ABSTRACT
Perhaps I had been reading too much about monuments. The first thing that occurred to me as I viewed Fernando Traverso’s stenciled bicycle silhouettes in a show in New York City was how the bicycles’ uniformity was a provocative twist on the uniformity of the anonymous US civil war soldier statues. 1 The anonymous soldiers are erected in towns across America to remember local heroes, but the statues also serve to mark US territories as one, united nation. Most of the soldier statues were mass-produced, and it is difficult to distinguish between a confederate and a union soldier, though the two are not the same. In the early twentieth century, US northern and southern towns placed them in central squares rather than in cemeteries, to project patriotic sacrifice by the Everyman. 2 Similarly, in a patriotic reference to his nation of Argentina, Traverso’s “In Memory” installation art piece used the Argentine flag’s particular sky blue for the flags that serve as backdrops for various black silk-screened bicycles. The bicis, the bikes, remember several people he knew, and Traverso proclaims their national sacrifice. I would later learn that for Traverso, Argentines’ right to wave their political flags in public, a right denied them during the dictatorships of Juan Onganía (1966–73) and the military juntas of El Proceso (1976–83), was something the artist considered fundamental, something sacred. 3
