Alberto Fiz
art critic
on the saddle of art
"In my opinion, the human body is no more important than keys or than bicycles". In Fernand Leger's famous affirmation dating back to 1930, the object takes on the same level of interest of traditional themes, definitively taking over the tradition of the 1800s that represented the noble themes of artistic research with landscapes and the human form. "One must recognise that the pictorial traditions that precede us are full of consequences. Why? Because is the landscape in which we have lived, the figures and portraits that adorn the walls, whose sentimental value resulted in a considerable quantity of good, bad or questionable paintings. In order to see this clearly, the modern artist has had to detach himself from this sentimental bind. We have overcome this obstacle: the object has replaced the subject; it is possible to consider the human form not only as being of sentimental value, but as being of plastic value"1.
All art in the 1900s went through the progressive conquest of the object according to research that no longer posed direct references of a naturalistic or psychological character. From Cubism to New Realism and Pop Art; "We look for the unconditional everywhere and we find only things", explained the German poet Novalis, demonstrating how reality offers itself in many forms which take on the shape of those things they inhabit. And so the object became a kind of symbolic transition that led to a progressive separation from the subject. Accordingly, Robert Rauschenberg in 1959 wrote that "a pair of little socks are no less suitable for painting than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and canvas"2. What it proposed as a dogmatic value slowly disintegrated according to a quest where art pursued form, with the precise aim of pursuing time; a fundamental move forward, beginning with Paul Cezanne. Art therefore, went in frantic search of a dialectic truth that penetrated the becoming of things. "Painting, which has slumbered for so long in its golden crypt, its glass tomb, is invited to leave and go swimming, I'll offer it a cigarette, a bottle of beer, its all a mess, I'll give you a push, I'll trip you up, I'll teach you how to laugh and give you clothes of every colour, go take a ride on a bicycle", wrote Claes Oldenburg3. "In this way, it is the bicycle that assumes an emblematic aspect and in no way is it considered one of many objects. Its invention dates back to 1818 and the Baron Karl Friedrich Drais von Sauerbronn, a Prussian army officer who created the ancestress of the bicycle, beginning with a simple structure formed from two aligned wheels and fixed to a rigid canvas using an axis that allowed the forward wheel to rotate. It took on a metaphysical aspect that led to a transversal reading of artistic matters in a long path that ranged from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Fernand Leger, from Marcel Duchamp to Robert Rauschenberg, from Mario Sironi to Joseph Beuys, from Fortunate Depero to Claes Oldenburg, from Gerardo Dottori to Michelangelo Pistoletto, from Giacomo Balla to Arman.
And it is this very conviction that the bicycle conceals a multiplicity of meanings that explains why such an exhibition is being housed in the extraordinary Villa Panza. If the bicycle was only a mean of transport, it wouldn't explain why Duchamp in 1913 represented the first ready made with the Bicycle Wheel. The story of art began revolving around that wheel in a different manner, rendering a common object a work of art.
"This is art because I say so", said Duchamp. That wheel with the upside down bracket and screwed to a stool boasts all the characteristics necessary for it to be hailed the first monument of the object in an irreverent rereading of all academic tradition.
Who knows whether, exactly thirty years later in 1943, Pablo Picasso thought of Duchamp when he created his Tete de taureau made from bicycle saddle and handlebars. It is certain that the Spanish master was heading in the opposite direction to ready made and attained a metaphorical object with a double nature as he himself confirmed. "And so one day, I took a saddle of a bicycle and the handlebars, putting one on top of the other, thus making a bull's head. But later, the bull's head was thrown away. Thrown away in the gutter somewhere, a long way from me. Then, a manual worker came and removed it from the drain and decided that maybe he could get a saddle and a pair of handlebars out of that bull's head. And if he had done so, it would have been wonderful. This is the art of transformation".
The inventor of Cubism understood the intrinsic mimetic capacity of representation that alters before the eyes of the observer. Nothing is what it seems in a continuous overturning of meanings. And I believe that it is here that the secret of the bicycle lies; thanks to its legendary and symbolic component, it assumes a polysemous meaning, entering into direct relationship with the self. For the rest, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote of Picasso: "He created objects impregnated with humanity". All things considered, the bicycle watches us from a close distance, and returns the look that we have dealt her. She is tied to the actual presence of man and it is this inextricable nature that makes her an irreplaceable object.
"The bicycle is a way of reconciling life with time and space, it is going and being on a human scale still, though I don't know for how much longer", wrote Sergio Zavoli4. The cyclist by Mario Sironi (1916-17), exhibited at Villa Panza, demonstrates this as the bicycle intimately participates in man's hardships in a vision that is no longer external to things, but originates within things. Despite the fact that this work of art belongs to the Futurist period, Sironi emphasises the fusion between the bicycle and the cyclist by accentuating space and through the geometric constructions. With a different spirit, Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a cyclist, 1913, represents the object as it becomes dynamic; "that is to say, a synthesis of the transformation that the object undergoes in two movements, relative and absolute... This implies that the strong lines that characterise the potentiality of the object and take us to a new unit is a new fundamental interpretation of the object, or rather the intuitive perception of life"5. The network of taut strong-lines that represents the revealing status of the object characterised in another masterpiece of Giacomo Balla on display at this exhibition, Line of speed+form+noise, 1915. But on this journey divided into stages through 20th century art, there are plenty of surprises and, as if by magic, it is possible to come across what might be defined as a lyrical fantasy by Alberto Savinio. I'm speaking of that admirable composition from 1947, Walker by the sea, where the two wheels offer a narrative opportunity to ironically reinterpret mythology. A head of the bull appears in place of the handle. Poking fun at Pablo Picasso maybe? Who knows. On the subject of mythology, it would be worth mentioning the famous sage Roland Barthes who defined the Tour de France as a Homeric epic. "Like the Odyssey, the journey is at once a periplus of complete trials and the total exploration of terrestrial limits. Ulysses reached the gates of the Earth many times. The Tour also touches on the inhuman world in many places (...) and if we wanted to pick up on a kind of Vichian outline of History, the Tour would represent that ambiguous moment when man strongly personifies Nature by confronting her more easily and freeing himself of her better"6. Mario Schifano also referred to the Tour de France by dedicating a series of shirts to this famous competition in which he uses Picasso's Tete de taureu. In this case, it appears as an icon of public dominion equal to the great works of classical antiquity. "I created the shirts for Tour de France in 1989", Mario Schifano recalled in 1995. "I also created a small logo, in reference to a famous sculpture by Picasso, the Head of a bull, composed of bicycle handle and saddle". Alongside this collective rituality described by Barthes, we can place the Homage to Scheiwiller, the sculpture by Fausto Melotti created in honour of the publisher Giovanni Scheiwiller, a great cyclist, who dedicated a wonderful little book to the bicycle. The cover portrays a bicycle designed by Giuseppe Viviani. Melotti invented a thread-like bicycle for his friend that looked as if it were suspended upon a tight-rope, in a lyrical interpretation of art as "an angelic and geometric state of mind".
Pygmalion, by Ettore Colla, is another example of this, whereby a wheel has worked its way into an iron structure. In this case, it is the materials that are entangled, mangled and contorted, coming to life in a representation in which the sculptor seems to play the role of a simple bystander. It is the object that stands out, with its gaudy and unexpected presence. "Descending from Olevano Romano, after one of many explorations, I was drawn to the ruins of a factory destroyed by bombing. Here and there, amongst the bottles, wood, stones and unexploded bullets lay sowing machines, ploughs, mowing machines and scattered around them, wheels of all different shapes and sizes. The sad and appalling sight stayed with me until the day I received permission to collect the wheels. I looked at them for a whole year; I moved them, put them in place, took them out of place and put them in place again without reaching a logical solution. But one night in December 1954,I began soldering two of the medium-sized wheels, one across the other (...). I then fixed the largest wheel measuring 1,35 metres on top of the highest one, and diagonally across this one, positioned the two smaller ones, one measuring 50 cm above, and the other of 35 cm below, behind it. And so I had unexpectedly resolved the theme of continuity and had finally cured myself of vertigo"7.
At the end of the day, it is we who are the objects in this world and everything is a sign to those who know how to read the true nature of things. If Colla's works hide behind scrap iron, then it may be said that Mimmo Rotella works with the left-overs of advertising. However, sublime images may emerge from his decollage that belong to a sentimental dimension as happened with The ideal bicycle, 1991, that originated from who knows which forgotten advertising bill via a slow reappropriation of mass media. Today, bicycles are snobby and represent a mean of putting distance between the claustrophobic and individualist homologation which cars have forced upon us. While the bicycle provides extensive communication, cars appear like hyperbaric chambers in which everyone moves in total solitude.
The two wheels are bearers of a philosophy that goes against the tide and this is another of the bicycle's specific characteristics. And it is not by chance that they may be found in Joseph Beuys great work, Meeting with Beuys, Dusseldorf, 3 July 1983. The German artist uses the bicycle as a means of opposing the artificial, technological and material society, recouping the physical and existential dimension. And this is how the bicycle can represent a way of thinking for accessing other worlds, as occurs with the impossible machines thought up by Gianni Piacentino or Panamarenko.
On this mysterious journey regarding the two wheels, Panamarenko's magical machines go well together with Alessandro Mendini's Bike and Outfit Alchemy. This complete set portrays the cyclist as a kind of point of contact between the bicycle and the product of design. "The bicycle is a shoe, a skate, it is yourselves", wrote Alfredo Oriani8 in 1925 recognising the human component in a vehicle that continues to defy technology. It is rather unusual like the same characteristics described by the sports journalist in the comic film Holidays by Jacques Tati, where the bicycle appears to be a projection of the protagonist and the landscape around him. It is perhaps this intrinsic, existential component that explains the fact that the bicycle has flanked different artistic movements and trends throughout the 1900s, finding a fundamental landmark first in Pop Art and then in New Realism. On the subject of the movement founded by art critic Pierre Restany, we cannot fail to mention the Compressions of bicycles by Cesar, or the Accumulations by Arman. The latter, for example, is presented in Homage to Bicycle Thieves, an important installation of 1979 in which the object undergoes a kind of catharsis, abandoning its traditional function to be contemplated as an alienating representation where the bicycle seems blocked as if by magic. It is the time of the object that stops and this is evident in a work that refers explicitly to the film by Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini. If Arman presents himself as an archaeologist of the present through his accumulations, then Michelangelo Pistoletto considers the bicycle to be an element through which to project the image of the world with a mirror in a kind of absolute identity. Life is reflected in a bicycle that, since the 1960s, constitutes a monument to classicism. Venus of rags isn't placed next to the Bicycle with rags for nothing. The thing, finally, becomes a real experience for Robert Rauschenberg who has always maintained that he wishes to work in the space that lies between life and art. This is how his combine paintings from the 50s are read, as well as many other variations dedicated to the bicycle that represented a constant landmark for the master of Pop Art. Another example exhibited here is Bicycloid VII, 1992, where the bicycle undergoes a kind of cloning, transforming into a sci-fi bicycloid. From Duchamp to Rauschenberg, the bicycle continues its journey within Twentieth Century art, ready to be subjected to different styles and trends in a continuous transformation.

Note
1 F. Léger, Fernand Léger, edizione Cercle d'Art, Parigi 1952.
2 L. Vergine (a cura di), Trash. Quando i rifiuti diventano arte, cat. mostra, Palazzo delle Albere, Trento 11 settembre 1997-11 gennaio 1998 (Electa, Milano 1997), p. 232.
3 Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art, Mazzotta, Milano 1978, p. 141 (prima edizione Pop Art, Thames and Hudson, Londra 1966).
4 S. Zavoli, "L'elogio della bicicletta" in Scrittori della bicidetta, a cura di Nello Bertellini, Vallecchi Editore, Firenze 1985, p. 16.
5 AA.W. Capolavori della collezione Gianni Mattioli, Electa, Milano 1997 (tratto da Ciò che ci divide dal cubismo in Pittura, scultura, futuriste, 1914).
6 R. Barthes, Miti d'oggi, Einaudi, Torino 1996, p. 111 (prima edizione Mythologies, Edition de Seuil, Parigi).
7 E. Colla, "Civiltà delle macchine", anno V, n. 4,1957.
8 A. Oriani, "L'Ode", in Scrittori della bicicletta, op. cit., p. 25.