As in Ber-Ner’s previous videos, the question of educating and civilizing within the family comes up, while it is unclear who, at the end of the day mimics whom – is the child following the adult, or vice versa. Ben-Ner is happy to join his children in ignoring the appropriate rules of conduct in the museum. However unlike his children, Ben-Ner’s antics aren’t merely playful, but rather functional and practical. Faced with the ready-mades Ben-Ner assumes a naïve position: rejecting the rules of the game that allow for a bicycle seat and handlebars to become Picasso’s bull’s head, he recognizes the original function of the ready-mades, and reinstates them in their designated roles, as he assembles a pair of bicycle with his children.
In the second part of the video the threesome take the bicycle for a ride outside the museum, embarking on a family adventure in the park. In this innocent journey a few unusual gestures are in dissonance with the pastoral atmosphere: the soundtrack (performed by Guy, Amir and Aliya Ben-Ner), as well as the LSD tablets and the artist’s flight from his children while riding his bicycle backwards. All these idiosyncrasies are in fact ready-mades of sorts, taken from Rodney Graham 2001 work phonokinetoscope, which in turn quotes Albert Hofmann LSD bicycle trip, as well as lines from Syd Barrett song Bike. What at first seems an escape from the appropriation and references of the Modernist ready-made to a more straight forward innocent area opens another chain of appropriations and references of the new bicycle gang.
Guy Ben-Ner (1969) born in Israel. Lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv.
The video was first exhibited earlier this year in Münster Sculpture Project, Germany. In Münster, a city known as “The City of Bicycle” the video was screened in monitors wired to the bicycles, and operating by the viewer’s pedaling. The pedaling gave the viewers control not only over the pace but even on the direction of the video, filmed in the streets of Münster.
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