Left For Dead
Over Thanksgiving holiday, I went to New York and saw the 2005 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park. My friend Margaret Lee had a sculpture in the exhibition. Throughout the park was an exhibit called Left For Dead by David Shapiro. It featured parts of bicycles around steel posts with street signs. I thought it was a clever title and idea, and I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since then. Whenever I used to see bicycle trunks on Manhattan sidewalks, stripped of everything possible except for the Kryptonite lock keeping it locked to the post, I always found it amusing. I used to call them “bike casualties.” They reminded me of images of cattle skulls in the desert.
In Austin, I haven’t seen “dead” bicycles like these, but I see other dead items and I think to myself, “Now those are left for dead…”
4 January 2006 – 12:00 PM