July 21, 2013. Painted. 2ft x 4ft. Downtown La Jolla.
Vivid orange bicycles suddenly popped up out of nowhere: I was strolling with a few friends in downtown La Jolla when we saw four of them parked on busy intersections. The bicycle shown in the photo above was poised in front of a fancy brunch restaurant, “The Cottage”. Not only did the bicycle have an orange frame, it had orange tires, orange brakes, orange spokes, orange everything. It was locked with a black cable to a black rack. When we came across the first orange bike my friends and I argued about whether it was art, vandalism, or just a new style you could purchase that way. Perhaps someone had ridden it down from Orange County. But once we saw the second and third bright orange bike, we realized that it was street art.
La Jolla is a wealthy, finicky, carefully manicured town with no trash or graffiti to be found. Downtown La Jolla is not a district where you would typically see tags, throw-ups, or pieces. I suspect that if any illegal art appeared in La Jolla, it would be covered up or removed right away. A street artist would have to be very savvy to install street art here. So it was eye-opening to realize there is really nothing the city can do about the overly orange bicycles neatly locked to bike racks, flagrantly complying with the law.
One way to skirt the issue of the illegality is to find a legal way to make street art. There is no law against painting your bike orange, and it is not illegal to park it on a bike rack. Thus, the city of La Jolla has no control over removing this particular piece of street art. The orange bicycles remind me of the street art done by Magda Sayeg, the woman who initiated yarn bombing. Yarn bombing is seen as a more playful, less politically charged form of street art. Sayeg’s technique is to knit colorful patterns around everyday public objects such as street signs, buses and lamp posts, transforming them into something soft and unexpected. The orange bicycles, like a yarn-bombed lampost, turn an everyday hard object into soft art and allow the viewer to really look at an object that would be otherwise overlooked. Both of these acts of street art bring color to everyday life, and inspire the observer to take the time to contemplate something in their surroundings. They challenge the observer ask...Why is it there? Who put it there? What is its purpose? Its purpose could simply be to make people question its purpose.
This approach is similar to Stephan Fairey’s image Andre the Giant. Andre the Giant has no specific meaning, and this ambiguity forces people to question what its meaning is. Street art is often a hidden act, unsigned, and without a descriptive gallery placard. A person discovers the work of art, not expecting it, so any meaning comes from their own experience of the piece. In my experience of the piece, the placement of the bicycles was most interesting. The four bikes were installed on busy corners with cars buzzing by, which implied action, perhaps urgency. The distance of one bike to another gave it an element of performance art, where the viewers were interacting with not only the bicycles, but the city space between each bike. Bikes imply riders, so in my personal story I assumed the orange bicyclists all knew each other, but didn’t they park together? Perhaps they were checking shops they had visited trying to recover something the group had lost…a cellphone…a wallet…a baby…their spaceship? Or perhaps just a can of bright orange spray paint.
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