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Bicycle Obelisk: New Highway Deities

August 25, 2010

In the heyday of Isis and Ra, obelisks were hot. Their pizazz has cooled over the last few millennia, but they’re still occasionally erected to honor someone extra-special or add cryptic counterpoint to another landmark — say, a humongous piece of fruit.

The latest unusual expression in this grizzled architectural form is in Santa Rosa, California: the Cyclisk, an obelisk made of the gears, rims, frames, and other loose parts of 330 junker bicycles.

Cyclisk is large. So large, in fact — 65 feet tall — that its two creators reportedly chose not to get paid for it, so they could make it bigger. “We wanted to give the city a landmark,” sculptors Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

Like the obelisks of old, the impressive Cyclisk has been built to last — possibly for centuries — and the city reportedly feels that it will show Santa Rosa to be both cultural and bike-friendly.

This is in stark contrast to another fused amalgam art form seen in other cities — the melted gun sculpture — which delivers an anti-gun/anti-violence message. If only all the guns were melted.

In California, where bicyclists expect respect and deference by traffic that is rare or non-existent in most other states, a similar fantasy might occur to a few internal combustionists: “If only all the bicycles were melted. Then I wouldn’t have this helmeted diva shrieking profanities at me because I stopped in the bike lane to make a right turn….”

Perhaps we also need an obelisk of melted cars?

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