Visiting rampant bikers at the Anti-Auto Show

Ellen Fox

March 1999: Newcity Chicago

If half the crowd looks homeless and the other half looks hot, you must be at an art show reception in Bucktown.

There's a keg in the hallway, hardwood floors and big, cold windows that look nicely out of Daniel Reid Fogelson's loft onto the distant downtown nightscape. Someone's wearing big shoes, someone's wearing face paint. Someone walks by me and the smell of b.o. lingers many moments later. He's clearly ridden his bicycle here, as have many attendees at tonight's "[Anti] Auto Show." It's a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the first car fatality, put on by participants of Critical Mass, a monthly, take-to-the-streets bike ride.

Started in San Francisco, where the cyclists are as fierce as the hills they assail, Critical Mass is an international movement that's touchy about calling itself a movement. It's comprised of people like Travis Culley, a clean-cut, Mark Harmon-looking guy in an Exxon work shirt, who smiled knowingly when I asked if he was a member: "Whatever 'member' means. Membership is kind of a misleading term."

Culley and other cyclists (be they messengers or investors) meet at Daley Plaza at 5:30 pm on the last Friday of every month and flaunt their low-cost, high-energy mobility in the face of sluggish traffic. Talking to some of the cyclists though, it's hard to figure if the mood at the rides is healthy bike-enthusiasm or car-culture disdain. There were a couple of arrests in November.

"Are you driving an SUV because of a certain... inadequacy? Are you still making payments on your mid-life crisis? You don't need a car to prove your masculinity." So goes one of the fliers handed out earlier that day outside the Auto Show at McCormick Place. Culley and others provided show-goers with facts about health issues and car fatalities, but he was a little evasive when it came to addressing my question about the number of annual bike fatalities, the concern that keeps me from cycling right here in Chicago.

"Most accidents that happen with bikes are car related," he assured me.

As for the art, some one's assembled a photo and paper collage of his bicycle accident, complete with close-ups of mild abrasions on hairy knees. There's a huge vertical percussion set made from hub-caps and oil cans, and a photo album of ruddy, grinning bike messengers with cool names like Guenevere and Sappy.

Culley's own contribution is a piece called "Post-Fordian Day Dream." It's a set of thick, black car tires that start on the ground and become increasingly hacked to pieces as they ascend diagonally to the heavens.

(Ellen Fox)