In Gasoline Hubert Dobler assaults the polite electronic façade of our postmodern service-industry landscape with his mean machine Honda CB550 Four, 1976. It is gasoline, the return of the repressed. No brakes. Muscular energy.

The power is raw. The motorcycle is chained to the ceiling in Dobler’s Bull video and it screams and bucks into the air and up against the walls like a wild beast.

And, through Jack the Pelican’s three galleries, Dobler has roughrided himself through a sinewy course of sharp-left killer turns, painful corner beads and posts. Around and around. Again and again. Even the narrowing straightaway is perilous. Dobler takes a beating, but he is Austrian. —He can take it.

In the process, he burns rubber across the pristine white floors. Specially installed for the exhibition, these coated boards register the fearless navigator’s momentary flickers of hesitation and readjustment as he flings himself headlong, and also his stops and starts of recovery after crashing. And gasoline cans litter the floor like so many crushed Budweisers. In the back gallery, the beast Honda sleeps on an institutional steel-frame bed, tucked cozy under a woolen blanket. (Yah, the motorbike is tired.)

Gasoline, like liquid Viagra, fuels the lone cowboy’s raging libido. It is pure forward motion and bikers everywhere feel the exhilaration. The rest of us on foot -pedestrians, shoppers and especially gallery goers-are wont to feel as slow-meat, potential targets. Dobler’s rowdy symbolic adventure is a timely meditation on the American romance with aggressive power.