Balancing the Bicycle Act: It’s Art in Motion

Were bicycles made to be beautiful? Or are they naturally beautiful, like lightbulbs, canoes and other simple tools?

On a hot day outside the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, a 19th century high-wheeler rolls along the Mall, a preposterous toy--it has a nearly 5-foot front wheel and a little afterthought of a back wheel. It’s a spectacle--it doesn’t roll as much as it proceeds down Madison Drive with the self-conscious serenity of a monarch. It’s beautiful.

There is charm in all of the bicycles on view at a one-day expo this past spring sponsored by the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation--road, mountain, antique, arm-powered, solar-powered and the ultra-downhill gravity racers that look like artillery shells with wheels--and the charm can turn to beauty in a moment.

“When you ride a high-wheeler, it’s quiet--you’re above everybody,” says Larry Black, who is part of the expo and owner of College Park Bicycles in Maryland. “It’s like being on a moving chair with the world going by. You’re in a movie. You’re part of an ever-changing kinetic sculpture.”

Art in motion! A high-wheeler leaning against a tree is ugly--a whimsy from the dark industrial past. The sculpture is complete only when someone mounts it and rides away in a triumph of gyroscopics over gravity, a celebration of the basic business of life--staying upright, keeping going.

Perfectly upright, as it happens on high-wheelers--vertical in the manner of an era when posture was a moral virtue.

It still is in parts of the world such as Vietnam, where straight-spined girls in silk ride heavy black bicycles through the motorbike vulgarity. They look as if they’ve found a means to convert dignity into a driving force--their pedaling seems beside the point. They deserve better bicycles, but around the world, in countries that need the best possible bicycles for transportation and hauling freight (crates of pigs, stacks of bamboo), the technology is clumsy and heavy.

Another exhibitor named Ross Evans, a Stanford-trained engineer, says: “When I went down to Nicaragua, I thought I was going to interact with the people and learn a lot about bicycles, since they’re a major form of transportation and freight-hauling. I was amazed at the machines they used, at how ill-suited they were for the jobs they were doing.”

So he built the Xtracycle, which moves the rear wheel back about 15 inches--far enough that the bike can carry two surfboards. With its freight equipment, it can haul 200 pounds on rough terrain and still have the handling of a mountain bike, Evans says. Just now he rides around the museum terrace with engineering student Erin Anderson standing on the back. She wears a blue T-shirt and khaki shorts that circle her thighs without ever quite touching them. She flares her hands like a shy Aphrodite.

“What better way to sell something good than make it sexy?” Evans says.

His pamphlet pitches “a soul-satisfying alternative to automobile dependence.” And a list of dreams--pure air, free-flowing rivers. . . . “We dream of a people motivated by beauty.”

Bicycles combine beauty with the charm of antiquity, like the charm of frontier Colt revolvers and wood stoves, or the bicycle Paul Newman rides in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” full of the delight of turn-of-the-century invention--it was called a “safety bicycle,” to separate it from the high-wheeler that could respond to a pothole by tossing its rider headfirst into the road. It was easier for women to ride in skirts. And less of a luxury item for young gentlemen, who despised it because it lacked danger and uselessness. Danger and uselessness, as found also in fox hunting and mountain climbing, have always been moral and aesthetic criteria for the rich.

The safety bicycle is what most people ride today.

America went bicycle crazy at the end of the 19th century. Between 1890 and 1900, a third of the patents registered in America had to do with bicycles, according to historians at the Lemelson expo.

Then the craze collapsed. Between 1900 and 1905, the number of American bicycle makers went from 312 to 101. Bicycle engineers went to work on cars, motorcycles and airplanes. Trolleys carried people to work. By the 1920s, bikes were used by delivery boys, but otherwise they were children’s toys, ending up with the ape-hanger handlebar bikes of the ‘60s, and the dirt bikes modeled after dirt-track motorcycles.

In the late ‘60s, bicycles for adults got fashionable again as emblems of ecological purity, as symbols of European sophistication and Third World awareness, as validation of the inner child, as physical-fitness devices, and as self-propelled kinetic sculpture. Grown-ups rediscovered the pleasure of mounting a bicycle and gliding down pavement with the eerie grace of a skeleton walking in a cartoon, or galumphing down a slope on a mountain bike.

Back to the future, forward to the past. Think of the fad now for copies of the old fat-tired Schwinns kids rode in the ‘50s--bikes with the cushioned heft of a Buick Roadmaster, with horns inside mock fuel tanks and front lights like the spotlights on police cars, bicycles for the solid citizens of the future.

In a story called “Bicycle Repairman,” futurist Bruce Sterling writes that even in the year 2037, people “got sentimental about their bike gear. People were strangely reticent and traditional about bikes. . . . People didn’t like their bikes too complicated. They didn’t want bicycles to . . . complain and whine for attention and constant upgrading the way that computers did. Bikes were too personal.”

Bicycles have the allure of so much outmoded transportation gear.

Sailboats, Adirondack guide boats (with varnish like a film teased from the back of a palmetto bug), steam locomotives, sleighs, sulkies, horses, ship propellers, wooden airplane wings: Their grace lies not just in their forms and finishes but in their potential for motion--the proprietary quality of a canoe nosing its way into a morning mist on the lake, the fierce and provisional triumph of a Piper Cub taking off from a grass field.

Meanwhile, along with Ross Evans’ Xtracycle, the latest progress in Third World bicycling has come along the Mexican border, where groups of illegal immigrants have pedaled madly past checkpoints, bent over like road racers in helmets and jerseys. After a year of this, and maybe 300 crossings, our alert Border Patrol agents got suspicious, perhaps wondering why the race was always south to north.

But who wants to mess with them? Packs of bicycle racers look like spacemen in their plastic-pompadour helmets and insect sunglasses. Nobody messes with extraterrestrials.

So they’d fly on through with an alarming beauty--the delicate, speed-stretched crouch you see in the pelotons, as French racing jargon calls the packs, tilting through curves of the Tour de France, or through weekend parks all over America, like packs of machine-drive wolf spiders in spandex--raked forward like 1960s California hot rods. They don’t so much approach as descend on you with a cool so regimented it’s a law unto itself . . . no baskets, no backpacks (except for an occasional CamelBak water bag), and God help you if there’s a little ding-dong bell on your handlebars. They’ve surrendered all individuality to ride wheel to glittering wheel, so close that a fall in front will take down all of them--order so extreme that it always verges on chaos.

One step further out, chaos is the aesthetic of bicycle couriers. They are outlaw racers, too eccentric or dreadlocked or egotistical to submerge themselves in the drone-drive of the peloton. Their peloton is downtown automobile traffic, which they decorate with their shuttlings, dodgings, dashes--life and work as a near-death experience.

Their art is shock theater, performance art, the theater of the absurd, a death-defying yet Chaplinesque thumb-your-nose comedy performed on everything from curb-jumping $2,500 mountain bikes to junk they don’t have to lock because no one will steal it. (Every bike offers a freedom of its own.)

Ultimately, there is the “ur bike” as described in the Rivendell Reader, which is a cross between Bicycling magazine and the Whole Earth Catalog. “It is primal, stripped, spare, uncompromising . . . the battle scarred, flat-black, one speed, no brakes, skinny tires, courier-style city bike.”

No brakes. You can’t even coast because the pedals never stop turning. You pull backward on your pedals to slow down, but it doesn’t work very well, so you live by maneuver and instinct.

“Power, control, finesse. . . . You so dominate the flow of traffic that you soon come to feel that the city is yours, all yours. You thread through clots of stalled cars. . . . it doesn’t hurt if you adopt the look of a disgruntled postal worker carrying fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria) in your courier bag.”

The look is performance, the simplicity is minimalism, the bicycling itself takes kinetic sculpture to the point of blood sport combined with improvised ballet, as if Isadora Duncan had taken up bullfighting. One imagines Ernest Hemingway writing about the bike couriers instead of toreros. “He ran the red light well and truly and flipped the bird at a motorist who honked and you knew this was one of the great ones.”

As the bicycle couriers remind us, bicycles mean freedom.

When you walk, the world is looking at you. When you ride, you look at the world. It’s like wearing sunglasses: You’re not invisible, but you’re abstracted one level from reality, like the couriers or the riders of high-wheelers.

Or inserted further into it, in the case of the riders of mountain bikes, which carry you back to a primal American dilemma, the struggle between our love of technology and our love of wilderness.

They’re conspicuous technology, with all the grace of pipe scaffolding bolted to wheels. They bristle with springs and levers, tires with tread knobs the size of molars, everything outsize, deliberately brutal. They also scream the song of the wild--they’re made to meld with not only the roadless wilderness but the terrors of gravity itself. Man vs. nature? With nature? Philosophers of bicycling like to say that the mountain bike is the first postmodern bicycle, nostalgic, high-tech and paradoxical, a skidding, rock-jumping irony.

How very modern bicycles seem now with their indexed shifting of 24-speed derailleurs driving composite wheels under hydraulic seat posts over shock-absorbing frames.