March 5, 2001
Student goes extra mile with his transit humor

By Raphael Lewis
Globe Staff

Why Ravi Jain showed up on a motorcycle to the ceremonial opening of the Leverett Circle Connector Bridge on Oct. 7, 1999 - desperate to cross before anyone else - he cannot say.
After all, the span amounts to little more than an exit ramp on steroids, a concrete colossus with the aesthetic appeal of a light switch.
Perhaps it was the notion that such an unprepossessing structure had attracted hordes of reporters and ribbon-cutting politicians. Or maybe it was Jain's gut sense that the homely roadway deserved such honors.
Regardless, what began as a small step in the annals of transportation has become a giant leap in Jain's artistic identity. For if the 30-year-old Jamaica Plain resident was a typical frustrated artist before crossing the Connector, he is something more bizarre and thought-provoking today: a ''Transportation Pioneer.''
In the past year, Jain, a graduate student at the Massachusetts College of Art, has traipsed across Boston, the nation, and the world in a quixotic campaign to attend the openings of new bridges, new train services, and new highways, glamorous or otherwise. Each time he becomes more ravenous for media attention and laughs, and more adroit at getting them.
A self-styled champion of ''infrastructure,'' Jain now shows up as characters tailored to the achievement in question, usually with two friends converted to his pioneering faith. For the January 2000 maiden trip of Amtrak's Acela Regional service - the railroad's first all-electric train in the Northeast - he arrived as ''Electric Man,'' a silvery super hero who frightened PR officials and spooked police officers. Fellow pioneer Stefan Economou arrived as sooty Old Man Diesel.
For one of the first public tours of the Big Dig, Jain arrived as a tweedy academic named Professor Von Hardwigg. And for the inaugural voyage of Amtrak's new bullet train, the Acela Express, this past December, Jain, Economou, and John Carrera became pseudo-astronauts, renting the film ''The Right Stuff'' to better impersonate the spacemen.
''I guess I have a nostalgia for the 19th-century spirit of adventure,'' says Jain, waiting for soup at the lunch counter of Sparr's pharmacy, his favorite eatery, on Huntington Avenue.
''What's left to pioneer when everything's been developed in the world?'' he continues. ''Things like the Leverett Connector. To me, it was so amazing that they actually made key chains for that event. We had a State Police escort across the bridge. People were cheering. It was exhilarating.''
An exhibit of Jain's exploits is on display at Mass Art's Doran Gallery through tomorrow evening, and will reappear May 16-30 at the school's Bakalar Gallery. Called ''The Museum of Transportation Pioneering,'' the diminutive exhibit is a multimedia installation consisting of five 20-by-24-inch Polaroid portraits of Jain (in costume), a display of collectibles and media clippings, and a 12-minute video of Jain's ride, with two fellow pioneers, on the Acela Express.
If all this sounds like a cynical rebuke of America's transportation feats - after all, didn't the Europeans introduce high-speed rail service decades ago? - Jain begs to differ. To be a transportation pioneer, he says, is to revere the infrastructure.
''Someone said to me I should show up when there's a new sidewalk, but that's not what this is about,'' Jain says, a serious mien clouding his usually cheerful face. ''That's a sendup. There's a legitimacy to the things I'm going after. The question is how much legitimacy, I guess.''
In the Acela film, which Jain edited and produced, the pioneer troika - all graduates of Oberlin College - appear in orange jumpsuits, cradling crash helmets and waving to an imaginary crowd in Washington's Union Station before boarding the rail-liner. Once inside, the trio battle fake G forces, cope with zero gravity, and attempt a spacewalk, as a friend records their antics on digital video camera.
Donald Burgy, a professor in Mass. Art's Studio for Interrelated Media, says Jain's work is appealing, at least in part, for its total lack of introspection. Jain, he says, has no intention of sharing his inner pain.
''In the art world, there's an obsessive preoccupation with individualism,'' he said. ''People are navel gazing with incredible determination. Ravi's work is almost always collaborative; it's performance and media. That's pretty unusual.''
But if the medium is appealing, so is the message.
''A lot of the humor comes in the fact that transportation is filled with irony, especially big transportation. Immediately, eyebrows go up,'' says Burgy. ''Acela was the last gasp of a transportation fiasco. With high gasoline prices and highway glut, you would think railroads would be booming. And here Ravi comes with this boom-era glee, this nostalgia for the Space Age.''
Perhaps most surprising about Jain's work is the loving embrace it receives from engineers, hard-hat wearing construction workers, politicians, and executives.
''It's like these guys are dying for members of the public to get excited about what they do,'' Jain says.
In one of the video's vignettes, Amtrak President George Warrington sits down beside Jain and his cohorts as the Acela Express speeds toward Boston and offers his heartfelt thanks for their enthusiasm.
At the Big Dig tour, Sean O'Neill, a public relations worker for the project, recognized Jain, despite the artist's professorial costume, from his appearance at the Leverett Circle Connector celebration. Jain ended up walking away with a massive engineering map, which, of course, is on display at the gallery.
As for the future, Jain has more than enough to fill his pioneering calendar right here in Boston. The Silver Line Transitway, a $600 million tunnel between South Boston's waterfront and downtown, is fast approaching completion.
And the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge - could there be a better target? - will open soon after, becoming the world's widest cable-stayed bridge. (In July, Jain traveled to Europe to christen yet another cable-stayed bridge, this one running between Denmark and Sweden.)
''I really have to stay on top of this stuff,'' Jain says. ''I read in the [New York] Times the other day that Istanbul just finished a new subway. I was like, `Damn it! I should have been there.'''

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