Les Bikes Du Bois Rond, Gavin Turk (2010)

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.

TD July 10

This is a slightly edited script of a package that I wrote for Resonance FM’s The Bike Show.