Situationist Cycling Through LA's Nighttime Streets
LOS ANGELES — The City of Angels is famously opaque to the average visitor. Unlike New York, the vibe of Los Angeles doesn't reveal itself immediately after you step out of the subway. It doesn't even reveal itself after a few months.
LOS ANGELES — The City of Angels is famously opaque to the average visitor. Unlike New York, the vibe of Los Angeles doesn’t reveal itself immediately after you step out of the subway. It doesn’t even reveal itself after a few months. The sense of LA’s city-ness comes and goes, and unlike almost every other city I’ve been to, the way you travel around LA, and your departure and destination points, so much mark what type of city you experience and remember. There are many Los Angeleses wrapped up in the umbrella of a city, pockets and corners and secrets that you’ll never see because you’re zipping by in a car or a bus.
Which makes Los Angeles the perfect venue for a dérive, of course. Perhaps the ideal venue. A dérive — French for “drift” — is a famous Situationist practice, a way of ambling about an urban space with no real goal or purpose, guided largely by curiosity and where the mental winds take you. But how do you amble about a city so famously defined by the car and the boulevard? It’s impossible to cover much ground simply by walking, and trying to drift in a car will probably get you pulled over.
Enter The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, or The Passage for short. Founded by Sean Deyoe and Nathan Snider, The Passage is a weekly night bicycle journey through Los Angeles. Unlike the more flashy and famous Midnight Ridazz, The Passage is a smaller, more quiet group, and they follow in the Situationist tradition. Passable Atlas, a new exhibition at Red5 Yellow7 Gallery, highlights the wanderings of the group, with a boxy, mini-maze-like structure on which are hung photos, stories, and maps.
“Do you know where you are?” is one of the most common questions the group leaders get, said Snider in a recent lecture in the space. He has led the group through unexpected and perhaps dangerous places, uncovering new corners and secrets of the city, like the Dumpster of Fortune, a treasure chest of discarded fortune cookies, or even the Los Angeles Policy Academy, where they were promptly welcomed and given a tour.
Routes are defined ahead of time — “There’s only a certain amount of uncertainty before it’s counterproductive,” noted Snider — and descriptions and routes are posted in detail online. A recent journey, called Geology in Action!, paid heed to LA’s geological attentiveness:
But regardless of one’s opinion on the naming, it is hard to argue against this idea that the human legacy (if not necessarily we humans ourselves) will persist on geologic time scales. One can’t help but wonder what our contribution will look like to a geologist millions and millions of years hence: our buildings, our infrastructure and our bodies — this whole human construction project — compacted into yet another layer in the stratigraphic record.
The exhibition itself features gorgeous images and video of a city few Angelenos will recognize. I hear it’s an often arduous, physically demanding journey — LA is a lot more hilly than you think — but judging by the images, it’s well worth it.
“You see the underbelly of the city,” said Bryant Yeh, a frequently cyclist and the designer of the exhibition space. An architect by training, Yeh pointed out how cycling the city at night reveals its structural separation, from enormous wealth to extremely impoverished and dangerous conditions. “It feels eerie and beautiful at the same time. There hasn’t been something so strong to provide an alternative to consumerist culture. It’s in opposition to the way we are forced to live.”
Passable Atlas runs till July 6 at Red #5 Yellow #7 (4357 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles).
