Biker Culture
by Elisabeth Morse, Art News
June 15, 2000
[Webmaster's Note: discussion of Jeremy and quotations from him dominate this article commencing at the end of the third paragraph.]
With architect Frank Gehry as president and Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Krens as chairman, the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club is more about art and culture than about beards and tattoos.
The informal society started when the Guggenheim's "Art of the Motorcycle" show opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao last year. "Tom and I had the idea that we could have rides for an invited group of people that would have an educational or cultural component but would also be fun," says Ultan Guilfoyle, director of the Guggenheim's film and video department, who organized the show.
Guilfoyle, who rides a Ducati, and Krens, who favors a BMW, had the know-how and the biker connections to gather a star-studded crowd. They invited actress Lauren Hutton, an avid rider who has been involved with the Guggenheim's educational programs, and Hutton called actor Laurence Fishburne. Filmmaker, actor, and photographer Dennis Hopper, a Guggenheim SoHo advisory board member, was also invited. Actor Jeremy Irons, who rides so much that he rarely uses his car, rocker Bob Geldof, and country music crooner Lyle Lovette followed.
Gehry doesn't know how to ride, so he traveled on the back of Irons's bike. "I was the lowest on the totem pole," he explains, "so they made me the head of the club. I enjoyed riding, but I'm 71, so it's a little late for me to take it up."
The Guggenheim arranged for BMW bikes to be on hand for club members in Bilbao, to make things easier. Initially, the weather was not hospitable -- it snowed on the first day. Undeterred, the group took a short spin around the city. Over the next few days, they took 50- to 100-mile excursions through the nearby mountains, stopping along the way for lunch, coffee, and discourse. "We discussed the way motorcycle riding sharpens one's senses, with the weather and the rhythm of the road, in the same way as Frank Gehry's designs -- by exciting your senses and opening you visually to the art within," says Irons.
Hutton, a former art student who counts artists Brice and Helen Marden among her first friends in New York, enjoyed debating the esthetic merits of motorcycles. "One of the great things about fighting about art is that the arguments don't come from the barrel of a gun," she says. In general, the group agreed that bikes should be considered art forms. "These objects have very lovely designs," observes Irons. "Balancing power on two wheels with flair and ingenuity can turn out as beautiful sculptures."
In the future, Guilfoyle would like to take the club to China, where the Guggenheim has connections because of its 1998 "China: 5000 Years" show in New York and the upcoming "America: 300," tentatively scheduled to open at the Shanghai Museum. "People go riding together. It's a communal thing," he says. "But our group is very nonthreatening. We're more likely to want to stop and look at art than go to a biker bar."