SpaceTime travelers: on riding a bike in the city

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Request accessible transcript

Transcript (if available)

Content

SpaceTime Travelers
On riding a bike in the city
By
Jordan Gonzales

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF CURATORIAL PRACTICES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
December 2022

ii

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my committee members for their patience and guidance.

To Jenny Lin, whose deep knowledge of the intersections of urban life and creative practice have
grounded my research and helped me to draw connections between what seemed like such disparate ideas.
Thank you for encouraging me to explore these connections (com)passionately.

To Andy Campbell, for foregrounding this research with his own; without Andy’s meticulous and intimate
excavation into the life and work of Beverly Buchanan, my own research would not be possible. Thank
you for encouraging me to embrace writing as an emotive and vibrantly creative practice.

To Annette Kim, an incredible educator whose practice and praxis is imaginative, concerned, curious and
uplifting. Thank you for showing me that the intersection of art and urban planning is more than just
beautification, but rather a way of approaching how we think about and move within our landscapes.

Thank you to the following people for their guidance, encouragement, and mutual love for movement:

My parents, Larry and Vicki Gonzales – they made movement a foundational part of our lives.

Amelia Jones - an astute critic, enchanting writer, and fellow bike rider.

The bike riders of Los Angeles – the knowledges contained within this thesis would not exist if not for
their friendships, mentorships, and teachings.

iii

Table of Contents

List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iv
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v
Chapter One: Getting oriented ........................................................................................................ 1
Chapter Two: SpaceTime Bending, Practical and Theoretical Origins ......................................... 6
Frustulation ................................................................................................................................. 6
Nepantla: spaces in-between ....................................................................................................... 9
SpaceTime Bending .................................................................................................................. 11
Chapter Three: Materiality and Proximity: the rider and the city ................................................. 16
Chapter Four: Materiality an Movement: on the feeling of riding ............................................... 22
Chapter Five: Materiality and time: muscle memory ................................................................... 28
Chapter Six: Conclusion: How riders create the city .................................................................... 35
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 41

iv

List of Figures
Figure 1: A sketch of my bike in front of City Hall……………………………………………….1
Figure 2: Beverly Buchanan. Untitled (double portrait of artist with frustula sculpture)…………7
Figure 3: Beverly Buchanan, 3 intervals…………………………………………………………..8
Figure 4: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art…………………………...13
Figure 5: Pink Bike Mike’s Pink Bike…………………………………………………………...14
Figure 6: Beverly Buchanan, Frustula; Image of artist in her studio in Macon, Georgia………..19
Figure 7: Ghost Bike in honor of Frederick “Woon” Frazier……………………………………32
Figure 8: Beverly Buchanan, Marsh Ruinstoday……………………………………………...…33
Figure 9: Beverly Buchanan, Marsh Ruins………………………………………………………33
Figure 10: Chief Lunes group ride……………………………………………………………….34

v

Abstract
My thesis focuses on one of many antidotes to privatized automobile supremacy. My thesis
is about riding a bike in the city - how it feels, how it engages the body and mind, how it brings
the rider into relation with the urban landscape and other people. To explore and understand the
experience of riding a bike, and the implications of this experience in how we approach and
navigate the city, I turn to artists. Art and artists present us with objects/moments/spaces to probe,
deal with, and understand the social, political, and personal conditions of contemporary life. I
believe that the role of art and artists in creating and intervening in the (urban) landscape, and
urban processes, is not limited to “beautification.” By entering into conversations with artists and
their works, and by understanding their processes and concerns, we can better create meaning and
connection within our experiences of the city, as well as vision and imagine pathways to navigate
through it.

1

Chapter One: Getting oriented
Riding up San Pedro towards downtown, on our way to East LA from my home one
morning before work, Javier pointed out the view of City Hall. As we returned from East LA,
riding on 3rd (or maybe it had become 4th by then), he pointed to City Hall again, and it remained
in our sight until we crossed the 4th street bridge back into downtown. City Hall used to be the
tallest building in Los Angeles, though now, only blocks away, high-rises and smallish skyscrapers
surpass it. But the gray, terra-cotta-coated appendage still protrudes above most of the city's other
buildings, and it remains a useful visual marker to orient yourself within and around the city.

Figure 1. A sketch I abandoned of City Hall from Grand Park (left) and a sketch of my bike in front of City Hall (right), from the
same spot on the same night. Dated September 17, 2021

Javier was surprised we could see City Hall from the beginning of our ride. From just about
forty blocks south and a few to the east, sitting at about the same, if not a little lower in elevation,
you can spot City Hall just above the skyline, which is truncated by buildings of mostly no more

2

than a few stories, and of a variety of residential, commercial, and industrial varieties. The frame
of the skyline and the heat of the road are softened for a few blocks here and there by some mature
trees on the sidewalks (most of which grow behind gates and fences, overflowing from personal
gardens that are best appreciated on foot). It was not until I began the research and writing for this
thesis in earnest that I realized how the loops of my life intersect at City Hall. On a different
morning than the one above, riding towards downtown but this time coming from the North, on
the stretch of Broadway between the bridge and Chinatown, I remember seeing City Hall, and I
could not recall at first glance if it was the library, City Hall, or the prison, and I thought that was
a telling trinity for the city. From the observation deck at the top of City Hall, you can experience
the sprawl that characterizes Los Angeles in one seamless, far-reaching gaze.
In order to move forward we must have a concept of how a public relates to the problems
of materialities, spacetimes, and movement (the ‘holy trinity’ of this thesis). Philosopher and
cultural theorist John Dewey presents a relational concept of a public as an assemblage of bodies
“pulled together not so much by choice…as by a shared experience of harm,”
1
the effects of which
coalesce “to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically
cared for.”
2
Key here is the emergence of a public in response to a problem, rather than a public
as preexisting a problem. To contextualize this understanding of the public I turn to the recent
criminalization of bicycle “chop shops” in Los Angeles. These chop shops occur in encampments
of people experiencing homelessness and consist overwhelmingly of stolen and abandoned
bicycles (and parts of them). This “black market” of bicycles presents two major problems - a rise
in bike theft (which largely affects working class people who either work on their bikes or must

1
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter a Political Ecology of Things, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 100.
2
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), 16.

3

ride their bikes to places of employment that do not provide secure bike storage) and the
obstruction of sidewalks and other pedestrian spaces of right of way.
When we think about the problem created by the operation and expansion of bike chop
shops within communities of unhoused people, a public emerges in response to this problem. That
is, people who ride bikes and people who must access, use, or otherwise interface with or encounter
the pedestrian spaces where the chop shops operate. The communities of people experiencing
homelessness are not a part of this (“the”) public because their actions constitute the very problem
in response to which the public is conceptualized and agglomerated. To be sure, people operating
the chop shops of concern are not considered “private citizens,” they are, effectively, stripped of
their subjectivity and humanity, and conceptualized as an operational “problem.”
The ordinance passed by the city council, which prohibits “the assembly, disassembly, sale,
offer of sale, distribution, offer of distribution, or storage of bicycles and bicycle parts on public
property,” does not - in theory - apply to members of the public (a bicycle repair shop with a
privately-owned storefront and license to operate a business; a rider who must stop to fix a flat tire
or mechanical failure en route). However, there is some worry about the potential for this law to
be applied disproportionately and discriminately to members of the public who ride bikes but may
not fit the idealized image of the “bicyclist” or “cyclist.” As “public space” (space that is publicly
accessible and which may be used by members of the public at no cost, and with no conditions for
use except that one must be part of the “public”), this controversial ordinance implicates important
questions about who is considered part of the public and thereby entitled to use public spaces, as
well as what constitutes a “public” use of space.
Author and historian Norman Klein traces the trend of spatial privatization within Los
Angeles to as early as 1905, when city officials were “already refusing offers for donations of park

4

land, as if this seemed beside the point.”
3
With the completion of the freeway network in the mid-
nineteen sixties, the “point that one entered public spaces was narrowed considerably, while the
privacy within the auto was enhanced.”
4
Although freeways and roads for cars might be considered
public space, the reality of their use denies access to these spaces for anyone who is not contained
within a privately owned vehicle.
Rather than existing as publicly accessible and usable space, roads for cars are, in reality,
concessions of public land to private vehicle travel. This fixation on and prioritization of the
automobile within Los Angeles infrastructure and development results in the continual social and
physical fragmentation and isolation of neighborhoods, and to the rapid loss of (public)
greenspace. Despite social connection and connection to nature and our environment(s) being
integral to individual and collective well-being, and despite calls for more accommodations for
active modes of transportation which promote both of the aforementioned, the city and those who
plan it continue to accommodate private, passive transportation by automobile.
My thesis focuses on one of many antidotes to privatized automobile supremacy. My thesis
is about riding a bike in the city - how it feels, how it engages the body and mind, how it brings
the rider into relation with the urban landscape and other people. To explore and understand the
experience of riding a bike, and the implications of this experience in how we approach and
navigate the city, I turn to artists. Art and artists present us with objects/moments/spaces to probe,
deal with, and understand the social, political, and personal conditions of contemporary life. I
believe that the role of art and artists in creating and intervening in the (urban) landscape, and
urban processes, is not limited to “beautification.” By entering into conversations with artists and

3
Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory ( New York: Verso, 1997),
84.
4
Klein, The History of Forgetting, 84.

5

their works, and by understanding their processes and concerns, we can better create meaning and
connection within our experiences of the city, as well as vision and imagine pathways to navigate
through it.

6

Chapter Two: SpaceTime Bending, Practical and Theoretical Origins
Frustulation
Before I rode a bike in Los Angeles, I rode public transit in New York City. For a few
months a handful of years ago, I took a shuttle from my college campus to the Staten Island Ferry,
and upon arriving at the southernmost point of the island of Manhattan, I caught one train, then
another, and ended my route at the Brooklyn Museum where I was training to be a docent. It was
here that I first experienced the work of the late artist Beverly Buchan (1940-2015); my cohort of
docents was being trained on the most comprehensive exhibition of Buchanan’s works to date, a
show titled Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, and coordinated by
Catherine Morris. In Buchanan’s caste concrete forms, I encountered, for the first time with
resonance accompanied by immense tension, the language of the city and of my own body. It was
– it is - a material language of fragmentation and disorientation.
Raised in the rural South, Buchanan lived in New York City and New Jersey beginning in the
1960s, where she studied and practiced public health.
5
During this time, in the late hours of the
evening following her full-time work as the city's public health educator, the artist began "casting
small cement pieces using old bricks and milk cartons as forms in a fourth floor walk up in East
Orange."
6
Through these small, experimental and explorative forms, Buchanan developed the
material language and processes upon which she built her later, larger, ruinous Georgia sculptures.
Buchanan's move away from the city in 1977 - to Macon, Georgia - marks the year she retired
from her work in public health to become a full-time artist.

5
Revisiting Buchanan’s work through this project, I was surprised at how the paths of her life resonate with my own.
I have my own formative relationship to the South, as well as a connection to New York City as both a city in which
I once lived, and generationally by my mother’s family. Buchanan and I also both studied in dual graduate programs
in fields of public service, which inform and complicate our creative practices.
6

Edward W. Waddell, “Life… ain’t been no crystal stair,” Atlanta Art Papers (November/December 1985): 15.

7

Learning from the city’s walls “when they are in various stages of decay,”
7
and exercising her
capacities as an artist, Buchanan deciphered a material language of the city and of the body.
Concrete is the material of the city. Beverly Buchanan made concrete - mixed it, cast it, broke it
down, built it up, decoded its languages, and repeated the process in her fourth floor walk-up in
East Orange. She translated this material language into an artistic one, applying the syntaxes of
post-minimalism and abstraction she learned from her teachers Romare Bearden and Norman
Lewis,
8
and developing her own idioms and vernaculars.
The individually-cast fragments conversate with one another to create whole forms called
“frustums” or “frustula;” the word frustum means “a piece broken off….a portion of a fragment.”
9

Buchanan played with her concrete fragments to see how they spoke with one another and to learn
from their variable
conversations and iterations.
For Buchanan, each new
form - a momentary “whole”
comprised of the concrete
fragments - was personal,
emotive, relational.

7

Beverly Buchanan, Wall Fragments - Series Cast in Cement, artist statement for Truman Gallery, 1978.

8

Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris Staton, Beverly Buchanan: 1978 – 1981 (Mexico City: Athénée Press, 2015): 12.

9
Buchanan, Wall Fragments - Series Cast in Cement, 1978.
Figure 2. Beverly Buchanan. Untitled (double portrait of artist with frustula
sculpture), n.d. Black and White photograph with original paint marks, 8 ½ x 11in.
Private Collection, © Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian
Archives of American Art

8

Figure 3. Beverly Buchanan, 3 intervals, n.d., concrete. Photography Courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Frustulation is the cycle through which our material and psychic worlds fragment and
become disoriented; these fragments encounter and engage (with) one another, and these
encounters create new forms and connections. Fragmented materialities and fragmented
psychological landscapes (including those of our social psyches), like the cement blocks which
compose Beverly Buchanan’s frustula, are integral to the iterative forms created in the cycle of
and processes of frustulation.
10
Frustulation is also the act(ion) of making and experiencing the
connections between the fragments, and of the wholeness they create. Incidentally, the look and
sound of the word frustulation recalls that of frustration. Indeed, frustulation of the body is
frustrating; to feel fragmented or to experience fragmentation of the body and of the world around
you is frustrating (to say the least). But integral to frustulation - as both a material process and
psychic action - is the creation of relational cohesions.
On a bike, the rider enters a very close dialogue with the material qualities and conditions
of the city; this dialog is visceral, it is dynamic, and in Los Angeles, it is very volatile, often hostile.

10
Integral (/ˈin(t)əɡrəl,inˈteɡrəl/): necessary to make a whole complete; essential or fundamental

9

The relationship between riders, their bikes, and the landscape is ‘frustular’ in nature; that is to
say, riding a bike through the city is a form of frustular movement and locomotion. Riding
coalesces body, space, and time together into a vital experience, where each intimately engages
with and activates the others.
On a bike, body, space, and time simultaneously reiterate one another and generate new
ways of being (with)in one another. And the more you ride in the city, you learn how the city
speaks in fragments, and that pathways and roadways and infrastructures trail off, cut off,
deteriorate, pick up somewhere else entirely different. You learn the patterns of the spaces-between
of those half-formed sentences, the way the city stutters and pauses, the hms and umms and inhales
and exhales of the city and you learn that you can expand them, bend them, move through them.

Nepantla: spaces in-between
To connect the city we (riders) must create “unofficial” pathways through it, imagining
pathways that do not exist in our physical realities. But this act of moving where there is not meant
to be space for our movement creates tensions - with drivers and other road users as well as with
the landscape and the city’s infrastructures (including their systemization and “logical”
organization). This tension rips open spacetimes; in these chasms we can (en)vision ourselves and
summon back missing or absent pieces of the landscape.
11
Understanding the city’s spaces-
between as iterations of author and writer Gloria Anzaldua’s nepantla helps us to better understand
the creative power and potential of existing within, engaging with, and moving through these
spacetimes.

11
Gloria Anzaldua, Light in the dark/luz in lo oscuro: rewriting identity, sexuality, reality (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2015): 2.

10

According to Anzaldua, nepantla is a space and a state of being located “between
imagination and physical existence,” a place of constant tension “where wholeness is just out of
reach but seems attainable.”
12
While wholeness is desirable, it is not a static or final state of being.
Wholeness is a condition of connectedness, requiring actants to create and maintain connections.
Los Angeles is in a constant state of frustulation, continuously ripped open and apart by material
and psychic tensions. When the city’s chasms become grotesque or seemingly insurmountable, we
are called to the action of imagining and enacting connections within/between those spaces.
Nepantla characterizes the anthropological liminal space. However, nepantla is less
restricted to rites and rituals - it is a spacetime that we encounter in our daily lives and states of
mind both individually and socially. To navigate through nepantla is fraught with turmoil and
conflict, and to come out of nepantla is transformative; those who come out of nepantla transform
their perspectives and knowledges of the world and its peoples. These transformed and
transformative knowledges cultivate a person’s conocimiento - a connectionist mode of thinking
and understanding the world that comes from a deepening perception of it. A knowledge cultivated
from experiences in nepantla, conocimiento is “profoundly relational, and enables those who enact
it to make connections among apparently disparate events, peoples, experiences, and realities.”
13

Those who enact conocimiento - people who traverse nepantla and guide others through it - are
called nepantleras.
Ride leaders and group riders embody Anzaldua’s nepantleras; they guide each through
the city, at all times of day and night, helping each other to cultivate their own conocimiento of
nepantla, and providing experiences that riders can recall and build upon when travelling alone.

12
Anzaldua, 2015: 2.
13
Anzaldua, 2015: xxvii.

11

To be candid, travelling in nepantla - in the cracks between and within our worlds - is scary as hell.
It is well known among people who ride bikes that one of the best ways to learn how to move
through the nepantla of Los Angeles is with a group. For the inexperienced or disengaged rider, it
is easier to see where nepantla exists and to see the pathways through it when you can take up
more space; riding with a group helps individuals to (en)vision an alternate way of existing and
moving through the city’s nepantlas. With enough experience, individuals can even learn how to
manipulate spacetimes, how to open and expand them at will as they encounter each iteration of
nepantla. I name this practice spacetime bending.

SpaceTime Bending
The notion of spacetime bending builds on the work of Annette Kim and other participants
in the Race, Art, Place research and creative collective at the University of Southern California.
Though the distinct methods and practices vary immensely between each individual and group
within the RAP collective, they all cultivate interpersonal connection and community (and
networks of communities) through the arts and creative practices. These varied “space bending
practices” are “imaginative defiance[s] of distance” which sow “seeds to break concrete for future
pathways.” The effects of each project and each practice bend space and time to “break through
isolation, to re-make places of belonging, and to occupy and live with radical joy.”
14
The effect of
people who ride bikes is the same.
To this theory of space bending I add the consideration and action of time more integrally
because, as Dewey notes, “moments and places, despite physical limitation and narrow

14
Race, Arts, Place, RAP USC Guide: to our network, values and modes of practice, May 2022.

12

localization, are changed with accommodation of long-gathering energy.”
15
The bedrock of every
practice and collaboration within the RAP collective is long time - a commitment of faculty and
community members to each other that transcends short-term and short-sighted academic-
institutional timelines, resulting in mutual trust and copowering relationships. Over many years
for most and even decades for some, RAP participants imbued and affected the spaces where they
gather(ed) and where they travel(ed); in as much as spatialization is integral to the radical affects
of RAP practices, so is time integral in connecting and compounding moments of their gathered
energies in space(s).
In order to travel through and connect spacetimes (on a bike, specifically, though I suppose in
other ways too), we must engage with our material worlds in three ways: through (over)proximity,
through movement, and through time.
Riding a bike engages and exercises our capacity to piece together the fragments of worlds
in the same moments we encounter them. The resulting form is a bend in spacetimes that become
the riders’ connection to/through the city. Highways and major avenues and boulevards represent
the most direct and connected routes through the city; most of these spaces and infrastructures are
the most hostile towards the movement of riders (though some groups do brave the freeways).
16

The same capacity of readers to create closure between the images in comics frames engenders
riders to construct pathways through the fragmented streets of the city. In this process, visioning
refers to the ability to imagine where, when, and how spaces-between can emerge. Drawing from
a rider’s experience, visioning is a future-sight. With our vision, we construct pathways where we

15
John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Perigee, 1934 (24).
16
Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990): 91.

13

can project ourselves. The results are imaginative, resistive, even delightfully chaotic pathways
through the city where previously there were only latent fragments.
We encounter and perceive the world through our senses, and these perceptions are
incomplete, fragmented. Closure enables us to create meanings of the world by (sub)consciously
synthesizing the fragments. In comics, closure occurs in the spaces between frames - this space
activates the reader’s capacity to create meaning between two (or more) images.
17
Creating closure
relies on our ability (and willingness) to access and activate our past experiences and imaginations
to make sense of our present and to (en)vision futures.

Figure 4. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 1994; pg 63, frames 1, 2, & 6

In order to spacetime bend, riders “call on the ‘connectionist’ or web-making faculty” of
Anzaldua’s nepantleras; a faculty of “less structured thoughts, less rigid categorizations, and
thinner boundaries”
18
that allow us to imagine the landscape, and our places within it, differently.
Spacetime bending requires that we activate and enact our conociemientos, dreaming an alternative

17
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994).

18
Anzaldua, 2015: 83.

14

reality “via all our senses, and willing it into creation.”
19
I have learned from LA riders how the
city - the “worst city for cycling” - can be such a freeing city, a loving city, a connected city. I
learned how to exercise agency in this nepantla by riding with people who traversed it long before
I ever even sat in the saddle. They are masters of their movements, of the city, and of bringing the
two together.
The spaces between cars and their infrastructures always exist; when cars stand still, so do
the spaces between them pause and lay out like a maze. But when cars are in motion, the space(s)
between become blurred, borderless, instantaneous, and
invisible. Riders in the city develop the capacity to
appropriate these tense and chaotic passages, most
commonly and specifically the gaps/spaces between cars.
Spaces designed for cars are wastelands - the primacy
placed on personal vehicular travel (i.e. car dependency)
leads to streets that are hostile to everything except the
passage and storage of cars. Riders resist vehicular
primacy and streets’ disutility and activate these wasted
spaces when they weave through and hustle alongside
traffic. The spatial and temporal gaps/cracks/spaces
present realized and cognitive gutters in and through
which riders can engage with and construct imaginative pathways through the city.

19
Anzaldua, 2015: 20.
Figure 4. Pink Bike Mike’s Pink Bike. Photo
provided by Michael Rivera. 2022

15

My friend Mike helped me to build my foundation in riding a bike; his mentorship and
coaching pushed me to savor the tensions of the city and to build the athleticism necessary to move
with agency on a bike. His favorite coaching mantra is “visualize, and execute.” Simple, but
effective. Mike rides a pink bike, covered in stickers like tattoos on a corporeal machine. If you
ask most veterans in the scene, they likely know or know of pink-bike-mike. Just like Mike helped
to hone my capacity for riding, he likes to brag that his coaching was formative to the development
of some of the fastest and most intense riders I know, including one of the leaders of a week night
group ride called The Mixed Race.

16

Chapter Three: Materiality and Proximity: the rider and the city
The second time I rode a bike up Mandeville Canyon Road it was a Thursday night,
sometime between eight and eleven. I was riding with the Mixed Race, a weekly group ride led by
three women who love to ride f-a-a-a-st. Our group of twenty or so riders approached the ascent
and the street lights faded behind us as our blinking bike lights fractured the darkness ahead. For
the next five miles to "the wall" (a huge driveway gate marking the end of the road), the pack of
riders thinned out, until most people pedaled beside only one or two other riders, if any. My eyes
remained fixed on the patch of road illuminated by my front light, unable to see into the cavernous
darkness ahead and generally uninterested in the spacious driveways and white-wall dwellings that
lined the road the whole way up. While my vision became limited the rest of my body meditated
on the rhythm of my pedaling, keeping me in touch with the road around me.
The moisture in the air and the moisture of my sweat became indiscernible from one
another; I wondered if this is how the trees to my left and right feel when the night becomes the
day, when the cold air meets the warm sun. At every point of contact between my body and my
bike, the tires transcribed what my eyes could not discern of the textures, ruptures, and ravines in
the pavement. Ahead of me two riders came into earshot - the soft purr of their chains spinning
and the buzz of tires rolling against the damp pavement became clear, and when I looked up from
the road just ahead of my front tire, the riders finally came into view.
We climbed the remainder of the mountain road together, our paces and rhythms syncing
(though not quite matching) as we trailed and pulled each other for about the last mile. After what
felt like years and seconds, the final hundred feet of the climb appeared, illuminated by a lonesome
streetlight. In the span of inches the road pivoted towards the sky and the entire weight of the
mountain seemed to push against my progress. As I finally reached “the wall,” my pedals refused

17

to turn over one last time, and the snack I ate earlier to fuel the climb decided it was no longer
needed and promptly exited the way it came.
When I think of an aesthetic experience, I think of the way we experience the world through
our senses, and where/when/how those experiences bring us (feelings of) pleasure, satisfaction, or
wholeness. Aesthetic experiences implicate the material conditions and qualities of our world -
that is, the material(itie)s of our worlds. To be sure, not only can we not escape (our experiences
of) the material world, but life happens because of our material world. Dewey argues that in order
to live, our physical body - our materials and all of the organic systems and forms constituted by
these materials - must adjust to the material environment external to it, and that “the career and
destiny of a living being are bound up with its interchanges with its environment…in the most
intimate way.”
20

If you live in a city like Los Angeles or New York, your material surroundings are made
of a lot of concrete. We do not tend to think of concrete as a particularly beautiful material, let
alone our experiences of concrete as aesthetic. But when you combine the artistic tendency to
search for and draw out the aesthetic experiences of our lives, even our encounters with concrete
can become interesting, compelling, beautiful. Buchanan’s earlier works draw from her experience
of and interest in New York and New Jersey’s “urban walls when they are in various stages of
decay,” (as the concept of frustulation posits, they are always in these stages) and “walls as part
of the landscape.”
21
Intrigued so much so by these concrete forms as she encountered them in her
daily commutes and movements through(out) the city, Buchanan created these aesthetic
encounters with concrete walls into her home through her art practice.

20
Dewey, 1934: 12
21
Buchanan, 1978.

18

To be in the presence of Buchanan’s frustula sculptures is to feel a slight unease and
ambivalence about the sculptures and your experience of/with them. During our education about
the Ruins and Rituals retrospective, even my cohort of docents at the Brooklyn Museum were
confused by their inclusion in the exhibition, and the meaning of the show within the larger context
the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. These sculptures do not echo the
beautiful, vibrant, colorful objects that had previously been shown in the museum’s dedicated
feminist gallery; instead they are “stark, raw, a bit terrifying.”
22
Why would anyone want to
experience New York City’s drab walls inside the hallowed halls of fine art? Is this not where we
come to escape that very concrete-ness?
The allure of Buchanan’s sculptures, as art historian and critic Andy Campbell puts it, is
precisely in their position in the “uncomfortable space between object and thing.”
23
Buchanan’s
Frustula do not, in fact, re-create city walls, but rather each sculpture marks a moment in time of
the artist’s intimate aesthetic engagement with the material(ity) of city walls. Her forms are not
final - they are iterative assemblages of concrete. They are derived from deep engagement with
and handling of a material that most others (including myself) would normally find dull,
unimportant, and constrictive.
Beverly Buchanan's work is a testimony to the artist's capacity to intimately engage with
the material(itie)s of her world and to find aesthetic experience in them. By her process of material
exploration and iteration, the artist pushes against the concepts we hold of the city and of art as an
object. Buchanan invites us to revel in the discomfort of experiencing her frustula work and the
landscapes they recall.

22
Waddell, 1985
23
Andrew Campbell, "'We're going to see blood on them next:' Beverly Buchanan's Georgia Ruins and Black
negativity," Rhizomes no. 29 (2016): ¶6.

19

Figure 6. (left) Beverly Buchanan, Frustula, n.d., concrete, Photograph Courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art;
(right) Image of Beverly Buchanan in her studio in Macon, Georgia, n.d., Photograph Courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives of
American Art

Riding a bike similarly resists the conceptualization of the city and forces riders to engage
intimately with the realities of its material(itie)s. When we abandon, even for a moment, our
understanding of “the city” and allow ourselves to experience and come to know it through its
material expressions, we can, like Buchanan, conjure new forms and modes of being with(in) our
landscapes. Theodor Adorno’s pedagogy of negative dialectics prompts us to do just this - to
“imaginatively re-create what has been obscured by the distortion of conceptualization.”
24
Klein’s
The History of Forgetting attests to the ease with which our concepts of “the city,” of Los Angeles

24
Bennet, 2010: 15.

20

in particular, are shaped by the popular and political stories which we tell and which we are told
about the city.
Throughout his book, Klein reinforces the claim that these stories - these concepts and
conceptualizations of the city - can be “utterly phantasmagorical,”
25
with little grounding in the
realities of the city as we each experience it. Rather than trying to define what the city is - largely
an effort of those who have a stake in this idea (politicians, planners, movie directors, agents of
tourism), it seems worthwhile to follow the lines of inquiry of artists and craftspeople - that is, to
see what the city (and its material(itie)s) can do and to “collaborate more productively with it.”
26

The degree to which a person must really engage with that material world - with concrete,
and other materials of the city (largely plastics nowadays, along with steel, aluminum, and other
metals)
27
- varies immensely. Riding a bike in the city places the rider in an over-proximate
relationship with the urban landscape and other people. Our material - our bodies, bikes - is
exposed to the city. But so is the landscape closer to us. And this closeness opens an opportunity
for the rider to observe/experience/learn/engage the city in intimate sensory, mechanical, and
cognitive ways. Riding a bike wholly engages and exercises our senses as we experience and learn
the city’s landscapes.
Though sensory proximity to the world inevitably brings us into closer proximity to its
repellent/unpleasant aspects, we are also brought closer to the world’s beauties. As geographer
Yi-Fu Tuan observes, "the more attuned we are [to] the beauties of the world, the more we come
to life and take joy in it."
28
Riding renders the city in vivid, vital realness because it puts us in

25
Klein, 1997: 2.
26
Bennet, 2010: 60.
27
Think about how many times a day you touch a plastic or a metal throughout your day, as opposed to organic
materials.
28
Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics Nature and Culture (Chicago: Island Press, 2013): 1.

21

touch - literally - with the city. But touch is not only receptive. "Touch, unlike other senses,
modifies its object. It reminds us that we are not only observers of the world but actors in it."
29

How boring it must be to be a driver, to be out of touch with the city, limited to the roads and
highways set out for you, passing through the city as if it were any city, because it could be, because
that is the goal of the car. To make the spaces you travel between your destinations all the same,
because the only space you are actually in, is your car.

29

Tuan, 2013: 46.

22

Chapter Four: Materiality an Movement: on the feeling of riding
It might have been the first time we rode together, on a summer morning in 2020. The Ride
for Black Lives was waiting for the last few riders to roll through before we started on their 30-ish
mile loop from Mid-City out to Santa Monica and back. Jesi was in high spirits, as they always
seem to be when they’re in motion. Jesi loves to dance, and I knew this, but I was so dazzled and
a little jealous when Jesi powered on their speaker (secured to their bike where a water bottle
should be), and began to dance their way to the beach, their bike and body coalescing into one
flow-finding machine, the city coming alive as the music rolled by, laying out the biggest roving
dancefloor you’ve ever seen.
Since this first ride together, I have learned to dance; and with the help of someone very
close to me, I have built a bike I never could have dreamed of. It's like a disco ball, it shines and
shimmers, reflecting/fragmenting/multiplying the city's lights. It so easily becomes an extension
of myself - I don't have to think about riding the same way I don't have to think about breathing
(except, in both cases, under tension). Even when my body and brain are so tired, if I can get on
my bike then I will find a flow or a groove - with(in) my body, the city, the music - and riding
becomes the way my body should move (it also helps that as someone with poor hand-eye
coordination, my feet and hands need only stay in one place). And when that feeling/experience is
combined with the puzzle and skill of navigating through the urban landscape, I believe it is an
incredible way to be in the city.
In thinking about dance and why there is always energy for it, choreographer and scholar
Susan Leigh Foster describes "the willing responsiveness of the body to the experience of being
in relation, whether with the music, with another person, with the environment, or even with one's

23

whole self."
30
The experience of riding in the city is the same - despite the ache/exhaustion of
mundanity, the feeling of riding energizes. Regenerative in nature, the feeling of riding is the
feeling of finding/learning/creating rhythms and connections between and within our bodies and
environments, with bicycle locomotion - movement - as the node in which they converge.
My own exploration into the relationship between materiality and our movement builds on
theories of “materiality that allow for a focus on how action intersects with materials to produce
new spaces of meaning.”
31
“Flow” is key to finding elation, satisfaction, and connection - that is,
to having an aesthetic experience - when riding a bike in the city. Flow refers, broadly, to a
“frictionless power, the exercise of which generates a sense of being fully alive - fully aware of
one's own movement and of one's environment."
32
Flow is not unique to bike riding, nor to
dancing, but rather is a feeling and a state of being in relation which results from the “merging of
action and attention.”
33
Flow, along with groove (the urge to move), inhabits the rider, allowing,
even necessitating, the release of the self-construct, while simultaneously heightening the rider’s
psychosomatic, spatial awareness of the feeling of their body and the spaces they move through.
People on bicycles are subject to both pedestrian and vehicular flows because we move in
pedestrian and vehicular spaces, and because those same spaces leak into and obstruct our own
(bike lanes mostly). This is all to say that from the perspective of a bicycle, the innate flow of the
city is created in the clashing and interweaving of chaotic vortices of movement. And if the flow
of the city is indeed vortexual, then streets for cars and sidewalks for pedestrians and bike lanes

30

Susan Leigh Foster, “Why is there always energy for dancing?,” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 3 (December
2016): 15.

31
Amelia Jones, "Material Traces: Performativity, Artis "Work," and New Concepts of Agency," in The Drama
Review 59, no. 4. (Winter 2015): 21.
32

Tuan, 2013: 38.

33

Foster, 2016: 16.

24

for bikes - linear spaces for movement - force us to cross the spirals head-on and exacerbate the
resistance and tensions we feel in our movements.
But bikes offer a remedy to the linear organization of the city’s infrastructures; integral to
every bike (perhaps even considered as the heart of a bike) are two pedals attached by two arms to
an axle - also called the crankset. To activate the bike, a rider must spin this mechanism - they
must pedal the bike. Through this cyclical activation the rider creates their very own vortex at the
heart of the bike, and activates two vortexes at the anterior and posterior of the bike (the wheels).
With this trinity of vortexual motion, riders can more readily ebb and flow with the vortexes of the
city. However, the ebbs and flows of and within the landscape do not align with the linear
organization of the city’s infrastructures; riding in these flows often creates tensions between riders
and users who remain within the city’s linear organization.
Tension - or rather proper tensioning - is integral to making a bike go, and to finding
balance or harmony within our environments. Even Dewey notes that “equilibrium comes about
not mechanically and inertly, but out of, and because of, tension.”
34
Johnny, a skilled bike
mechanic and a good friend of mine, is a master at working with and through tensions to achieve
a fluid and rhythmic wholeness. To watch Johnny bring a bike from disrepair and fragmentation
to a state of cooperative motion is truly a wonder. Using his senses of sight, hearing, and touch,
Johnny adjusts the tensions between the multitudinous parts of the bike and draws out connections
where previously there was only dissonance. Under Johnny’s mentorship I continue to learn the
skill and importance of tensioning; this lesson is crucial to my own navigation of and relationship
with the city and riding a bike in it.

34
Dewey, 1934: 13.

25

Tension is felt most acutely at the city's various intersections. Traffic lights and stop signs
run through their rhythms in an attempt to create order where people and vehicles must cross
chaotic paths. There is immense tension at Los Angeles intersections as drivers, pedestrians,
bicyclists, and everyone in-between wait for their turn to cross a concrete and asphalt threshold.
Some choose to defy the ominous order of traffic laws and right of way, too often with fatal results.
The hybrid position and perspective of people on bikes open up spacetimes which offer some relief
from the anguish of idling in the city's synchronized pauses. Cars may not always have the room
or directional knowledge to circumnavigate the city's congested intersections, and pedestrians
typically lack the speed to do so effectively and safely.
Because of our size, position on the road, and range of speed, managing an intersection on
a bicycle
35
requires splitting one's perception beyond ourselves to include the myriad
drivers/vehicles and pedestrians with whom we are about to cross paths.
36
Approaching an
intersection from all of these angles at once "creates a split in awareness that can lead to the ability
to control perception." Once a rider understands how to apply this ability in the moments they
encounter an intersection, they can vision and move in the space(s) between the splits in
perceptions "to a space that simultaneously exists and does not exist."
37

This experience of moving through subjectivities and perspectives, in my experience,
echoes my own experience of gender fluidity and hybridity. Indeed, my own queernes helps me to
understand the ways riders embody hybrid and responsive subjectivities when visioning and
moving through the city’s spaces-between, and especially the space(s) between cars and their

35
This applies to a rider approaching an intersection from the road more so than from the sidewalk; on the sidewalk
there is some deferment of speed for the benefit of safety. As bikes are vehicles, bikes are supposed to defer to the
pedestrian right of way in pedestrian spaces.
36
Drivers and pedestrians have less choice and less capacity to appropriate each others spaces because their sizes and
speeds are so incompatible. .
37
Anzaldua, 2015: 28.

26

infrastructures. Riding in the city requires a simultaneous hyperawareness and releasing/opening
of the self (both the ego and the material body). Our bodies and bikes amalgamate into one fluid
machine, both acting as an extension of one another. When I ride my bike, the primacy of myself
at once heightens and dissipates; the problems of my body, of my way of being and being
perceived, are irrelevant because I am no longer attached to my own stasis and knowability. I move
through landscapes - material, social, psychological - fused with my bike, able to vision and project
myself into new spaces because ‘myself’ is essentially hybrid, responsive, and dynamic.
The subjective and physical frustulation that a person experiences while riding a bike in
the city creates space(s) that are not voids, but rather openings in spacetimes. To see these spaces,
a rider must widen or open their visual field of the street throughout time (this becomes easier and
more accurate with experience and practice). When a rider can vision these spaces as they are in
the present, have been in the past, and likely will be in the future, they can predict when and where
different openings in spacetime will occur (again, experience and practice yield better results). If
we can approach these intersections as Anzaldua's nepantla space (both ideologically and
physiologically), then we become more aware of the connective tissue that creates breathing forms
in the frustules of the city. Exercising those vital connections in our movements, "we undergo the
anguish of changing our perspectives and crossing a series of cruz calles, junctures, and thresholds,
some leading to a different way of relating to people and surroundings and others to the creation
of a new world."
38

Until very recently, I have always felt a deep chasm between myself and other people. It
was not that people did not "see" or "understand" me. Actually, in hindsight I believe many of the
people closest to me throughout my life have seen and understood me better than I could myself.

38
Anzaldua, Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro, 17.

27

No, it was more like there was nothing holding it all together - myself, my relationships and
meaningful connections. For a decade I stayed in cycles of various self-harms and abuses hoping
to force those connections, including the denial of my sexuality and the nature of my gender. In
many ways, Beverly Buchanan and riding a bike (in that order) articulated to me the corporeal
languages of fragmentation - of frustulation.
As much as these languages are about fragments they are also about the connections
between them which create cohesive, dynamic, and vital wholes. Think about it: neuron
connections create our psyche(s) and the electricity that runs between these connections generates
and activates our entire bodies; even more than that, whole worlds of imaginings, memories,
knowings, wonderings live in these connections. Art and movement teach me how to find points
of connection through the body, and I continue to experience the satisfaction, pleasure, and joy of
embodied connection. In the process of connecting the pieces, I learn how to move through the
world, held together, dynamic and vital.

28

Chapter Five: Materiality and time: muscle memory
In the digital age, we have such an overload of information, and new information
(im)materializes so rapidly that we quickly move on and forget (details, information, stories). This
general social forgetfulness applies to spatial experiences and histories. As neighborhoods, homes,
and the people who live in them are pushed out, pushed elsewhere, or otherwise disappeared, the
city and those who plan it are quick to replace the memories and remaining outposts of these spaces
and people. Our collective tendency to forget further amplifies the impacts. I believe that cars play
as integral a role to this forgetting as we have come to accept digital technologies play. Klein points
out that over the course of nearly 30 years starting in roughly 1933, over 200,000 cars (not counting
passengers in cars) passed by the bulldozing of neighborhoods situated just west of downtown Los
Angeles.
39

In an appendix to his book, Klein lays out a theory of social forgetting which he calls
simultaneous distraction. Distraction itself happens in the “quiet instant when one imago [the
idealized image of a person, or in this specific context, a place] covers over another.” Klein
complicates psychoanalytic theories of distraction with two simultaneous operations of the mind:
first, that “in order to remember, something must be forgotten,” and second, that “the place where
memories are stored has no boundaries.”
40
Klein locates memory and remembering (and by
extension forgetting) only in the mind and on the screen. I would argue that simultaneous
distraction is primarily a function of cognintive memory - both the making of memories (cognitive
experiences) and the act of remembering them. In contrast, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan offers us a
much more engaged and active locus of memory - in the physical body and the “close” senses.

39
Klein, The History of Forgetting, 3.
40
Klein, The History of Forgetting, 13.

29

Tuan provides us with some explanation for the passivity of Klein’s forgetful automobile
passengers: “on the modern thoroughfare there is no contact, for each person (or each small group
of persons) is encased in a motorized metal box.”
41
Cars cut off our sensory engagement with our
surroundings. To remember our experiences of our surroundings - and by extension to create and
draw on knowledges of them - we must rely on the instantaneous mental images we may capture
and the concepts (including stories) we hold of our surroundings.
It could be said that a person on a bike is primarily engaged with their bike as a vehicle
and secondarily with their environment but this would be a misguided argument. A person on a
bike is simultaneously engaged with the vehicle of the bike and with the environment; this is a
result of the physical proximity and exposure/vulnerability to the environment, as well as the
activation of our senses through movement. For this reason, first learning to ride a bike in a city is
disorienting and overwhelming because of the immediacy with which a rider encounters and
manages their vehicle, their body, and their environment at the same time. In contrast, because a
car encapsulates its occupants, drivers and passengers lack that immediate exposure and
vulnerability to the environment which warrants immediate attention. The automobile metropolis
of which Los Angeles is intended to be a shining pinnacle thrives on this ambivalence towards the
city's spaces by those who use and occupy them.
When pressured for alternative options to cars for moving throughout the city, planners,
their collaborators, and their investors rely on our collective forgetfulness so that we do not
remember their failures nor the successes of people who exist in contrast or opposition to what the
city "should" be. I believe that riding a bike resists and complicates the persistent censure and
erasure of spatialized community histories. Through movement and continual engagement with

41
Tuan, 1990: 175.

30

in-between spacetimes (conceptualized earlier as manifestations/iterations of Anzaldua’s nepantla
space), people on bikes tell innumerable, infinitesimal stories of the urban landscape. These
stories activate a body of knowledge of the city - an embodied knowledge that I will refer to from
here on as muscle memory.
Muscle memory operates similarly to the Greek mētis, a sort of ancient wisdom and craft
which Michel de Certeau describes, and can even be thought of as an embodied iteration of mētis.
Muscle memory is a knowledge "composed of many moments,”
42
variable elements, objects, and
subjects, and the even more varying relationships between all of them. Whereas the “person who
‘sees’ is an onlooker, a sightseer, someone otherwise not involved with the scene,” the information
available to the person who “perceives the world through all [their] senses simultaneously” is
“immense.”
43
Even in the “aimless playing” with their material world, Tuan argues, a child
develops knew understandings of their world.
44
To ride a bike is to play with movement and our
environment - that is to play with the material(ity) of our bodies and our landscapes, and form new
understandings of and connections between them (ourselves, our landscapes, and their
material(itie)s).
Material(itie)s - material qualities and our experiences of/with them - contain and express
knowledges of deep times. Beverly Buchanan’s body of concrete sculptures demonstrates how
materialities succumb to, transcend and reverberate through spacetimes, and the potential for
material processes to activate sites of embodied memory. As I laid out in the previous section,
movement (obviously, in this case, riding a bike) engages and cultivates our relation to and with
material(itie)s (of the body, of the city). By experiencing (the material(itie)s of) the city again and

42
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984): 82.
43
Tuan, 1990: 10.
44
Tuan, 1990: 12.

31

again, we agglomerate these experiences into knowledges of the city through shifting spacetimes.
Through movement, we activate the memories contained and expressed within our bodies - we
relive our knowledges of ourselves and the world around us to form connections with the present
moment and create new meanings.
Riding a bike, particularly as a group, enacts and activates memory and creates memorial
space. To be clear, this section is not about monuments - if we were to erect a monument to every
person, home, community who was lost to the city (by driver violence and indifference; by real
estate development and gentrification; by the police and the carceral system), we would have only
a city of monuments. Though important to creating spaces of mourning and remembrance, over
long time I believe monuments are ineffective at helping us to remember, celebrate, and mourn the
everyday people and places we lose. Without activation, monuments do not provide means for us
to move on, to find new ways to navigate the spaces left behind by passings and takings. As our
psyco-environmental landscapes rupture, fracture, and deteriorate, how and what can we
create/grow in the spaces? How can the memory of what is past/passed/passing be woven into and
made present within our daily landscapes?
Ghost bikes are memorials which mark the sites of riders' deaths. In the city, a ghost bike’s
bright white paint clashes with the various grays and browns of the city's detrital materials. But
over time, ghost bikes can be difficult to maintain, and they are vandalized, pillaged; they
deteriorate. Echoing Beverly Buchanan’s sculptural works during her time in Macon, Georgia,
ghost bikes deteriorate from monuments to ruins as they succumb to the city's detritus and are
pillaged for their parts. Whereas Buchanan’s frustula emphasize the connections between

32

fragments as a means to create new forms, her later ruins emphasize the “triangulated connections
between historical trauma, building practices, and landscape.”
45

The material(itie)s of Buchanan’s Georgia ruins - comprised specifically of three major,
public works, as well as her more intimate forms and practices - recall and indeed recreate
material(itie)s of bodies and spaces associated with chattel slavery and the slave-labor economy
of Macon, Georgia. Whether through the laborious process of grinding and mixing oyster shells,
lime, and sand to create tabby, a material used widely in the construction of plantation dwellings
(labor carried out by people enslaved by white landowners), or through the ritual searching for

45
Campbell, "’We're going to see blood on them next:' Beverly Buchanan's Georgia Ruins and Black negativity,
¶41
Figure 7. The ghost bike placed by Danny Gamboa and other Ghost Bike Volunteers to honor Frederick “Woon” Frazier’s
memory. Woon was struck and killed by a driver on Manchester Blvd in 2018. © Sahra Sulaiman/Streetsblog L.A

33

forgotten graveyards of enslaved people, Buchanan’s Georgia ruins embed “the unrecoverable, the
unknowable, and the simply forgotten” into her practice.
46

Buchanan’s interventions into and with the landscape contain within them the artist’s
knowledge and experiences of the Black south's historical traumas and their persistent legacies,
particularly where those legacies are encountered in the landscape (the material world). Her work
points to “the long history of racial supremacy and its attendant practice of disappearing black
brown bodies in the South,” and the ambivalence (in some cases the activation and manipulation)
of the southern landscape towards its histories of disappearing and forgetting.
47
Buchanan’s
practice can serve as a model for engaging with our own racialized landscapes, particularly where
the continuing legacies and iterations of chattel slavery, American imperialism, and white
supremacy materialize within these landscapes.
I will briefly draw out some of the connections of these legacies and iterations to our
present concern (that is, riding a bike in Los Angeles). The choices, on the part of the city, to
prioritize and cater to private automobile travel, is directly informed by the white-supremacist-

46
Campbell, "’We're going to see blood on them next:' Beverly Buchanan's Georgia Ruins and Black negativity, ¶35.
47
Ibid, ¶35.
Figure 9. Beverly Buchanan, Marsh Ruins, concrete
and tabby, 1981. (Marshes of Glynn, Brunswick, GA).
© Beverly Buchanan. Photo courtesy of Andrew
Campbell

Figure 8. Beverly Buchanan, Marsh Ruins today, concrete and
tabby, 1981. (Marshes of Glynn, Brunswick, GA). © Beverly
Buchanan. Photo courtesy of Andrew Campbell

34

capitalist-patriarchy. One of the earliest examples of modern planning in the United States is, in
fact, the planning and organization of living quarters for enslaved, imprisoned, and captive people.
This planning is culpable in redlining and responsible for the creation of the freeway system, for
which planners and developers (not entirely the same but not entirely different) displaced and
bulldozed through the communities of Black, Brown, and other racialized peoples. The American
capitalist proclivity for oil, the exploitation of migrant and working class communities for their
labor, and the policing and incarceration of Black and Brown peoples, have all enabled the City of
Los Angeles to build their automobile metropolis.
At the risk of naive optimism, I would like to insert into this ominous narrative a mode of
moving forward which is embedded in our embodied memory of the past. Through her ritualistic,
material practices, Beverly Buchanan activated spaces as sites of remembrance. The artist’s
activation of spaces through material - artistic - practice resists the ambivalence of our
forgetfulness. Her work is testament to
the potential for us to activate memory
by engaging - intimately and creatively
- with the material(ities) of our
landscapes, and for the potential for this
activation to reverberate through time
and space. When the daily monuments
we build in remembrance of the people
who others will never know of fall into
disrepair, where do we go, what do we do, to grieve and to celebrate, as individuals and together?
We ride.
Figure 10. A group ride with the bike club Chief Lunes, through the
streets of L.A. Woon Frazier is in the center, on the bike with red bar
tape. © Harold Cerda and Bicycling.com

35

Chapter Six: Conclusion: How riders create the city
The manner of riding a bike dealt with in this thesis resists the “logical organization”
48
of
the city; it is visceral, instantaneous, instinctual, and chaotic. Riding in the spaces-between of the
city is rarely the safest way to ride, and in fact it often requires flagrantly violating traffic laws and
disrupting the flow of traffic. However, riders ingeniously appropriate an urban landscape
(specifically here, but not exclusively generally, Los Angeles) that has been intentionally designed
to subdue our relationships with the materiality of the city, its spacetimes and other subjects.
I recently saw an ad on some entertainment streaming platform for Safelite's windshield
replacement services. The main character, a young-professional-esque woman, tells you all about
how her drive home from work is her "me time," her time to decompress after the stresses of work
and busy life. I understand, and have experienced as a driver, how cars do lend their occupants a
certain anesthesia to the world around them. Drivers and passengers are encased in their cars, their
only direct contact with the world around them rendered to their distant senses of sight and sound
(which are muffled and obstructed anyway, to the point where sight assist devices are
commonplace in personal vehicles). The word itself, anesthetic, means without feeling - "the
condition of living death."
49

I think this is a fitting description for the nature of cars - machines of living death. That
would make car culture the culture of living death, and a city which prioritizes and glorifies cars
and the associated culture... a city of living death. And we do most certainly live in this city.
Drivers and their cars resign to their scripted pathways (even if it is a violent resignation) and they
generate nothing but potholes and pollution. Vehicular travel reiterates the city, engrains and

48
de Certeau, 1984: 91.

49

Tuan, 2013: 1.

36

erodes its streets into the earth. In the automobile city, time and motion stand still. They lag and
halt as battalions of drivers descend on highways, freeways, and city roads, wasting in gridlock
and bumper to bumper traffic. Drivers are not made to engage with the landscape. Instead, drivers
are restricted to the paths laid down for them, their obtuse metal encasements further mediating,
dulling, and confining the city.
One notable exception to the zombie-ism of automobile supremacy actually comes from
within car culture itself - the lowrider. Lowriders are typically mid-century model cars that have
been customized with hydraulic jacks, which allow the car to be lowered almost completely to the
ground, or suspended high above the normal lift of a car. These lifts and lowers can be
asymmetrical and are manipulated by drivers to create a sort of vehicular dance. Another mark of
the lowrider is the brilliantly painted and decorated interiors and exteriors - each vehicle is a work
of art both in its design and its operation. Born out of Chicano and Black cultures and aesthetics
in Los Angeles, lowriders subvert automobile supremacy by prioritizing the aesthetic experience
of driving. “Low and slow” is the motto of the lowriders, who even today bring their mobile works
of art to shows, parades, and caravans every week around the city.
Choreographer, writer, and composer d. Sabela Grimes speaks to the influence of
lowriders to his own movement practices - the way lowriders (both the people and the cars) tap
into, create, and play with the rhythms and flows of the city (called “hitting switches”), and the
way their aesthtics push against the dreary gray and smog of automobile supremacy.
50
It should
also be noted that there is an unsurprising intersection of lowrider culture and bicycles. Beach
cruisers and other low-riding bikes are decked out with handlebars that swoop high like those
found on motorcycles, with intricately twisting frame tubes and bright paint jobs. Just as with

50
d. Sabela Grimes, interview with Jordan Gonzales, Race, Arts, Place 23, February 08, 2021. https://us11.campaign-
archive.com/?u=c86726e3dd3b76a51938d9383&id=bf0d4e3a5f

37

lowrider cars, the efficiency of lowrider bikes as modes of travel is secondary the to the aesthetic
experience of these bikes.
Rudimentary experiences of riding through the city on a bike could hardly be considered
aesthetic for most people. Much like Buchanan’s concrete forms, the bikways around Los Angeles
are in a constant state of decay and fragmentation. The fragmentation of pathways through(out)
the city is further amplified by the nature of these fragments as discards from car infrastructures.
Although the city may create new bikeways, they only become part of a network or a whole when
they are connected to and with each other. The fragments, in my experience of them, are largely
not connected - they are stuck in the stages of fragmentation and disorientation because they are
not designed to connect every-day users to the city, but rather to bring tourists (both local and not)
to areas of tourism and entertainment.
This is evidenced by the quantity and connectedness of bikeways around Dodger Stadium,
the Banc of California Stadium, Beverly Hills and the various shopping districts of the West Side,
and Santa Monica and Venice beaches, in contrast with the stark lack of such infrastructures in
areas identified through Vision Zero’s High Injury Network. Only through riders’ movements and
enactments of conocimientos is the cycle of frustulation rounded out - we create connections
between the fragments and bring whole forms and pathways into being. Without our action within
and activation of the fragments, the city’s pathways would be left to fall apart.
I certainly do not deny that bike lanes are important for the safe passage of people on bikes
- most riders, even if they spacetime bend, are not what the city would consider the “strong and
fearless” type; bike lanes are designed to accommodate those people on bikes who typically ride
under favorable or less resistive conditions, those who “perceive significant barriers…with

38

regards to traffic and safety,”
51
as well as those riders who may be more confident in their
capacities to manage the road but will still prefer to use designated bikeways. My problem with
bike ways and bike lanes is certainly not that they exist, but that they are vehemently ineffective at
preventing dangerous behaviors and uses of these spaces by cars.
Bikeways exist in and as spaces formerly designed for cars, and the material(itie)s of bike
lanes are the same as those of automobile infrastructures. Bike lanes pop up where there used to
be a shoulder lane for cars, or as the extension of what is very clearly the gutter between the curb
and the road. A bike lane is set apart from the road much in the same way a shoulder lane is set
apart from the main lanes of traffic (though maybe a bike line is filled in with green paint, or maybe
it has a figure of bike on it at some intervals).
“Protected” bike lanes employ plastic parking stops, concrete barriers, road paint, and even
parked cars to create space for the movement of bikes. Without specific markings (painted or
posted symbols, words) noting the space as for bikes, the material existence of these spaces is no
different than or separate from that of spaces for cars. If a driver encounters a space for bikes but
does not see the notative symbols (as they often do not notice), then what about these spaces does
not appear as for cars. Infrastructures and pathways for people on bikes do not actually meet the
needs of people on bikes because these infrastructures are concessions and remnants of spaces and
materials designed to accommodate cars.
Those who have the power to organize 'the city' do so with a disengaged/distanced
perspective.
52
But the lived experience of the city is not static in the way that the city (and life in
it) is rendered. The decision making process of city planning is largely removed from the present

51
Los Angeles County Bicycle Master Plan, Appendix F: Design Guidelines, 2012: 11.
52

de Certeau, 1984: 91-94.

39

moment of the city, working towards how the city ought to be rather than the reality of its forms
and operations. Riders may be able to call for or catalyze changes to the design of the city, but
rarely do we, the riders, have the chance to make decisions about the form and function of that
infrastructure.
Our capacity to engage with and intervene into the processes and systems of the city (and
its physicality), as well as the decisions about all of them, is limited (by the government and its
enforcements) to codified input at town hall meetings, community engagement workshops, and
design charrettes. Riders at once defy and create the city through their interaction with and
activation of the city's spaces-between. In as much as the spaces between comics frames allow
readers to employ their imaginations to participate - and collaborate - in the action of stories,
53

riding a bike opens opportunities to participate and collaborate in the action(s) and movement(s)
of the city.
Jane Jacobs points out that "it is futile to plan a city's appearance, or speculate on how to
endow it with the pleasing appearance of order, without knowing what sort of innate, functioning
order it has."
54
City planning in Los Angeles generally follows a linear perspective - on growth,
money, time, resources. The models and tools at the disposal of people attempting to organize the
city do not account for the vortexes of chaos that naturally appear when people live in such high
densities and close proximities. Anzaldua describes these chaotic vortexes as characterizing
nepantla, and representing "temporal, spatial, psychic, and intellectual point(s) of crisis" that we
encounter at transitional moments in our personal and social lives.
55
I want to understand how we
can construct urban landscapes, and experiences within them, so that peoples’ capacity to act with

53

McCloud, 1994:65-69.

54
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961): 14.
55
Anzaldua. 2015: 245.

40

agency when our spacetimes become chaotic, and to actively participate in the city outside of its
official organization is considered, cultivated, and even prioritized.
Riding in the city is a skill - arguably an art of which there are many styles, and disciplines
- that a rider cultivates through experience. The ability to create closure between spaces-between
is necessary to the successful movement of the rider through the city, because the gaps in bicycle
infrastructure are so frequent and sizable. The art and skill of riding in the spaces-between is
necessary; riders connect the pieces of the city together when and where bicycle infrastructure fails
to make those connections.
Notwithstanding getting lost, riders know how to orient themselves in the city’s chaotic
and momentary spaces between (and I suppose getting lost and finding your way are almost the
same thing). Riders orient themselves to the city and to its subjects, creating and collapsing spaces
and pathways between them. Los Angeles, the automobile city, is not short on crisis, contradiction,
and tension. Riders in the city learn to move in all of that, creating spaces to move where they
never were supposed to be, and creating pathways and connections between and throughout the
city that otherwise never would have existed.

41

Bibliography
Anzaldua, Gloria. Light in the dark/luz in lo oscuro: rewriting identity, sexuality, reality. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2015.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press,
2010.

Buchanan, Beverly. Wall Fragments - Series Cast in Cement, artist statement for Truman Gallery,
1978.

Campbell, Andrew. "'We're going to see blood on them next:' Beverly Buchanan's Georgia Ruins
and Black negativity." Rhizomes no. 29 (2016). https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e05

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles. University of California Press,
1984.

Dewey, John.
Art as expereince. New York: Perigee, 1934.
The Public and its Problems. New York: Henry Holt, 1927.

Foster, Susan Leigh. "Why is there always energy for dancing?" Dance Research Journal 48, no.
3 (December 2016). 12 – 26

Grimes, d. Sabela. Interview with Jordan Gonzales. Race, Arts, Place, 23. February 08, 2021.
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=c86726e3dd3b76a51938d9383&id=bf0d4e3a5f

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.

Jones, Amelia. "Material Traces: Performativity, Artis "Work," and New Concepts of Agency."
The Drama Review 59, no. 4. (Winter 2015): 18-35.

Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory. New York:
Verso, 1997.

McArthur, Park, and Jennifer Burris Staton. Beverly Buchanan: 1978 - 1981. Mexico City:
Athénée Press, 2015.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics : the Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994

Race, Arts, Place. RAP USC Guide: to our network, values and modes of practice, May 2022.

Tuan, Yi-Fu.
Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics Nature and Culture. Chicago: Island Press,
2013.

42

Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990.

Waddell, Edward W. “Life… ain’t been no crystal stair.” Atlanta Art Papers
(November/December 1985): 13-16.

Asset Metadata

Creator Gonzales, Jordan (author)

Core Title SpaceTime travelers: on riding a bike in the city

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts / Master of Planning

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 12/15/2022

Defense Date 12/14/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abstract minimalism,active mobility transportation,art,art and the city,art criticism,beverly buchanan,Bicycle,chaos theory,city,critical theory,Gloria Anzaldúa,interdisciplinary,Landscape,liminal,materiality,Nepantla,oai:digitallibrary.usc.edu:usctheses,OAI-PMH Harvest,Urban planning,yi fu tuan

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Advisor Lin, Jenny (committee chair), Campbell, Andy (committee member), Kim, Annette (committee member)

Creator Email jordanegonzo@gmail.com,jordang1@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112620978

Unique identifier UC112620978

Identifier etd-GonzalesJo-11384.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-GonzalesJo-11384

Document Type Thesis

Format theses (aat)

Rights Gonzales, Jordan

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20221216-usctheses-batch-998 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email uscdl@usc.edu

Abstract (if available)

Abstract My thesis focuses on one of many antidotes to privatized automobile supremacy. My thesis is about riding a bike in the city - how it feels, how it engages the body and mind, how it brings the rider into relation with the urban landscape and other people. To explore and understand the experience of riding a bike, and the implications of this experience in how we approach and navigate the city, I turn to artists. Art and artists present us with objects/moments/spaces to probe, deal with, and understand the social, political, and personal conditions of contemporary life. I believe that the role of art and artists in creating and intervening in the (urban) landscape, and urban processes, is not limited to “beautification.” By entering into conversations with artists and their works, and by understanding their processes and concerns, we can better create meaning and connection within our experiences of the city, as well as vision and imagine pathways to navigate through it.