Jon Day is a lecturer in English literature at King’s College London and the author of Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier. (July 2018)
In “Do You Love Me?,” a Borgesian short story first published in 1975, Peter Carey described an unnamed country in which things—first landscapes, later objects and people—begin to disappear “like the image on an improperly fixed photograph.” The unloved “nether regions” of the country are the first to go. “We …
Comics lend themselves to representing the experience of cycling: the flatness of the bird’s-eye-view map set in contrast to the scene-by-scene illustrations of Eleanor Davis’s daily experience biking from Arizona to Georgia. We are pulled into Davis’s perspective, seeing from her position on the road as well as from a close third-person view as if slightly above.
Intended to rejuvenate public sculpture in Britain, in 1972 the City Sculpture Project gave sixteen artists £1000 each to produce a site-specific sculpture, to be installed in one of eight cities across England and Wales (now documented in an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England). The main responses to City Sculpture seem to have been of public indifference and barely concealed philistinism.
