THE ART OF THE MOTORCYCLE
THE EXHIBITION
The Guggenheim Museum's landmark exhibition, The Art of the Motorcycle, inaugurates the Guggenheim Las Vegas with a new installation designed by Frank O. Gehry. Featuring curved and polished stainless steel walls, towering chain-link curtains, and glass floors, the new design responds to both the massive scale of the Guggenheim Las Vegas museum and the materials and craftsmenship of the motorcycles themselves. Gehry previously designed the installation of The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition when it was on view at the Guggenheim museums in both New York (1998) and Bilbao (2000). The Las Vegas installation is his most ambitious to date.
Frank Gehry founded Frank O. Gehry & Associates, now The Gehry Partners, in Los Angeles in 1962. His designs include a broad range of projects such as museums, performance, institutional, commercial, and residential buildings. His design for the celebrated Guggenheim Bilbao (1997) was described as "the greatest building of our time". Other recent and current projects include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the DG Bank Headquarters in Berlin (2000), the Dutch Embassy in Prague (1997), and the Vitra International Furniture Museum and Factory in Wheil am Rhein (1989). Frank Gehry has received the most prestigious and coveted awards bestowed on the architectural profession: the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989), the Premium Imperiale for Architecture by the Japan Society of Art (1992), and the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects (1999) among many others.
Invented by a French engineer at the dawn of the industrial age, the evolution of the motorcycle has tracked the great popular themes of the modern era. Function, design, precision, technology, and speed have been the common obsessions of successive generations of designers for 130 years. Fantasy, romance, rebellion, danger, and freedom are the states of being that have been projected onto the evolving cultural frame ever since the notion of mechanized personal transport first emerged in an era noted for its preoccupation with time, space, and speed. It is this love affair with dynamism that inspired the invention of the motorcycle.
The history of the motorcycle officially began in 1868 when two French inventors attached a small steam engine to a velocipede to create the first motorized bicycle. The Michaux-Perreaux was capable of a maximum speed of 19 mph. At the end of the 20th century, Massimo Tamburini's MV Augusta F4 consummated a marriage of high technology, space age materials, and deliberate sex appeal to produce a sport bike capable of speeds in excess of 175 mph. These two machines are on opposite ends of a continuum that reflects extraordinary design and technological adventure inside the limits imposed by a two-wheeled motorized machine.
The criteria for the selection of motorcycles in the exhibition have necessarily been rigorous and precise. The principal objective is to include examples of the most important and seminal machines in motorcycle history.
Design excellence and technological innovation are perhaps the most important interpretive criteria. The classical functionality of the 1923 BMW R32 is a clear example. With a reliable air-cooled engine housed in a light, easy-to-ride frame, the angular, architectonic lines of the R32 are the work of a master designer. At the end of the 1950s, Soichiro Honda recognized the desire for mobility in the newly affluent western population. The 1962 Honda Super Cub was small, only 50 cc, did not leak oil, and was quiet and efficient. Two-and-a-half-million Super Cubs later, Honda is still mobilizing vast numbers of people in China and Africa.
The final criterion for the selection of these machines is their social impact. From a public fascination with motorcycle board track racing in the first decades of the 20th century, to the importance of the motorcycle as a primary means of transportation after the war, to its use today as everything from practical tool to luxury accessory, this remarkable machine has played an important role in the social development of the modern age.
THE HISTORY OF THE MOTORCYCLE
1868-1919: Inventing the Motorcycle
The 19th century spans an impressive period of invention, one notable for its preoccupation with time, space, and speed. The first railroad locomotive, the use of electric light, the creation of cinema: the influence of these technological advancements was profound, responsible for fundamental alterations in the manner in which we perceive our environment, even live our lives, today. The railroad isolated us further from a spatial relationship to the landscape; electricity released us from the quotidian routines dictated by natural light; cinema, with its illusion of occurring in "real" time, changed traditional notions of temporality and mortality.
These particular inventions share more than a continuing resonance. They also demonstrate the restlessness of human nature since the industrial age, the desire for more speed, more time to work, more entertainment, the demand for "different and better" as quickly as possible. It is this love affair with dynamism that inspired the invention of the motorcycle.
Certain early experimental motorcycles are fascinating in terms of the transparency of their inventors' intentions: namely, how can we move faster? The Michaux-Perreaux, created in France in 1868, took a small commercial steam engine and attached it to the bicycle, which had existed since 1840. Use of steam-powered two-wheelers continued until late in the century, as evidenced by the Geneva. In other early motorcycles, like the De Dion-Bouton, the Orient, and the Thomas, the designers began experimenting with petrol power while maintaining basic bicycle design. Gottlieb Daimler, the German engineer who earned the nickname "Father of the Motorcycle," was actually using his 1885 wooden "boneshaker" (a term often used to describe early cycles, with their wooden frames and wheels) to test a gasoline engine intended for a four-wheeled carriage. Felix Millet's unusual "motocyclette," built in 1893, featured a radial five-cylinder engine inspired by aeronautical design that reappears later in the striking 1922 Megola.
1922-1929: The Machine Age
The 1920s was an age of euphoria and sobriety born on the heels of the first global war in modern history. The aftermath of this far-reaching conflict ushered in an era celebrated as "the Roaring Twenties" and "the Machine Age," a decade in which a return to order on the political front was offset by social liberation and an outburst of artistic creativity. Characterized by carefree expression on the one hand and sober, utopian visions on the other, the cultural spirit of the '20s was bound by a desire to wipe away the horrors of war and to rebuild society according to new values and ideas.
The upheavals of the birth of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of planning and restructuring, defined by the promise of technology, to form the foundation of a socialist utopia. A group of Russian avant-gardes known as the Constructivists who perceived themselves as engineers rather than fine artists abandoned realist representation in favor of the abstract language of geometry. Their forms in steel and glass served as metaphors for a new world order of harmony, precision, and clarity.
This new direction's manifestation in Modern architecture came to be known as the "International Style," so-called because of its widespread adoption and its seemingly universal visual language. Le Corbusier's landmark Pavillon de l'Espirit Nouveau, a two-story apartment built for the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs, exemplified the principle of the building as machine, constructed from modern materials and a design language culled from a hybrid of Classicism and Modern engineering. The exhibition was also a watershed for Modern design, serving as the foundation for Art Deco, the quintessential Machine Age style defined by its combination of streamlined forms and use of industrial materials like chrome and plastic.
But perhaps the most far-reaching influence of the machine aesthetic can be traced to Germany's Bauhaus, the landmark school founded in 1919. Under the directorship of Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus espoused social change through architecture, functional objects, and works of art based on a universal visual language (geometry) capable of being mass-produced through the use of inexpensive, industrial materials. The motorcycles of the era, such as the BMW R32 and the Moto Guzzi C4V, demonstrate design emphasis on practicality and efficiency achieved through a reductive vocabulary of forms, which epitomized the ethos of the Machine Age: clean, lean, and devoid of ornamentation.
1930-1944: New World Orders
The free-spirited character of innovation and experimentation that flourished during the 1920s underwent a sea change in the next decade. Whereas the machine aesthetic of the '20s was realized through a prevailing tendency toward abstraction, based on a reductive, geometric vocabulary and a utopian political agenda, the ethos of machine culture in the 1930s assumed an altogether different scale and demeanor.
Ushered in by a wave of conservative, even totalitarian, political ideology that overswept Europe, the cultural landscape shifted toward social realism, a state-controlled ideology of popular, classically inspired art and architecture that celebrated national identity through grandiose themes in works on a commensurate scale.
Ironically, social realism incarnated many of the principles and ideals of the prior decade: a belief in technology's potential to transform society and a desire to communicate through a universal form of visual expression. In Germany, the Weimar Republic's short-lived experiment in parliamentary democracy was buried under the weight of high inflation and unemployment. Demoralized by the loss of World War I, Germany had been further humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, which exacted a high price from the country in the form of reparations, demobilization of its armed forces, and concessions on territorial claims. Thus, by the time Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Germany was ripe for transformation.
The irony of this era is that communism, the archenemy of fascism, embraced many of its ideals. Steeped in the same cults of personality and celebrations of national identity, Stalin launched Soviet Russia into a new era of bold industrialization that was to be achieved through a series of harshly ambitious Five Year Plans. As in Italy and Germany, the ideology of modernization was propagated through large-scale planning and classical ideals of physical strength, continuity, order, and stability. Monuments were an inevitable outgrowth of these ideologies, and they were constructed with fervor.
The legacy of these ideological dictatorships is now a matter of history. Having placed their own houses in order, or in some cases due to an inability to do so, they set out to change the rest of the world, each seeking to establish a new paradigm based on its own political philosophy. Technologies developed for social transformation became weapons of destruction. Indian, Zuendapp and Harley-Davidson were amongst the many motorcycle manufacturers that saw service during the war; and many more, particularly British manufacturers, fell victim to the postwar financial crisis in Europe, with its reverberations reaching into the 1950s.
1946-1958: Freedom and Post-War Mobility
The rocky homecoming of American World War II veterans enriched American motorcycle mythology. Their wartime world fostered a camaraderie among motorcycle platoons that would form the root of motorcycle gangs like Marlon Brando's in the film The Wild One (1954). The juiced-up Army bike with the everyman-sounding moniker "Bob-Job," became the vehicle for their flight. Combat veterans roamed America's roads in cohesive groups; the forerunners of the maligned American motorcycle gang, these vets did Easy Rider long before Hollywood did. The counterpoint to the "Bob-Job" was the Vespa: Brando in leather against Audrey Hepburn in a billowing skirt in Roman Holiday (1953). Born of the need for cheap personal transportation in the chaos of postwar Italy, the Vespa zipped into the collective cultural psyche. Socially acceptable yet still romantic, it epitomized suburbia's embrace of the motorbike.
The end of warfare did not mean the end of war. The term cold war supplanted the phrase world war, with perhaps even greater cultural reverberation. The enemy could no longer be conquered simply by massive mobilization and mass patriotism; rather, the big bombs were as elusive and invincible as the air through which they might travel. Nuclear became society's operative word. The anxiety provoked by the perils of nuclear war spawned the American fixation on the nuclear family. The resulting insularity, best characterized by planned, homogeneous communities like Levittown, New Jersey, followed a pattern, the disintegration of the old patterns of human social relationship, and with it, the snapping of the links between generations. War planning, family planning, and economic planning sucked the spontaneity out of the postwar world. Political and social conformity became law.
In this context, the GIs' uncomfortable homecoming became all the more jarring, suburbanization all the more unavoidable, and social rebellion all the more predictable. The motorcycle became the vehicle for all shades of rebellion, from the vigilantism of hardcore biker gangs to the softer, almost sexy poses of suburban housewives daring to mimic Hollywood starlets. Fine machine, from dainty Vespas to daunting Harleys, became the metaphor on which America would ride into one of the most tumultuous eras the young country had ever known. The anxieties of postwar society forecast the chaos of the 1960s, and the motorcycle became the cultural icon that tracked the societal meltdown.
1960-1969: Popular Culture/Counter-Culture
In the 1960s, motorcycles met fashion. Co-opted by both suburbanites and flower children, bikes were as relevant to the cultural iconography of the '60s as bra-burnings, LSD, and street protests. Self-fancied rebels cruised in packs on Harleys and nuclear families puttered on Honda Super Cubs. Motorcycles became familiar on both the new American superhighways and the old, middle-American back roads. Their speed, sexiness, utility, and custom design satisfied a society bent on expending energy. But as generations, races, and genders grappled with their desires and differences, cinema and advertising made the motorcycle motif solipsistic. A rebellious image became more significant than rebellion itself, and the motorcycle lost some of its nasty edge.
Night after night the news ran its typical template of the themes that preoccupied the Great Society: the Vietnam War, the Cold War, race, women's liberation, sexual revolution, and rock 'n' roll. The American populace revolted, but the revolution devolved into theater; in the words of Norman Mailer, "Conventional politics has so little to do with the real subterranean life of America that none of us know much about the real which is to say the potential historic nature of America." The discrepancy between mediated life and the elusive "real" of life had become vast.
Whatever history was being made, young people were making much of it. Whether by dying in Vietnam or deciding what band would top the now all-important charts, the largest age cohort in America, "youth," preoccupied a gamut of "authority figures" ranging from politicians to ad men to ministers to suburban moms. The world's youth were out on the road seeking freedom, and the motorcycle was as sure a vehicle as any to offer a quick hit of it. The film Easy Rider (1969) turned upside down the myth of the American Western, cowboy and horse and a code by which to live, and the gentlemanly John Wayne yielded to the dazed Dennis Hopper.
The youth of the world managed to make nearly every public act a political gesture, and tie-dyed shirts and long hair took their places alongside civil rights marches and draft cards. Rebellion became fashion, and Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the motorcycle industry capitalized as never before.
1969-1979: Getting Away from it All
The year 1969 marked the end of one era, which reached its peak with Woodstock, and kicked off another, with Peter Fonda's iconic film, Easy Rider. The advertising campaign for Easy Rider proclaimed, "A man went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere," a sentiment that could be expanded to embrace the entire decade.
Vietnam, the threat of martial law at home, the OPEC oil embargo, Watergate, and the CIA's "dirty tricks" abroad and at home led to growing feelings of insecurity and powerlessness in the face of crises on the domestic and international fronts. Escape from life's uncomfortable realities was found in experimentation with alternative religions and lifestyles; the search for life's meaning through transcendental meditation, yoga, mysticism, and Eastern religion; the writings of Carlos Casteneda; communes; and hallucinatory drugs.
Disco, immortalized in the film Saturday Night Fever (1977), was arguably the most pervasive symbol of the era. It emerged initially as the music of a true underground society, whose denizens danced till morning to frantic nonstop music plied by "dee-jays." Feeding on the public's appetite for fear-induced thrills, Evel Knievel became one of the highest-paid entertainers of his time, making motorcycle stunt-riding an industry unto itself. Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) defined a new genre of moviemaking as interested in release through spectacle as in story or character development.
Motorcycles have always offered riders escape through speed, but, in the 1970s, manufacturers learned to apply the technology of the racetrack to the creation of superspeedy bikes for the road. Honda, for example, transformed both motorcycle design and riding habits with its CB750 Four. Harley-Davidson and Triumph made noble attempts to compete, offering their own sporty superbikes. While Harley-Davidson's XLCR, a smaller-bodied cafe racer, tempered classic Harley design components and took inspiration from Europe, Britain's Triumph made a last-ditch marketing attempt by crossing the Atlantic with styling that made direct reference to a classic "American" (i.e., Harley-Davidson) look. Both were market failures. Although nothing could be further away from Captain America's Easy Rider Chopper, it was the Ducati 750SS, the product of masterful Italian design, that captured the era's zeitgeist. In the '70s, this bike was the ultimate escapist vehicle.
1982-1989: The Consumer Years
The 1980s was characterized by extremes. The decade began with the Iranian hostage crisis and ended with Operation Desert Storm. It opened with the proposal of the "Star Wars" space defense program and closed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union. President Jimmy Carter had declared a "national crisis of confidence" in the summer of 1979. By the beginning of the '80s the country found itself in the throes of a full-fledged recession. Ronald Reagan's presidency neatly spanned the decade, and by 1983, signs that inflation was being brought under control pointed to the beginning of an economic recovery that would transform the bank accounts and lifestyles of much of the American middle class.
Newfound economic power in Asia was manifested by the flood of cheap electric goods, cars, and motorcycles that came pouring into the United States. Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha were among the most heavily marketed and widely bought motorcycles of the '80s, and they came to define and eventually to symbolize the look and design of the motorcycle during that era. Speed capabilities and racing-type styling found its quintessential form in the "crotch rocket" and its market in the newly flush yuppie with a taste for the image of danger and the status of speed.
The lust for consumer goods extended to the art market, helping to radically inflate prices paid for art at auction. In 1987, the same year as "Black Monday," the largest Dow Jones industrial average plunge up to that date, Vincent van Gogh's Irises was auctioned for a record $53.9 million at Sotheby's in New York. Art had become merely another commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace.
Perhaps the epitome of the decade's sensibility could be found in the alternately praised and derided Jeff Koons. With his stainless-steel bunnies and floating basketballs, he seemed to wish to prove, with Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), that greed was not only good, it could also be fun.
1993-2001: Retro/Revolutionary
The 1990s is the decade in which, for the first time since Honda presented its iconic strap line thirty years ago, "you meet the nicest people on a Honda." Motorcycling is not only cool, it sells. But, cool as it may seem, the edginess of '90s popular culture is present in motorcycling as well. The decade's design trends echo the rapid-fire change of politics and culture throughout the world. Nineties culture is about reference, not deference. Old orders are swept aside, upstarts take their place, and, against the odds, they succeed.
Miguel Galluzzi, a young student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, saw this edginess in the suburban streetscape of southern California, where grunge biking was a perfect mirror of the music and attitude of a new age. Flying in the face of every contemporary motorcycle design rubric from Tokyo to Munich, Galluzzi recreated stripped-bare suburban specials in a production motorcycle. The result, a brilliant piece of pop-culture interpretation, was the M900, nicknamed "the Monster."
Erik Buell, a true individualist of American motorcycle design, picks up cues from a different landscape and then reshapes them. Equally comfortable in the Gen-X world of mountain biking or the racetrack's pit row, Buell has reinvented an American motorcycle archetype. For a start, his designs are environmentally sensitive: "More noise does not mean more power" is one of his mantras. While using only Harley-Davidson engines, Buell proves that American motorcycles need not embody the cliche of the noisy, fat boulevard cruiser.
When BMW decided to depart from their seventy-year-old script of quick, reliable sporting tourers and plunge into the cruiser market, they could easily have made the mistake of aping the Harley-Davidson style. But, through the brilliance of designer David Robb, they found a new way to cruise. Like Galluzzi, Robb studied at the Art Center College of Design and is sharply attuned to the world outside his studio. But whereas Galluzzi and Buell come directly from motorcycle tradition, Robb's design antecedents are those of American automotive and product design. Robb's R1200C refers to those halcyon days of big fenders and chrome without being at all "retro," a word pregnant with negative motorcycle associations. On Robb's quiet and efficient machine, you can cruise at 55 mph while smelling the flowers. You can almost hear the birds singing. This is the soul of American motorcycling, even with a heart all BMW efficiency: shaft drive, a proven Boxer engine, and electronic engine management. The Cruiser is the flipside of Galluzzi's grunge Monster; it is the '90s turned green.
Exhibition Highlights