Going Out On The Edge

By ROBERT HUGHES

The fact that the great spiral of New York City's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is at present full of motorcycles has annoyed some critics. Not this one. If the Museum of Modern Art can hang a helicopter from its ceiling, why can't the Guggenheim show bikes? "The Art of the Motorcycle" may seem an opportunistic title until you actually see the things. Design is design, a fit subject for museum consideration, and in any case I'd rather look at a rampful of glittering dream machines than any number of tasteful Scandinavian vases or floppy fiber art. My only regret is that the show doesn't (so to speak) go the whole hog: with the exception of the iconic chopped Harley that Captain America rode in Easy Rider, everything in it is stock, so that it ignores the creative ingenuity that has gone into making the custom bike one of the distinctive forms of American folk art.

No matter. For personal reasons I probably couldn't dislike this show if I tried. I have owned four large-bore bikes in my time, two of which (a Norton Commando and the great, purring, canonical 1970 Honda CB750) are in this show; and although I gave up riding after totaling a Kawasaki, and nearly myself, on a highway in Southern California some 25 years ago, I still rarely see a bike I don't like and can't suppress a twinge of envy when some yuppie on a postmodernist Japanese burner splits the lanes of the Long Island Expressway and goes blasting past my sedate Volvo. Divided, I am reminded of a Japanese saying about the poisonous fugu blowfish, which, when prepared under license, becomes a gastronomic delicacy: "I want to eat fugu, but I want to live."

Bikes mean a lot of things, but the main one is raw, unprotected speed, and there is little point in owning one unless you are prepared to go somewhat out on the edge. Biking requires a special degree of both abandonment and focus, an unscrolling story line of concentration on intersecting factors that your average car driver is muffled from: road surface, camber, radius of curve, angle of attack, lean. It connotes a unique mixture of aggression and vulnerability, and to have owned a fast bike is, in some degree, to be inoculated against the bloated status envy that goes with the plushier forms of American motoring. Bike manufacturers have gone to inordinate lengths to make bikes seem respectable. "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" was the message of a brilliantly devised advertising campaign in the 1950s designed to counter the undoubted truth that you met some of the nastiest ones on a Harley or (as in The Wild One) a Triumph 650. But in essence, bikes aren't respectable; and at heart, you wouldn't want them if they were.

The proto-form of the motorcycle was simply a velocipede with a steam-engine jammed in it, made in France in 1868. The first true serial production bike, with which the Guggenheim show begins, was made in 1894 by the German firm of Hildebrand & Wolfmuller; its enormous engine--1,489 cc, the biggest that would be fitted to a production machine until the 1980s--chugged it along at 30 m.p.h. Motorcycle technology advanced so quickly under the spell of the fin-de-siecle obsession with heroic speed that only 13 years later, in 1907, the future aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss was able to put an eight-cylinder engine in a truss frame of metal tubes and go rocketing through a measured mile in Florida at 136 m.p.h.

The first unambiguously beautiful bike design represented in this show was the 1915 Iver Johnson, with its arched frame and sculpted fuel tank (a feature that would become a near obsession with bike designers 75 years later). By the '20s and '30s, bike design was part of larger design fields. The 1923 BMW R32, with its clear, lean triangular geometry, is one of the most perfect expressions of Bauhaus sensibility ever devised. There were Art Deco machines too, with swooping exaggerated fenders, such as the early (1922) Megola Sport or the mighty, lumbering 1948 Indian Chief. The BMW and the Indian are, in fact, the poles of motorcycle design: one stripped down, the other elaborately faired.

The chopped "outlaw" bike of the '60s represents, among other things, the desire to return to the raw purity of the early, "primitive" machine. On the other hand, motorcycle design in the '80s and '90s--especially in Japan--tended to enclose the machinery in baroque, forward-raked shells, bodywork that "floats" above the wheels and is loaded with sexual suggestion. Hence the argot for them: crotch rockets. What began as a proletarian vehicle (cheap transport for folks who couldn't afford a car) has turned into an expensive, deliberate body metaphor. The car may be your wife/husband, but the bike is your Fatal Lover, and there's no way around that: if it weren't true, there would be no market for it.