Gabriel Orozco, “Four Bicycles (There Is Always...

Four Bicycles (There Is Always One Direction)

by Gabriel Orozco
album from Museum of Modern Art

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Gabriel Orozco, “Four Bicycles (There Is Always One Direction)” (1994)

It’s interesting to consider how Orozco’s “Four Bicycles” functions differently than Ai Weiwei’s “Forever, Bicycles” (2003).
Orozco’s feels like a prototype for some kind of impossible extreme biking, a challenge to the idea of movement, as discussed in the audio track from MoMA above, whereas Ai’s 42-bicycle sculpture is more of an enclosed space, an re-construction of bicycle structures into something else, a denial of movement. Here is a nice list of other bike reconstruction artworks.