulated and exciting than I have
anticipated.
I am still trying to work out what will happen to the bikes once
we are finished with them. I have been asked to take them to do a project
in Lille with French partners. I have also been speaking to various
galleries, and maybe doing something at this Frieze art fair in Regent's
Park and organise something where people can ride around the inner ring
of the park.
So, can such a bike ride be considered a work of art in its self? Turk's
day out was certainly a great fun - partially thanks to the weather, and
in quite large part because Sustrans had devised a great route.
But there was also plenty to stimulate the imagination, and to make
us reflect anew on the world around us - and they are surely two of the
tests that anything aspires to call itself art.
Because most people were riding these jolly, rather eccentric bikes,
it made the whole thing far more of an adventure. Riders were outside
their comfort zone, not quite sure what was round the next corner, and
uncertain if they could complete the journey on a bike that they had never
ridden before. It felt like we were in some kind of larky road movie,
a gang, thrown together by circumstance and pedalling into the unknown.
It had an air of the brash exploits of adolescence about it. For that
alone, it was worth while.
What's more, if you would like to try one of these rides yourself, there
is still a chance. Gavin Turk sets of awheel again from Ipswich next Saturday
(17 July 2010)- this time bound for Felixstowe. It is still possible to
join him, and its free - although you do need to book first through Commissions
East.
TD July 10
This is a slightly edited script of a package that I wrote for Resonance
FM's The Bike Show.
