Jean Pockrus ’08 and Matt Valades ’08 are no strangers to spectacle—last Halloween they built a “haunted supermarket” in the basement of Usdan, replete with zombie shoppers and a giant edible body made of food.
Sponsored by the University’s Zombie Art Collective, the installation was, like a lot of performance art, half aesthetics and half politics: a protest against the new campus multipurpose room, which, they said, was an architectural afterthought, as sterile as a supermarket.
This weekend, along with a troupe of University collaborators, they’re doing it again at the fourth annual Deitch Art Parade in New York. The Deitch Projects is an art gallery in New York that funds unconventional projects.
“They handle the estate of Basquiat and they’re wealthy so they can produce big public spectacles,” Pockrus said. “Contemporary art, just bizarre things you’d never see unless you went to a museum.”
The Art Parade accepts applications from anyone, and features some 90 projects, including some by well-known contemporary artists like Jim Drain, BetaTank and Yoko Ono. Pockrus and Valades applied, knowing only two things: they wanted to create a spectacle, and they wanted to make it out of old bicycle parts.
Their proposal was based on Freeganism, an anti-consumerist movement based on sustainable living and reusing what is usually considered “trash.” The idea was to re-purpose bicycle parts and other discarded materials to build a mechanical sculpture that could be wheeled down the street as a float. What and how this sculpture would manifest was left in the air, to be determined once they pulled more people on board.
“It was vague on purpose,” Pockrus said. “We left it open-ended because we wanted everyone to have creative control over how it was going to end up being. We just knew we wanted to use bike parts and have the Freegan Bike Shop represented.”
Pockrus and Valades had their lightbulb moment on a fateful visit to a carousel museum in New England.
“I was looking at the carousels and the horses all had this pained expression on their faces,” Pockrus said. “Freegans believe you shouldn’t have to harm any living being in order to survive, and vegans share that. So a Freegan carousel would be bikes instead of horses—you wouldn’t be using animals, you wouldn’t be riding on their backs.”
And so the Freegan Bicycle Carousel was born, a giant metal Frankenstein assembled from materials found by a Wes-heavy team of collaborators. It isn’t all mechanical—the carousel is topped with a patchwork quilt of sorts, which Elizabeth McClellan ’09 sewed out of fabric scraps salvaged from the Garment District.
Best of all, it spins.
“We’ll be pulling it on a cart, and as we pull it, the top of the carousel will spin,” Pockrus said.
So if you’re not too tired from your first week of classes, hop on a train and go see the spectacle. Who knows? They might even let you join in.
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