July 2007

The Art of Motorcycle (Image) Maintenance

Mary K. Coffey and Jeremy S. Packer

1998’s The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition drew the highest attendance any show ever had at the Guggenheim Museum of Art. It attracted 800,000 visitors during its three-month run (a statistic that rivals the yearly attendance figures for most museums, worldwide). Not only was this attendance unprecedented in the 61-year history of the Guggenheim, but reports implied that the vast majority of attendees were first-timers: first-time visitors to the Guggenheim in particular, and, more significant, first-time patrons of any art museum at all. The spectacular popularity of the Guggenheim show led to an ad hoc second U.S. venue at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, after which it moved to its next two Guggenheim destinations, inaugurating Frank Gehry’s building in Bilbao, Spain (November 1999-September 2000), and Rem Koolhaas’ satellite at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas (October 2001-December 2002). When the Field Museum took the show, the motorcycle as “art” was transformed into the motorcycle as “artifact,” as “motorcycle culture” was invoked to legitimate the object for display in this decidedly different cultural institution.

The construction of the object for two different venues—as “art” at the Guggenheims, and “cultural artifact” at the Field Museum—revealed the uniqueness of the motorcycle for museum display and exposed the changing conceptions of exhibition in traditional museum practice. However, it also provides an opportunity to discuss the contentious nature of any enterprise to name and represent a culture. Over the last several decades, any number of entities has represented bikers to an American audience via film, television, the art museum, rallies, motorcyclists’ PR campaigns, and best-selling books such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.[1] Therefore, we want to think about how the image of motorcyclists has been cleaned up, polished, fine-tuned, and ultimately maintained in an attempt to govern, not just the image, but the conduct of motorcyclists since the mid-1990s. These museum exhibits are only one of many cultural practices involved in this maintenance. However, they demonstrate in distilled form how culture plays an absolutely integral part in these processes and it is to a theory of culture that we now turn.

We can look to the three definitions of culture that Raymond Williams distinguishes in his sociology of language, Keywords, to illuminate how the motorcycle understood as culture was put to various uses and abuses. In the first instance, culture is defined as the best and brightest that society has to offer. The Guggenheim Museum invoked this definition when organizing its motorcycle exhibition. Through this appeal, the motorcycle is displayed as an aesthetic object on par with modernist art. Second, culture is defined in its anthropological sense as the meaningful activities of daily lives. The Field Museum employed this definition when presenting the motorcycle as a worthy ethnographic object. Through this appeal, the motorcycle serves as the object around which communal identity coheres. The third, and often overlooked, definition views culture as an instrument of government. Tony Bennett, another sociologist of culture, has elaborated Williams’ definitions, arguing that through the third definition of culture we can better understand how culture in its aesthetically restricted and anthropologically expanded sense has been produced and linked historically through a variety of programs and initiatives aimed at managing the social. For Bennett, culture is “an historically specific set of institutionally embedded relations of government in which the forms of thought and conduct of extended populations are targeted for transformation,” and the public museum has been a primary institutional apparatus for its instrumentalization (“Putting Policy” 26). 

In The Birth of the Museum, Bennett argues that the museum is one such governmental apparatus wherein “culture,” defined as “the aesthetic” is used to improve the manners and behaviors of “cultures,” defined as specific targeted populations. Bennett avoids the heroic history of the modern museum, which was born in the enlightened secularism of the French Revolution, and concentrates instead on its “political rationality,” a component better discerned within the nineteenth-century debates in Britain over “rational recreations.” Thus, the museum is not a democratic space of egalitarian public access, but rather is a highly contentious space for the modeling of refined behavior and submission to proper modes of political and social participation (17-58). Within this formulation, neither of the two conventional definitions of culture can be understood as empirical or ontological; rather, each is produced within a nexus of governmental relations which cross the museum, a space that is simultaneously social, representational, and regulatory. 

Through Bennett’s insights, we can better understand the motorcycle as governmental culture by tracing the ways its codification as art and as subculture in these exhibitions has enabled the targeting of various populations for a variety of corporate and governmental ends. By examining The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition in its two manifestations—at the Guggenheims and the Field Museum —we can explore the contested nature of the first two definitions of culture and how they were made concrete through the third. 

The Motorcycle as Art

The motorcycle and the art museum—these two cultural realms will intersect for the first time in the summer of 1998 in The Art of the Motorcycle, a landmark exhibition that brings together more than a century of bikes from around the world…. There can be no doubt that the extraordinary motorcycles we have chosen belong in one of the world’s great art museums. (Krens 11)

The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition was arguably the ideal focus for Thomas Krens’ directorial vision for the Global Guggenheim. As the lynchpin in a brilliant branding strategy for the Guggenheim’s expansion into new demographic, geographic, and cultural markets, the motorcycle exhibition garnered both Krens and the institution an “outlaw” status within the stuffy, often elitist, world of high-profile art museums. Born out of Krens’ own passion for riding, the exhibition brought together 113 motorcycles selected on the basis of “aesthetic and design excellence, technological innovation, and social impact.”[2] For the duration of the show, the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s world-renowned building was transformed into a spiraling metallic combine by architect and Krens collaborator Frank Gehry. Using the Guggenheim’s upwardly spiraling ramp to direct its story, the exhibition narrated a tale of technologically determined aesthetic development framed on one end by a French engineered steam-powered velocipede from 1868 (the “first motorized bicycle” with a “maximum speed of 19mph”) and on the other, Italian designer Massimo Tamburini’s MV Agusta F4, a bike that, in the words of the curators, “consummates a 1990s marriage of deliberate sex appeal…and the highest level of technological achievement: the rider of this motorcycle can reach speeds of over 170 mph.”[3] The motorcycles in between were organized into thematic groups roughly corresponding to decades from “Inventing the Motorcycle (1868-1919)” to “The Machine Age (1922-29),” “New World Orders (1930-44),” “Freedom and Post-war Mobility (1946-58),” “Popular Culture, Counter Culture (1960-69),” “Getting Away from It All, 1969-78),” “The Consumer Years (1982-89),” and finally, “Retro/Revolutionary (1993-98).” 

By drawing links between motorcycle design and contemporary artistic movements, such as Russian Constructivism in the 1920s or the ironic consumerism of 1980s appropriation art, the curators inserted these objects into the modernist and postmodernist histories of art. However, this aesthetic emphasis was offset by a corresponding attempt to illustrate links between motorcycles and the consumer culture of an expanding middle class as well as popular films like The Wild One and Easy Rider. Through an exploration of the motorcycle as commodity, the exhibition refused to treat bikes as purely aesthetic objects, and thereby it displayed an iconoclastic (within the conventional art museum) affinity for youth and kitsch. However, the insistence on design excellence helped to offset more unsavory agents—such as war or activities like “chopping”—in the evolution of form. The orientation text for the final section makes evident the marriage of design, technology, and commerce that characterizes the evolutionary script throughout. Combining the ethos of vanguardism with postmodern marketing savvy, it states:

The 1990s is the decade in which . . . 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.[4]

In this gallery, the technological promise innate in the steam-powered bicycle and manifest in the stripped down precision of the BMW R32 or the “super speedy” Honda CB750 Four reaches its ultimate expression in the Yamaha GTS1000 or the Ducati 916. Similarly, the creative prerogatives of designers-past find their perfection in Gaulluzi’s “grunge ‘Monster’” or the Aprilia Moto 6.5. Thus, while the content and rhetoric of the show struck a contrarian pose to the tacit rules of the modernist white cube, the form of the exhibition followed convention. Just like European modernism, the motorcycle’s history reveals an evolution of style that becomes visible when the bikes are lined up in chronological order.

Nonetheless, the flip concession to market forces in the text panels and promotional materials raised questions about the role of The Art of the Motorcycle in Krens’ management style and the “corporate populism” of his curatorial agenda.[5] From this point of view, The Art of the Motorcycle, along with subsequent exhibitions of Armani fashions, Brazilian art, and Norman Rockwell’s paintings, are criticized not only for the inappropriateness of their content for a museum founded to showcase “non objective art,” but also for the sources of their funding. In the case of The Art of the Motorcycle, BMW’s sponsorship is likened to Armani’s underwriting of the exhibition of his fashions or the investment of the Brazilian government in Brazil:Body and Soul.

The Art of the Motorcycle differs in important ways from the shows with which it is routinely compared. First, its sponsor, BMW, did not dictate the content of the exhibition (as in the Armani and Brazil exhibitions), nor were BMW motorcycles given any special emphasis within the exhibition. And unlike Norman Rockwell, who was always outside of the range of modernist art and who exemplifies much of what modernism historically opposed, the motorcycle, as an emblem of industrial design, has a legitimate claim on the modern art museum.[6] Rather, what mattered here was that the exhibition of motorcycles not only crossed the line between fine art and commercial culture that the art museum has historically worked to police, but also challenged conventional conceptions of audience. While the audience for high fashion, Latin American art, or a beloved figure of Americana might have deviated a bit from art-world norms, The Art of the Motorcycle appealed to radically “othered” segments of the general population. As it turns out, it was the motorcycle enthusiasts as much as the motorcycles themselves that generated critical commentary, both positive and negative.

The enormous popularity of The Art of the Motorcycle—and here popularity means not just as high attendance but as a particular kind of attendance—was presented as evidence of everything from a loss of cultural values, to the American obsession with speed, to the always unholy alliance between corporate culture and the “fine arts.” Witness Peter Schejldahl’s opening caveat in his review for the Village Voice:

The uptown Guggenheim’s big-bang motorcycle show—the most publicly successful offering in the museum’s history, we are told—raises two hot issues. Three if you count motorcycles, which I don’t. Motorcycles do only a little for me, and that little is kind of icky. Like guns, motorcycles are innately insane devices … and objects of unwholesome worship. Oozing displaced Eros, they are fetish machines and religious substitutes, traducing the spirit, while mortifying the flesh .... But hey, to each his or her bag. Earth in the 21st century bodes to be a bag planet, subdivided by enthusiasms. (125)

Schejldah’s subtle allusion to Italian Futurism and its praise of the hygiene of violence acknowledges the motorcycle’s place within vanguard art; however, his glib dismissal of the twenty-first century as a “bag planet” chastises the exhibition for pandering to the base desires of a decadent age. Thus, the popular appeal of this exhibition becomes proof of the consumerist ethos of our degraded epoch. Rick Woodward concluded his review for ARTnews with similar observations:

The lasting impression from this survey is the tingle of covetousness. One can’t help wanting to own one of these babies. The design of the machines seems to have taken a backseat—or at least a sidecar—to the designs on the consumer. When an exhibition label can tout one of the sponsor’s latest items, in this case the 1997 BMW R1200 C, as “typically environmentally friendly, high-tech, and safe,” the leakage of advertising copy into the curatorial process is unnerving. Was the Guggenheim exploring the wellsprings of mechanical innovation or helping one of its financial supporters move product? (167)

In slight contrast, Michael Kimmelman, of The New York Times, conceded that “corporate sponsorship doesn’t necessarily mean corporate noodling in curatorial decisions”; however, he reiterates the consumerist injunction by ending his review in praise of the Vespa, admitting that “it’s probably one of the least exciting bikes in the show. But I don’t care (the aesthete’s prerogative?). It’s the one I want” (37).

The journalistic response to this exhibition reveals a discomfort with both the motorcycle and its enthusiasts. Another journalist for ARTnews wrote of the “visitors who clogged the revolving doors” (Subotnick 32) of the Guggenheim, a description that surely bears a hint of disdain for the “hoary masses” when it comes to institutions of culture and distinction. This unspoken unease came to the fore in Schejldahl’s hysterical review, where he described these “first-time museum goers,” who “bring their families, tattoos, and tattooed families into the holy space” of the museum, as “moto-nuts” given over to “abject mechanical idolatry” (125). Despite the unsavory language in his tract, Schejldahl insists that these “exotics” are “not interlopers”; rather, “they are authentic American aesthetes who put their lives where their love is” (125). Employing the funerary language of a whole chorus of museum critics, he concludes, “They exude a raw imaginative ardor that our art institutions languish for lack of” (125). And here it is important to note the primitivizing motif that structures the entire review, as it appears again and again in relation to this exhibition and its othered audience. 

The Motorcycle as Cultural Artifact

The exhibition sheds light on the motorcycle not only as an achievement in design and technology but as a cultural icon, influencing and influenced by popular culture. In keeping with the Field’s mission to explore the Earth and its people, the Museum’s installation supplements the Guggenheim’s with new material, focusing on the diverse individuals and groups who have used the motorcycle to shape their identities.... As a cultural exhibit, The Art of the Motorcycle explores the bike’s important role in defining community and identity. (“Art of the Motorcycle”)

At the Field Museum of Natural History, The Art of the Motorcycle was legitimized by appealing to an expanded definition of anthropological culture as any socio-communal organization. As the exhibition rationale quoted above makes clear, the Field Museum distinguished its exhibition from the Guggenheim model by emphasizing the individual and communal identities of riders. With references to “popular culture,” the “earth and its people,” and “communities of mind,” its organizers insisted at every turn that the motorcycle was not only a “cultural artifact” but also appropriate as an anthropological display. In response to the rhetorical question “How can a motorcycle be a cultural artifact?” museum President and CEO, John W. McCarter, Jr., invokes the observation of Alaka Wali, the Field’s Curator of Anthropology:

Anthropologists study the way human beings adapt to their environment. That’s what we mean by culture. Culture isn’t limited to the ways of other people—people we study as though they were “exotic” or “primitive” versions of ourselves. That’s how museums of the 19th century viewed it. But modern anthropology recognizes that culture is also what we do here, today. (“From the President”)

McCarter and Wali’s comments reveal the pressures on ethnographic and anthropological institutions to decolonize their collections and exhibitionary practices by turning their gaze upon modern subjects and the cultures of the West. As many historians of the museum have noted, modern techniques of display were shaped by the development of historicized disciplines such as history, art history, archeology, and anthropology as well as the progressive direction of industrial capitalism and late-nineteenth-century imperialism. As a consequence Bennett argues that exhibition played a key role in connecting the histories of Western nations and civilizations to those of other peoples, but only by separating the two in providing for an interrupted continuity in the order of peoples and races—one in which “primitive peoples” dropped out of history altogether in order to occupy a twilight zone between nature and culture (Birth 77).

In this way, the evolutionary narratives on display in museum exhibits reinforced a colonial ideology in which non-Western cultures were deemed primitive and therefore sub-human and eminently exploitable. Further, Curtis Hinsley has shown, with respect to the ethnographic displays at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, that the techniques of display employed at the Fair not only presented colonized people as raw materials, but also as commodities. Recalling that these people were displayed along with the material goods and achievements of industrialized nations, Hinsley reminds us that knowledge of the “other” (the alibi for human display) was an essential component of preaching the virtues of global markets and Empire.

This legacy is built into the very bones of the Field Museum of Natural History. Founded in 1893 by Frederic Ward Putnam out of the collections he amassed for the anthropological exhibitions at the Columbian Exposition, the museum was forged at the intersection of commercialized spectacle and science, on the tail end of manifest destiny and in the heart of a national campaign to “salvage” the nation’s dying indigenous heritage. Like so many others, the Field Museum is haunted by its sensational past and mired in the ethical quagmire of contemporary museum debates over repatriation and the politics of representation.[7] Thus recent years have witnessed the revamping of permanent exhibitions to rid them of the traces of racial theories past and to convert static displays into interactive, multimedia environments informed by more current scientific theories regarding biodiversity, genomics, and the space-time continuum. Further, temporary exhibitions entitled Body Art: Marks of Identity and Baseball as America have been added to the more conventional rotation of shows on minerals, bugs, and folk life. Within this context, The Art of the Motorcycle offered the natural history museum a golden opportunity to exhibit its post-colonial sensitivity. The Field Museum benefited economically from taking on an already organized and highly promoted exhibition, while also parlaying the populist appeal of this show into an advertisement for natural history museums in general (as offering something distinct from their cousin, the art museum) and its enlightened status in particular.

The “multiplicity of [cultural] meanings” the exhibition claimed for the motorcycle was elicited through the classic exhibitionary techniques of any museum. Just like the Guggenheim display, the bikes were arranged in chronological order by decade introduced by a text panel with a string of terms meant to cue a broader historical moment or context. For example, under the subtitle “The Consumer Years: 1980-99” the text read: “CNN - Dallas - MTV- Chicago Bears- Mt. Saint Helens – Greenpeace - nutri-sweet - Salman Rushdie - rap music - AIDS.” Text panels explained each bike’s technological or design innovations, but no attempt was made to link the object to the context denoted in this buzz-word fashion. However, exemplary “communities” or “identities” were treated along the way in supplementary panels documented with text and archival photographs. The “communities and identities” treated ranged from the “Capitalist Tools”—the motorcycle club organized by Malcolm Forbes Sr., shown seated triumphantly on their “hogs” in Tienamen Square—to the motocross racing circuit, to the RUBS (an acronym for the “Rich Urban Bikers” who had increased motorcycle sales by 43% in the 5 years prior to the exhibition).[8]

This buzzword approach to context forces the viewer to “fill in the blanks,” and it also reveals the extent to which modern museum display assumes a naturalized link between an essentialized “culture” and the artifacts that are said to emanate from it. The first text panel of the exhibition proudly claims that the lessons of this exhibition can be “found in nearly every exhibition hall of this museum” and this is, in fact, true. Near the entrance of the motorcycle show one passed a display of shoes from around the world, excerpted from the conditions of their production, use, and symbolic exchange and converted into ethnographic objects of display. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett refers to this surgical approach to representation as the “art of metonymy” wherein an “object is a part that stands in for an absent whole” (19). Through the acts of defining, detaching, and displaying a thing, ethnographers convert fragments into metonymic objects capable of signifying experience lived elsewhere. However, it is not the absent life-world to which the object points and for which it stands as a part that guarantees its ethnographic truth, but rather, the “agency of display” that in claiming to present a fragment, creates the culture as a coherent whole (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 19).

The lack of imagination evident within the motorcycle exhibition further reflects critically on the rest of the natural history exhibitions, revealing the progressivist and developmentalist logic that underpins all chronological displays as well as the essentialization of “culture” and “cultures” that occurs when a targeted population is produced, reduced, and represented by a metonymic object. This approach was also evident at the Guggenheim, but because the motorcycle’s status as cultural artifact was not the primary explanatory grid, it mattered less. Rather, the links between the motorcycle and motorcyclists became most problematic at the Field Museum. Just as the display of Native American and African artifacts has fostered assumptions about the populations metonymically invoked by these objects, the display of the motorcycle as a sub-cultural artifact invited speculation about the “exotic” populations it claimed to represent. We should ask how this approach to motorcycle culture packages the motorcycle and its riders? And what ends and whose interests does this object of ethnography serve?

With The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition the museum, as a disciplinary institution, produces two audiences, each of which is governed differently through its relationship to the motorcycle. First we have those who don’t ride. For them the death-defying exotic “other” serves to reinforce the logic of their safe automobiles. Thus their conduct is shown to be rational through the displacement of fear and risk onto the motorcycle. Those who drive Volvos and religiously observe safety-belt laws can gawk at the primitives in their visceral glory. The “moto-nut,” on the other hand, is provided a sanitized, essentialized, and homogenized version of “his (sic) culture.” The creation of this imagined community works to situate the individual biker into a collective culture. Moreover, the inclusion of this formerly marginalized culture into the legitimating space of the museum admits all bikers into a broader civic enterprise. For as Bennett reminds us, “going to museums is not simply about looking and learning,” it is also a place of structured conduct in which behavior is targeted for ethical modification.

The Motorcycle as Governmental Culture

Yet there is only one thing that makes a “real” biker, and it isn’t what marque you prefer. It’s whether you give “The Wave” to every rider you pass. This is because motorcyclists share a stronger secret bond than any spurious historicizing can ever forge: pound for pound, they are the nicest folk on the planet. Nice—yech, huh? Don’t let it get around…. It will positively ruin your image. (Pierson 64)

Beyond the hallowed realm of the museum, much work has been done to clean up the image of motorcycling and unify biker experience. As the quote above, taken from the Guggenheim Museum’s Motorcycle Mania,[9] makes very clear, motorcyclists are “good people,” and the defining characteristic of real members of this culture is their “good peopleness,” a very serviceable tautology if you like that sort of thing.

We would argue this emanates from at least three sources. First, though not necessarily foremost, motorcycle manufacturers have attempted to broaden their market by softening the image of motorcycling. Harley-Davidson (H-D) in particular has done extensive work in this area and in economic terms it has certainly paid off. Second, a number of television exposés with a wide variety of titles, but a uniformity of theme, have provided a progressive narrative that doesn’t deviate much from that elaborated by the Field Museum’s exhibit. Third, and most interesting, some motorcyclists, most often in the guise of motorcycle-oriented organizations, have been working to clean up their image. This has been going on for years and, in fact, the notion of the one-percenters was popularized by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) in an attempt to claim that only one percent of the motorcycling population were outlaws. One telling response to this attempt to speak for and define “the majority” of motorcyclists is that many wear badges and patches with “1%” on their leathers.[10] More recently motorcyclist organizations have reshaped their image via fundraising events that benefit poor children, breast cancer victims, and myriad others.[11] These benefit rides function as both public service and public service announcements, telling the world that motorcyclists are not only decent law-abiding citizens, but caring and compassionate participants in the post-welfare-state “1,000-points of light” modality.[12] By briefly reflecting on each of these sources of change we will further explain how motorcycle culture functions as a malleable construct that serves the needs of capital and governance, rather than simply those of motorcyclists.

The moral of a 2001 A&E documentary entitled The Wild Ride of Outlaw Bikers is that bikers—though once a dangerous element—are now a useful and even valuable part of society. Like the exhibitions, the A&E documentary provides a narrative about the history of motorcycling from its inception to the dawn of the new caring motorcyclist. According to this story, motorcyclists have always been misunderstood. Recently, however, through their own efforts and the reduction of prejudice, bikers have emerged as just another consumer fetish group, one that has made a difference by organizing various fund raising rallies and runs for such causes as multiple sclerosis, breast cancer research, Toys for Tots, and AIDS. This radical redefinition of what it means to be a biker has gone the route of family values. The documentary continually informs us that bikers are really a great big happy family and are just like any other “normal” Americans.

The Wild Ride of Outlaw Bikers may have missed the boat when it comes to the newest outlaw bikers by dealing almost exclusively with H-D and its riders. Other elements of the biker crowd are left entirely out of the picture, such as more recent biker groups who prefer the sport bike or “crotch rocket” as their steed. By limiting its scope, Outlaw Bikers helped promote H-D while also promoting a type of motorcycle affiliation that is palatable, family friendly, and highly marketable.

This redefinition has a lot to do with the re-emergence of H-D in the 1980s and the tremendous success of their horizontal marketing strategies. By extending the range of goods well beyond that of actual motorcycle gear, H-D has created one of the most recognizable brands of the past twenty years. From the ubiquitous Harley t-shirts to the nostalgia-drenched Harley-Davidson Cafés, H-D has successfully cleaned up its image and along with it that of Harley riders. At the same time, the demographics have shifted upscale and the typical Harley buyer of the new millennium is—at least according to H-D—as likely to be a professor, lawyer, doctor, or investment banker as he is a classic rock-listening factory worker. And truth be told, today the cost of a used Harley, let alone a new one, is higher than most working class riders can afford. The Japanese motorcycle manufacturers have helped provide this economic niche with less expensive look-alikes. But, even this, according to motorcycle “purists,” has weakened the bond between H-D and the modified cruiser with its rebel image. Cleaning up motorcyclists’ image is not a new marketing strategy. Honda, most say successfully, rode their “You meet the nicest people” campaign to economic victory, becoming the most dominant marque in the US market by the mid-1960s and shortly thereafter the entire world. How ironic, that Harley—the brand implicitly being attacked by Honda—rode its own nice-image campaign to dethrone Honda in the US market during the 1980s and 90s. Ducati and BMW have clearly engaged in lifestyle marketing as well, via cafés, clothing, and kitsch. But their attempts haven’t deviated too far from their historical buyers—rather affluent within the motorcycling market. Furthermore, the type of riding and style of these bikes historically have not been articulated to the roughnecks imagined to be astride a V-twin.

Like all corporations, H-D dreams of dominating markets, but it has come to realize that by self-initiating cultural events, cultural history, and the cultural mediation of information, it can alter not only its own image, but that of motorcyclists. One way H-D does so is via rally-philanthropy.[13]

We certainly don’t want to diminish the philanthropic activity motorcyclists engage in. Nor do we want to simplify the motivations of motorcyclists or maintain that they have been duped into supporting governmental attempts to steal health-care and welfare benefits via a sleight-of-hand private-sector replacement. We would argue this form of philanthropy does work to re-present motorcycling to a formerly frightened, distant, and even spiteful car-driving population. The second of William’s definitions—culture as a “whole way of life”—works as a form of self-presentation. This philanthropy is lived, ridden, and written. Ten thousand bikers riding to raise funds for efforts to fight breast cancer is something local news cameras get a kick out of. It disrupts previous images of bikers or even worse, the “biker gang.” Many motorcyclists have worked hard to reorient both their own way of life and how those lives are understood publicly. But, as stated earlier, this is not entirely new. Struggles over image are almost always fought from within and without. Motorcyclists are no different. As a stereotyped marginal population, one can understand why they would be invested in altering assumptions that have led to unfair legislation, insurance exclusion, police brutality, public scorn, and vigilantism. Yet, this desire is by no means supported by all motorcyclists. In fact, it is vehemently opposed by many. Some see it as destructive of that which makes motorcycling so attractive in the first place. To those few—who do jump astride machines with more horsepower than your average econo-box, which scream louder than 18-wheelers or an 18-year-old’s bass thumping Eclipse and cut through the SoCal canyons quicker than Beverly Hills Boxsters—there is no desire to be accepted by the car-driving public. Therefore, what we see as particularly problematic with the kind of sanitizing and essentializing narratives deployed by the Field Museum, the A&E documentary, and like-minded activities are their attempts to create an undesired and unacceptable unity where there is so clearly a multiplicity of motorcycle cultures. This act of power, to clean up motorcyclists’ image, is an act of violence to those who deny this All-American Poster-Boy (and Girl) motorcycling. Any claim to describe what motorcyclists are really like is an attempt to produce a normative standard against which all others are, by extension, deficient. Thus, even if this image maintenance comes from some motorcyclists, the effects may very well be equally oppressive. There is no more guarantee that motorcyclists will “get it right,” than there is with mainstream cultural institutions or corporations.

Getting it Genealogical

The demands of comprehensibility and multi-perspectivalism are insurmountable: what should be included and who gets to determine the limits and rules of inclusion? Rather, we avoid the aesthetic and essentializing models of the art and natural history exhibitions. We are not denying that motorcycling is experienced communally or that there might be ways of codifying its culture, rather we are concerned with institutional practices as they have been brought to bear on the motorcycle and, by extension, the populations involved with them. We propose exhibitionary practices organized genealogically. What might that look like? We turn to Michel Foucault on issues of method and politics.

Foucault has argued in various ways for the practice of genealogy, which is “the tactic which, once it has described local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them” (10). A genealogical project, therefore, begins by examining power structures and the attendant discourses that attempt to limit, curtail, or redirect the voices of subjugated populations. A genealogy then attempts to work with the discourses of those who have been subjugated as a way of exposing the limits of power and the productive possibilities of resistance. Starting with “local discursivities,” we would focus on the power/knowledge relationships that motorcycling is embroiled in. In this case, we can think about how economic forces, museum practices, sociologies of delinquency, police anti-motorcycle gang teams, discourses of safety, filmic images, and other cultural forces have worked to produce a dominant way of understanding motorcycling and have regarded it as irrational (unsafe,[14] delinquent, criminal, exotic) or useful if disciplined (for military and police use, middle-class leisure markets, collecting and speculative activities). The genealogical exhibition would begin with compelling questions regarding the relationship between culture and power, not simple assumptions about the unity of cultures or the defense of aesthetic judgment. Some guiding questions for an exhibit to address might be: What is the relationship between mobility and identity? How has the motorcycle always functioned as an element for mobilizing the war-machine and a component of flexible and stealth policing? How might the chopper be understood as a vernacular art form and a mode of resistance to an increasingly expert-monopolized technocracy? These questions would be starting points and the resultant exhibition would treat more than the motorcycle. We could trace chopping practices within diverse communities of use—youth, racialized and ethnic groups, hot rodders, or even the regional folk tradition or class-based practices of jerry-rigging and the “Rube Goldberg machine.” Perhaps we would include legislative timelines that made motorcyclists with chopped bikes the object of police surveillance because of so-called safety concerns.[15] Our text-panels might locate these differences within a critical historical context that examines the interrelated issues of race, class, gender, and youth sub-cultures. We might have maps showing where and when policing has taken place. We would include popular representations of these practices internal and external to these cultures. We would examine the importance of film—from youthsploitation films of the 1950s to examples like 2001’s The Fast and the Furious and 2003’s Biker Boyz. So the motorcycle would not be the unifying object, but only one node of a larger network of cultural, political, and economic relations. To take an example from The Art of the Motorcycle: here the Hells Angels were considered as part of a history of groups organized around maintaining the homo-social order of military fraternity. An exhibition like the one we are advocating wouldn’t treat the Hells Angels as a civic sub-culture, but would examine the residual war-machine that produced men with an affinity for risk and thrill-seeking who were not easily re-integrated into the safety-dominated post-war order. We might ask the question, why call the Hells Angels a gang? What effect does that have on how they are understood? The Veterans of Foreign Wars, which provides another post-war mode of homo-social bonding, isn’t called a gang. Who has the power to place a criminal tag on some organizations and not others? In other words, comparing the Hells Angels to the VFW may be more useful to understanding culture, power, and motorcycling than comparing the BMWMOA with HOG or providing a motorcycle timeline. The motorcycle, discussed in this fashion would emerge with a specificity determined by its social and historical context, not an object shorn of those ties, an aesthetic object as such.

In conclusion, we ask what is gained by expanding the definition of art, or by introducing the so-called “sub-cultural” into the disciplinary practices of institutions of power and knowledge? In the end, the governmental logic of these practices can be discerned in the brief synopsis of a puff-piece by Ali Subotnick entitled “Look Ma, No Hands,” where the author details the “surprise of everyone, from security officers to curators and administrators” at the “code of honor” that motorcycle aficionados displayed while circulating within the spaces of high “culture” (32). This praise for the well-disciplined patron speaks to the governmental logic of the museum, as a space in which subjects and objects are “tamed” and managed toward particular ends. It should have been obvious that motorcyclists would “behave” on entering the highly routinized and surveilled space of the public museum. While museums work on bodies and attempt to civilize patrons—to inculcate within them desires and capacities—these kinds of statements about the visitors also work to produce a newly marketable image, a new truth and articulation between the motorcycle, rider, and museum that has already demonstrated its use in corporate branding activities. Furthermore, it places motorcyclists on public display, both in the exhibit and as patrons, to be assessed by art critics, other museum patrons, motorcycle art speculators, and, not least, motorcycle manufacturers. These judgments are economic and disciplinary in nature.

We would suggest that the real legacy of this exhibition can be seen in a 2003 Nissan car ad campaign that depicted two burly, dirty bikers contemplating impressionist landscapes within the clean, well-lit space of a museum gallery. The campaign’s slogan read, “SHIFT expectations,” and it drew upon the very assumptions about bikers and culture that were part of these exhibits.[16] The vision of these two uncultured bodies within the spaces of high culture is meant to shock the viewer. However, the ad implicitly invokes the governmental nature of the museum itself, by asserting that the culture on display exerts a disciplining force on its viewers, converting rough riders into contemplative well-tempered subjects. Further, their presence within the museum is evidence of its ability to craft cultural citizens who can then be brought into the fold of civil society. Ultimately, this is where the effects of the motorcycle as art and the motorcycle as culture come together in the governmentalization of motorcycle populations and culture(s) for the purpose of crafting responsible citizens and good consumers.

Toby Miller has argued that in addition to political and economic rights, citizenship also comprises claims to cultural belonging. “Now that many forms of publicly expressed identity have emerged from a combination of expanded human and civil rights discourse and expanded niche marketing,” he writes, “globalizing and privatizing norms merge with forms of consumer targeting to produce new kinds of civic life.” However, cultural citizenship entails more than recognition from the mainstream for marginalized populations. As a technology of government, culture works to fashion responsible citizen-subjects obliged to the social and loyal to both the free market and the law. In fashioning a cultured identity for the motorcyclist, The Art of the Motorcycle has made the motorcycle and its riders available for a whole host of civic and marketing agendas, some of which we’ve discussed here. Clearly, this Nissan ad would not be viewed in quite the same way had The Art of the Motorcycle never happened. And while it envisions an imaginary scenario, we would argue that it speaks to a popular truth created by the exhibition and furthered by various motorcycling organizations that have done extensive public relations work to clean up the image of motorcycling. The question isn’t so much how accurate a depiction of motorcycling these museum displays, ads, and PR campaigns present, but rather how does this sanitized version of motorcycling make it less resistant to the siren call of corporations, governmental surveillance and safety campaigns, as well as the logic of high and low culture the museum displays supposedly set out to dispel?

Notes

Works Cited

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 “Frank Lloyd Riders.” New York Times  Sunday Magazine 14 June 1998: 27.

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---. “Safe Practices and Risky Methods: Governing Motorcyclists through Epiphanies.” Information Theory and Society 1.1 (in press).

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