Untitled statement

1990

Without actually claiming spirit, gorillas pose some questions about who is who on this earth and why what happened, how fast we are not going and where... If I have chosen bicycles to frame them it's for the bicycle's ubiquity over the face of the planet. Wherever there are people there lurks a bicycle. The humble bike with all its utility showing, its frame-work an emblem and a foil for the spaces in between, is thinking of its past, not quite distant. The gorilla remembers too, back to the eye of time, when somehow he was left behind. Man jumped on a bicycle and sped away and does not now remember. But the bicycle is full of dreams, fast and slow, and the gorilla is full of silence, and here I am an artist who has promised to bring them together.

A black skeleton, weightless and in flux, the bike is me, moving through areas of confusion, through multiplicities of intersections, through the generated curve to confront its signs, signals and the fact that a straight line is really curved, closed, convex, and not a segmented measure to be drawn like a conclusion, that is, with theoretical charcoal.

Then, looming like a misty corollary is the face of the gorilla with its planes, points, coordinate frames, pairs of planes, quadrics, concavities, all brought within congruent space. His gaze: deeper than oceans, farther than the planet itself; a gaze of accuse and excuse, spreading in me, the bicycle, like a stain along broken lines of wheel and handlebar that, crumpling, apologize.
 

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