The Burning Motorcycle
2002
Thomas Zummer
Genie
2003
James Hyde
Motorcycles & Art3/14/2004 - 6/30/2004 |
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The motorcycle is an idiom for contemporary art. Art about motorcycles next to motorcycles is an excellent opportunity to explore any number of conversations, and it is our invitation to you to join us in talking about motorcycles and art.
Contemporary art is the art being made today, and it walks its walk somewhat free of the judgements of time. Who is to say if one contemporary painter is great and another is not? How would we know? Who will tell us these things? It may be easier to tell a great motorcycle if you know what you are looking for in the machine. The fast ones look fast, and the comfortable-looking ones sometimes are. For those who love motorcycles or art, questions about what is great and why prompt a similar reaction, “If I have to explain, you just don’t understand.” There is an interesting place for these two things, art and motorcycles, to meet – in the eye and mind of a person in love.
Motorcycles and Art is a focused exhibition designed to appeal to street-riding motorcyclists and art lovers alike. The motorcycles in our exhibition were chosen as representations of various high water marks in motorcycle history. This approach was extremely successful for the curators of the Guggenheim’s 1998 exhibit, The Art of the Motorcycle, in which over a hundred years of worldwide motorcycling was documented. The Art of the Motorcycle proposed that motorcycles were art all by themselves (Krens, Art of the Motorcycle, p. 17). If the Guggenheim exhibition’s goal to get the public to participate more in discussions about design, art, and culture, our exhibition may be seen as a direct achievement of that goal.
A motorcyclist may feel that motorcycles are undisputedly art, or that he is an artist painting the brushstrokes of his Dunlop tires on the canvas of the American highway. Riding a motorcycle is not an art any more than maintaining one is. If Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) tells us that motorcycle maintenance is art, then all of our children could paint something that looks like a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Baseball certainly is not art, but there are people who tell us that it is. There is, however, some great art, films, and music about baseball. The same is true of motorcycles. Andy Warhol knew the power of an icon, and the Warhol in our exhibition, Mineola, is the revolutionary Honda CB750Four. When the image was made in the mid-1980’s, the CB750Four had already shaken the foundations down and built some new ones. It gave birth to a new street fighter class of big, fast bikes easily bought by consumers, the UJM, Universal Japanese Motorcycle. By the eighties, motorcycling was a whole new ballgame. Artists like Warhol had followed the same paths to greener fields to create new genres of art using new technology, mass production, and clever marketing.
Much of what is said about art and motorcycles is false. Much of what is said of motorcycles and art concerns “what it isn’t.” Deduction often dictates the path we take as we gyrate toward answers. This is the dance that we dance, comfortable in the arms of logic that whispers in our ear that a negative cannot be challenged. Who are bikers? Who is not a biker? Motorcycling remains mysterious even to those of us who love it. The Kawasaki GPZ 900cc brute of the 1980’s was made to go fast just like the legendary Vincent Black Shadow of the 1950’s. The Vincent was expensive, but the engine was made of high quality aluminum, some of it scrapped from Sterling aircraft engines like the ones that powered the British Spitfires of the Battle of Britain in WWII. By the mid-eighties, a host of newer and cheaper technologies made the Ninja a light, fast bike capable of amazing things right out of the box. How we can talk about motorcycles in this American context and jump from Japan to the United Kingdom and vault a span of thirty years in casual conversation is just the beginning of the mysterious power motorcycles have over enthusiasts. Thomas Zummer’s The Burning Motorcycle, is at first glance a drawing of a UJM burning, but there’s much more to it than that. Zummer is interested in light, shadows, and technologies like photography that record and disturb what we know are real. The drawing was made from a photocopy of a print of a still digital photograph, so The Burning Motorcycle is about process as well as nightmare.
The motorcycle helmet is also a mask. This business of masks and mirrors is an old theme in literature, especially drama. This motif acts as a device that questions identity, presents a false identity, or drives a person to act as if he were not himself. We have our Mardis Gras and Halloweens to celebrate this theme, and even the people who do not think too much about why they like it so much are always right there enjoying it with the rest of us. Art can employ the same thematic devices. Conversely, the motorcyclist in the crazily painted helmet that passes you on a Sunday afternoon is disguised. He may even be disguised as what you would rather be doing with your time. Art and motorcycles are fragile. They are just like we are because we made them. These objects, like all of our objects, are the collective children of humankind with all of our faults and shortcomings coming right through to haunt us. How does that chopper stand up on that small kickstand? How does that large painting hang from that hook? We must be careful with these things. They can break, and something broken is broken forever. They are just like we are because we made them. They are not perfect; they are like us. They reflect us right back at ourselves.