ART

Last weekend's Madison Art Bikes open house provided an opportunity to admire some of the bicycles that will be part of this coming Saturday's art bike rally around the Capitol. Scheduled to start at 11 a.m. from the Madison Children's Museum, the annual event promises to once again be quite a spectacle of creative imagination.

Kids are invited to gather outside the museum at 10 a.m. to decorate their bikes for the ride around the Capitol.

Meanwhile, preparations have been underway to prepare quite an impressive variety of existing art bikes for the rally. The following series of short video clips previews some of the art bikes that will be on display during this Saturday's rally.

In this first clip, art bike enthusiast Bill Sethares rides a bike built with bowling balls for wheels, and accessorized with bowling pins fore and aft -- demonstrating the fact that the motivation behind an art bike can sometimes be more concerned with expressing an answer to the question "Why not?" than focusing on such concerns as speed, maneuverability, efficiency and utility.

Turning around after a short ride along a Jenifer Street sidewalk with a slight downhill grade, Sethares rides the bowling-ball bike back up a slight uphill grade in this second clip and parks it among some of the other art bikes you'll see at this Saturday's rally.

Sethares then mounts another art bike -- one with a frame geometry, extended seatpost and reconfigured drive train that elevates his view to a heightened perspective that appears to be somewhere north of seven feet. It is not, he assures onlookers, as hazard as it might appear in this next clip -- though his above-average bike-handling skills may be a significant factor in his low appraisal of the risk involved.

And then there is this short video clip, introducing a tandem bike that appears to be modeled on principles inspired by the PushmePullyou creature imagined by Hugh Lofting, author of the Dr. Dolittle stories. To demonstrate this tandem, Sethares is joined by another art-bikes enthusiast, Luke Emery.

One final "full-scale blow-out last-minute last-chance art bike decorating" effort is scheduled to begin at about 3 p.m. Friday, May 9, at 921 Jenifer St. (For details, phone Ann at 698-3525.)