Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

3. Provincial Cosmopolitanism

63 3 Provincial Cosmopolitanism Circuits of Value An important symptom of the infrastructural refashioning of contemporary Indian cities is the increasing obsolescence or outright prohibition of those modes of transportation and use of streets and sidewalks that had contributed to the visuality and texture of these cities in the second half of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan urban visions appear incommensurate with the pace, rhythm, and spatial needs of bicycles, cycle-rickshaws, and hawkers on the streets of the global metropolis. They survive only when detached from the domain of labor and inserted in the space of leisure: gyms, sports tracks, and museums. Contemporary artists have become fascinated with artifacts of obsolete infrastructure: forms of transportation that were until recently considered the most democratic and progressive signs on the streets of India and China. Bicycles, cycle-rickshaws, and vehicular art as ghosts of infrastructures past have come to populate art galleries, forging new familiarities and cosmopolitan alliances. In February 2009 the Tinguely Museum in Basel hosted an exhibition of nineteen Chinese tricycles, “unaltered” with their original wares, next to the work of fourteen artists who were commissioned to rethink Chinese bicycles (tricycles) by transforming fourteen of these “neutral” and “empty” examples. The bicycle was the metaphor of modernity in twentieth-century China. For those in the third world, it was the ultimate symbol of a functioning socialist infrastructure.1 The obsolescence of the bicycle with the burgeoning number 64 Provincial Cosmopolitanism of private automobiles on the streets of China is the point of artistic intervention in the exhibition: In the 1970s, the bicycle was a status symbol in Chinese society. . . . Moreover, the owner of a bicycle had the opportunity to engage in trade and commerce. Tricycles served as mobile kitchens, for the transport of coal, as repair shops, stores or for the removal of refuse. . . . One does still see them, but not in great numbers, and bicycles now bear the stigma of a passing era.2 There are still vastly more bicycles than private automobiles in China, and China produces most of the world’s bicycles.3 Given the Chinese authorities’ goal to make room for the automobile on city streets by converting bike paths into automobile arteries, cycling to work is becoming increasingly difficult and outmoded. For the moment, though, it remains the mainstay of the working class in China. The exhibition purported to do more than treat the bicycles as emblems of a disappearing Chinese culture, however. The curators hoped these bicycles would create a new object language that is not the language of the marketplace. A critique of capitalist modernization, the exhibition designed to speak of the bicycle as a “metaphor of change” in China, perhaps unwittingly, generated contradictory messages. The dislocation of these bicycles from their original context was seen as a necessary move for creating a new object language, one that would enable the bicycles to “find their way into modernity.” Since the point of departure is the “frenetic pace of modernization” in China, the gesture of reintroducing the bicycles into modernity suggests a chasm between modernization and modernity , between economic imperative and cultural critique, between uncontrolled modernity in China and the manageable modernity in Europe. The latter retains room for the bicycle. It can restore the bicycle’s ur-significance as a modern artifact by reintroducing its salvaged remains into the path from which it had deviated , as if the symbolic value of modernity had eroded in China when bicycles became a mode of mass transportation, taken over by so many quotidian needs and desires, transformed into conduits of everyday transactions. Reconfigured, distended,shaped for uses they were originally not meant to support—cooking, eating, hauling load—they gathered particularities that bound them to a specific cultural setting. The difference between object and space, technology and practice , became all but obliterated as these bicycles and tricycles in China became part of the milieu, obtaining a status somewhere between a mobile workshop and a slow transport. Provincial Cosmopolitanism 65 The exhibition description suggests that it is the bicycles’ transplantation into the Western artistic realm and transformation through the artistic gaze that would restore their cosmopolitan “originality,” their frayed objectness, allowing cultural critique. The old and new bicycles produce two temporal loops as twin moves in secular sacralization. Market obsolescence is rejected by taking the authentic tricycles with their loads out of the circuit of common, profane use and inserting them into the circuit of...