"Rerouting" is one definition of the French, "détournement" offered by Wikipedia. Literal translations reveal, "misappropriation" and "diversion". There is also the more dramatic, "hijacking" (détournement d'avion). I like all of those definitions; they tickle my fancy. And I think Jack Drummer liked them, too.
Before we get to Jack, I'd like to mention Guy. Guy Debord was a member of the Situationists International, a group of artists and activists in France in the 1950's who got a lot of their ideas from the Dadaists and from the "flaneurs" (meanderers - this really doesn't look like a real word, by the way, but I looked it up to make sure. This phenomenon of possible not-word just might serve my point later on, or it might not) of the 19th Century. Guy started "altering" common images, such as advertisements, to give them entirely new meanings (or no meanings whatsoever), and called this process, "détournement". It was a big hit with his fellow artists, and fit right in with their slightly over-processed wandering. Really, the Situationists were a bunch of people who got lost on purpose, and then thought about what that did to their brains, and then expressed these thoughts through (mainly subversive) art, to see if they could get anyone else "lost" as well. Some people don't like to enter the funhouse without their knowledge, and some do, so there was, predictably, a mixed reaction to the shenanigans.
And Jack Drummer. I'm certain he was not a Situationist, but he was an artist from Buffalo, NY. Specifically, he was a painter, and a person who did things his way, all the way, all the time. His paintings were (are) scary and beautiful - giant sheets of textured rubber tacked to wood, horny and clawed and topographical and prehistoric; maps of landscapes seen only by things with carapaces. Some seemed to be the "dream-tracks" of Australia, but not the ones painted by people; they were the horizon made real by the I Am.
Jack was also what could only be called, not prettily, the Town Drunk. Every night started at one of his favorite bars, and from there he would get very lost. Someone always arrived on the scene as his escort, usually almost as drunk as he was, and, for better or for worse, he and his guide would put down their prints through this magic city, and eventually to his bed safe and sound. Every night Jack would let the Universe take over, or maybe it was his way all along, who knows? Anyway, one night Jack ended up at a performance of a play by our avant-garde theater collective. We performed all of our plays euphemistically as "theater-in-the-round", which really meant, "theater-in-your-lap". So there slouched Jack, inches away from the actors, beer in hand. Sitting opposite him as my character, I had full view of his face as his eyes went suddenly wide, and he plaintively wailed, "How did I get here?!" Apart from the stuffed silence that followed as we all tried not to laugh, there was a poignancy, that from-the-mouths-of-babes significance that drunks somehow manage. Jeez, really, how did we all get here, in this room together, right now? How did we find this, and is it really a destination?
We've all heard the saying, "Not all who wander are lost". Well, actually, we are, and to say otherwise makes us look a little like the angry eight-year-old girl in the playground stamping her foot and shouting, "I meant to do that!" Maybe it would be more accurate to say, "I'm ok with being lost", or, "Am I ok with being lost, rerouted, diverted, hijacked, even?"
In Australia, the way the Aboriginal people traverse huge spans of the desert interior is to sing the songs the Ancients sang to create the earth, thereby following the birth of the land to get across it safely. In psychology, this is called "cognitive mapping"; building a map of significant landmarks in one's head in order to find one's way from point A to point B. The thing is, a cognitive map almost never looks like the actual place it represents. So, what exactly are we creating in our heads when we make this type of map? Maybe it's actually the real place. Maybe it's not even close, but we have to trust we'll get there eventually. Or maybe, as we walk, we create the world with every step.
Rebecca Solnit, who wrote a book called, Wanderlust, says this, " Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord." And throw in some Thoreau (say that three times, fast), "Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see."
So, what does this have to do with bicycles, you ask, and being on or off them, or weird art movements from France? I really don't know (and I came really close to making one of those nice ladies in the photos into a chicken on a bicycle). All I know is that for me, the same magic that occurs when walking also happens on a bike, and that it just might be a glimpse of pure creative energy. It's also nice to share these things sometimes, and there will be product reviews! Thank you for visiting, and feel free to share your thoughts as well.
