Word: biked
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...