Date of publication: 17.04 1999
*********************************************************************
From: New Museum of Contemporary Art
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 15:05:37 -0400
Subject: Picturing the Modern Amazon
Picturing the Modern Amazon
Co-edited by Joanna Frueh, Laurie Fierstein, and Judith Stein
This catalogue will unlock ideas about contemporary women's power
by looking at the representation of the hypermuscular and
physically strong woman and by exploring both their image and
their reality. Using the bodybuilder as a prototype of the strong
woman, the catalogue will present modern Amazons as a culture with
a history, as a dazzling and transgressive current phenomenon, and
as avatars of the future. Published in conjunction with the New
Museum's exhibition in March 2000, this will be the first
exploration of the bodybuilder as seen through archival and
historical materials, comic books, and contemporary art.
Description and Table of Contents
Although academics and artists have produced much work dealing
with the body -- especially the female body -- over the past
twenty-five years, no substantive book has been published on
female bodybuilders whose particular physicality resonates with
the significance of large social issues such as female
corporeality, female pleasure -- in appearance and in strength --
and the dynamics of bodily and social power.
Today, as well as historically, the female form has been
manufactured. A recent example in fashion was the waif, a
construction of feminine frailty, vulnerability, and soulful
childlikeness. Concurrent with recent manufacturing of female
form is the development of a physique phenomenon as yet virtually
unaddressed by artists and scholars. This phenomenon is the
creation of the modern Amazon, the woman of muscle. In the past
two and a half decades, politics, medicine, theoretical discourse,
the law, art, and many other cultural arenas have called into
question traditional definitions of women and power. Many of
these questionings concern issues of gender, beauty, and women's
agency. In light of this history and ongoing discussion,
Picturing the Modern Amazon considers the questions below.
Discussions of these questions will be developed in foundational
topics and concepts necessary to an understanding of the modern
Amazon:
* How does the strong female relate to women's empowerment?
Might a woman's muscle and the strength derived from that
muscle be considered a metaphor for social, political, and
economic empowerment?
* Does the muscular woman merely mimic male muscularity in yet
another cultural and psychological forfeiture of women's
identity, or does the emergence of the modern Amazon signify
more complex aspirations?
* If some women create a muscular body in order to display it, to
be looked at and appreciated, what does bodily exhibition imply
in relation to women's general obsession with their bodies and
to the (required) display of women's body in today's society?
* How is bodybuilding related to a woman's bodily pleasure?
* What is the relationship between narcissism and a muscular
woman's attention to her body?
* How does the representation of strong women combat stereotypes
of women as victims?
* What are the aesthetic and erotic nature of female muscle? Do
the race and age of the hypermuscular woman affect their
aesthetic and erotic nature?
* Is woman's bodybuilding a feminist enterprise? Is the
hypermuscular female a feminist body?
* How are the ancient Amazons a heritage for the contemporary
woman bodybuilder and strength athlete?
Contents
o Acknowledgements
o Preface: The Body Artist
Irving Lavin
o Introduction
The Modern Amazon
Laurie Fierstein
Object Lessons
Judith Stein
The Real Nude
Joanna Frueh
o Bring on the Amazons: An Evolutionary History
Jan Todd
o Women's Bodybuilding: A Contemporary History
Steve Wennerstrom
o Ghettos of Obscurity: Individual Sovereignty and the Struggle
for Recognition in Female Bodybuilding
Leslie Heywood
o Toward a New Aesthetics of Body for the Modern Woman
Al Thomas
o Dream Girl
Michael Cunningham
o Hardcore: The Radical Self-Portraiture of Black Female Bodybuilders
Carla Williams
o My Muscles, Myself: Selected Autobiographical Writings
Nathalie Gassel
o Title to Come (essay on female muscle in comic books)
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
o Interviews with Women Bodybuilders (Pudgy Stockton,
Bev Francis, Lenda Murray, Andrulla Blanchette, Ren?oney)
Joanna Frueh
o Amazons in Fiction: A Bibliography
Pierre Samuel
Contributors
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels Flesh and Blood and
A Home at the End of the World, both published by Farrar Straus &
Giroux. Michael Cunningham's most recent work, The Hours (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux) was the winner of the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for
Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His work has appeared
in the "New Yorker," the "Atlantic Monthly," and the "Paris
Review." He has received fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Laurie Fierstein, a bodybuilder and social activist, is a central
figure today in pioneering creative expression for and new
discourse about muscular and physically powerful women. Fierstein
produced the watershed performances of female bodybuilders and
strength athletes, "Evolution F: A Surreal Spectacle of Female
Muscle" (1995) and "Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle
in the World" (1993).
Joanna Frueh is an art historian, art critic, and performance
artist who has written extensively on the female body and
contemporary art. Erotic Faculties (University of California
Press, 1996) is her most recent book, and she is a co-editor of
New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action. She is Professor
of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Nathalie Gassel is a Belgian writer who loves to train with
weights, to display her muscles and her strength, and to wrestle
men. Born in the late 1960's, she wanted to do all that boys her
age were doing. Her daring spirit did not please her mother, who
wanted her to become "feminine". At age 16, Gassel left her
family and was attracted to Thai boxing. Then, at age 20, she
discovered bodybuilding, and she developed sizeable muscles, a
very hard body, and a strength in which she takes great pride.
Gassel's essays describe her feelings both when she trains and
exerts her strength.
Leslie Heywood's most recent books are Bodymakers: A Cultural
Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding (Rutgers 1998) and Pretty Good for
a Girl: A Sports Memoir (The Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1998).
She is currently competing in powerlifting, and teaches cultural
studies at State University of New York, Binghamton.
Irving Lavin has been Professor of the History of Art at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, since 1973. Best
known for his many works on Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), his
research and publications cover a wide range of subjects from Late
Antiquity to Jackson Pollock. For many years he taught at the
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and has lectured at
the Coll? de France, the American Academy in Rome, the
University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is
a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member
and past-President of the US National Committee for the History of
Art (CIHA), and a Foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei
Lincei, Rome, and of the Accademia Clementina, Bologna. Among his
books are Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, New York and
London, 1980, Past-Present. Essays on Historicism in Art from
Donatello to Picasso, Berkeley, 1993, and Erwin Panofsky. Three
Essays on Style, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995.
Pierre Samuel is a French mathematician who has written numerous
books and papers in his field. He is now Professor Emeritus from
the Universit?e Paris-Sud. He is fascinated by Amazons and
female strength and muscles, and his extensive research in these
areas was published in his book Amazones, Guerri?s et Gaillardes
(1975).
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is an independent scholar who teaches
periodically in the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Oregon. Her research and publications center on the evolutionary,
psychological, ontogenetical, and philosophical dimensions of the
tactile-kinesthetic body and on the significance of animate form
-- in broad terms, on what it means to be the bodies we are. A
phenomenological methodology informs much of her research and
writing. She has published six books -- The Phenomenology of
Dance, Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Investigations, The Roots
of Thinking, Giving the Body Its Due, The Roots of Power: Animate
Form and Gendered Bodies, and most recently, The Primacy of
Movement. She has numerous articles as well in philosophy, art,
and science journals. Her current research aims at completing
what was promised in The Roots of Power: a further (and final)
Roots book titled The Roots of Morality. This book continues to
take the question of origins seriously. It attempts to elucidate
the experiential basis of our moral sense and, in turn, to lay out
a viable evolutionary and psychological ethics.
Judith Stein is a curator and art critic. As curator of the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1981-1994, she organized
over 90 exhibitions of contemporary art. Stein writes frequently
for national art publications and was a contributor to The Power
of Feminist Art (Abrams, 1994). She is president of the
International Art Critics Association (AICA), American Section.
Al Thomas is recognized as the foremost contemporary pioneer in
heavy weight training for women. His contributions are analytic
and literary as well as in the field of training techniques.
Thomas began writing on women and muscle in 1952 as the editor of
a Navy newspaper. Since then his controversial articles on
muscular women and female bodybuilders and strength athletes --
as well as male strength athletes and physical culturists -- have
been published nationally in numerous magazines including Ironman,
Strength & Health, Muscular Development, Body and Power, Power and
Fitness, The Sports Reporter, Pallas Journal, Women's Physique
World, and Iron Game History. Thomas co-authored, with Steve
Wennerstrom, the first book on women's bodybudilding, The Female
Physique Athlete: A History to Date; 1977-1983. With a Ph.D. in
American Literature, Thomas taught that subject and others for
thirty-six years. At Kutztown University, from which he retired in
1992, he was also adviser to the school's powerlifting team, which
won national collegiate championships in 1981 and 1982.
Jan Todd, Ph.D., teaches in both Kinesiology and Health Education
and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is
the author of Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive
Exercise in the Lives of American Women (Mercer University Press,
1998), the founder and co-editor of Iron Game History: the Journal
of Physical Culture, and has published numerous articles on the
history of women and exercise. With her husband, Terry Todd, Jan
also serves as the co-curator of the Todd-McLean Collection, the
largest archive in the world in the field of physical fitness,
strength training and bodybuilding. Todd's interest in the
academic study of strength and exercise grew from her personal
involvement in the sport of powerlifting. In the 1970s and early
1980s, Todd was considered by both Sports Illustrated and the
Guinness Book of Records to be the "strongest woman in the world."
Steve Wennerstrom is editor of Women's Physique World magazine and
editor-at-large for FLEX magazine. In addition to his editorial
duties, he is the official historian on women in bodybuilding for
the International Federation of Bodybuilding (IFBB). Considered
without rival in his area of expertise, Wennerstrom possesses an
encyclopedic knowledge about the competitive years of women's
bodybuilding.
Carla Williams is a photographer and writer. She is co-author of
"Look at 'Miss Thing'": The Black Female Body in Photography, 1839
to the Present (forthcoming, 1998). Her publications include
"Naked, Neuter, or Noble: Extremes of the Black Female Body and
the Problem of Photographic History" in The Black Female Body in
American Culture (forthcoming, 1998).
New Museum of Contemporary Art
583 Broadway
New York, New York 10012
www.newmuseum.org <http://www.newmuseum.org>
P: 212-219-1222
F: 212-431-5328
[Note: This sounds terrific, doesn't it? So, who'd like to
join an Amazons International gathering in New York during the
time of the exhibition? -- Editor]
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Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:21:12 PST
From: Daniel Thomas <firestar_@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: The Degradation of the Superheroines in Comics
After reading Thomas's comments about Artemis in AI # 70, I got to
thinking, just what makes a superheroine an Amazon in the first
place? There are several very powerful characters whom I don't
consider to be Amazons.
First and foremost is Meggan of Marvel Comics. Meggan is a
changeling, a faerie born to human parents. Originally, she was
covered in fur, which led her parents to abandon her. She was a
monster, roaming the British countryside until a battle with
England's premier super hero, Captain Britain and his sister,
Psylocke, showed her that normal looking people don't have to be
cruel to her. She discovered her other abilities: Flight,
shape-shifting, and Empathy, and became a beautiful elfen creature
who fell madly in love with Captain (Brian Braddock) Britain.
Later, she discovered that she was also capable of using her
empathy offensively, controlling the elemental forces of nature,
and projecting blasts of mystical force.
My favorite Meggan moment ever was in Excalibur 56, where she (and
the rest of Excalibur) were prisoners of Brian and Betsy
(Psylocke) Braddock's insane brother Jamie (who had the power to
warp organic matter into whatever form he chose) and an alternate
dimensional version of Brian's old flame (Excalibur was one of the
most confusing comic books of all time, but it was also the most
fun). Meggan's words to Jamie are a perfect example of Amazon
virtue:
Meggan: "I am a shape-changer. The threads of order cannot bind
me. I was drugged before, so my power made me become what you
desired -- Brian says I'm 'Empathic' -- But NOW my mind is clear
and free. You cannot affect me."
Jamie: "NO! This is MY dream! I am in control, you stupid bimbo!"
Meggan: "You think me stupid because I cannot read or understand
clever words. But life is bigger than words. Words are just
small noises that hide the truth. I see more than you could
know. (Meggan backfists Jamie.) You have the power to return my
friends to normal. This is not a dream. It is real. As real as
the pain (punches Jamie again). I will hurt you (and again) until
you return my friends (and again) to their true forms. (Meggan is
standing over the broken and bruised Jamie:) I take no joy in
causing you pain. But you are an evil man, and pain is all you
understand."
Now this is an Amazon, right? I don't think so. Meggan has her
moments, such as the above. Unfortunately, she has other moments,
ones which occur far more frequently. The fact that for most of
her superheroic career, she fought solely for Brian, and that when
she believed Brian to be dead, she went catatonic, and then
insane. Despite his frequent infidelity, alcoholism and callous,
uncaring actions towards her, when she discovered that her "Dead"
lover was alive and attempting to return to her, she nearly killed
her teammate Rachel "Phoenix" Summers (who had always been far
more caring towards her than Brian had) in order to force her to
bring Brian back. (Phoenix, incidentally, died as a result of
rescuing Brian and neither CB or Meggan expressed any remorse
about it.)
Then, after Brian left her, Meggan began forming a relationship
with another teammate, Colossus. After several months together,
Brian returned and begged Meggan to marry him, which she accepted,
leaving Colossus (who had also been much more caring towards her
than Brian).
Other characters too, had attempted to intervene for Meggan.
Nightcrawler grew outraged by Captain Britain's treatment of
Meggan, and attempted to form a relationship with her, only to be
beaten senseless by Brian.
So here we have this character with enormous potential, incredible
power, and an abusive relationship. Truly degrading of a super-
heroine. Other characters, such as the Scarlet Witch, are in
similar situations.
Other problems with female characterizations: we'll use Wonder
Girl of DC Comics, and Jubilee and Deathcry of Marvel Comics as
examples. These are teenaged characters, all of whom are (while
fun) endlessly irritating. Sadly, they are the template for
teenaged female characters. They're giggly, extremely giggly.
I've never known a woman so bubbly. Jubilee with crack bubblegum,
rollerblades through houses and goes out of her way to be
irritating. Wondergirl is so hyperactive that other characters
have to resist the urge to beat her into pulp. She's so obsessed
with being like Wonder Woman (not a bad thing, by any means) that
she ignores things that would be important in her own life.
Deathcry started out fine, being tough, competent, strong, fierce,
until she let down her facade and became Jubilee.
Still we have characters who the artists got right. Magdelene of
the Mighty Avengers and Barda of the Justice League. These women
fight physically and *Gasp* wear effective ARMOR!!!! Magdelene's
resembles the typical look of science fiction/role playing game
battle suit, except in these mediums, it's usually worn by a male
(the female's armor designer feels that the nipple is the most
vulnerable part of the body, the rest is a moot point and can be
exposed). Barda, although she has a cape, which is something I
never understood about super heroes, wears a medieval type of
garment, with a breastplate, shoulder pads, gauntlets, and a --
Lord help us all -- HELMET that COVERS HER HAIR!! (What's a
superheroine without long, flowing hair that somehow never manages
to get grabbed?). Unfortunately, these wonderful characters are
given absolutely no characterization. They're just there.
Finally, there are female characters that I like. Unfortunately,
they fall into my aforementioned (in AI # 70) tragic character
archetype. Marrow of the X-Men and Kymaera of the New Warriors.
Kymaera (also known as Namorita or Nita for short) is the cousin
of the more famous Namor -- the Sub Mariner and a Princess of
Atlantis. Originally, Nita was tall, strong, blonde with pointed
ears and little wings on her ankles. She also wore a green
bathing suit (this I did not object to, as Namor wears a green
speedo. If both genders feel no need to cover their bodies, I
don't have a problem with women being scantily clad. But if
Superman is covered from head to toe, I object to Wonder Woman's
bathing suit and Supergirl's mini-skirt).
Nita's character went through a problem period, and the end result
was a terrible physical mutation. Her skin turned blue, her eyes
black, she had four fingers on each hand instead of five. the
fingers became webbed claws, and little dorsal fins grew from her
calves. After some horrible depression, Nita determined to return
to the surface world and resume her role as a superheroine. The
character grew once she mutated! She became a full person! How
wonderfully different in comics! She had a challenge and she
didn't quit!
Marrow, on the other hand, is just learning to allow people into
her life. Her power is well...disgusting. In addition to
superior strength and fighting ability, Marrow also grows bones at
an alarming rate. These are diamond hard and she can rip them out
without pain and use them as clubs, knives or projectile weapons.
But since all the other X-Men are so beautiful, she feels left out
and hurt by their presence. Marrow collects artwork and
photographs of beautiful things, and the beginnings of a
relationship with Colossus (yeah, Meggan's old boytoy) are being
built. We can always hope.
Before I go, Artemis has an acceptable outfit. Jeans with a
haltertop and a leather jacket. It's so much nicer than the
thong. She also chopped off her hair (not all the way, but she's
no longer in danger of tripping over it)
Daniel Thomas
http://members.tripod.com/~FirestarArtemis/index.html
"...But I do not enjoy the killing... I AM NOT VIOLENT!! And I
will put an arrow through the brains of anyone who says I am!!!"
-- Artemis (Artemis Requiem #4-DC)
"Dress to kill. Not to just maim." --Elvira
*****************************************************************
* Amazons International *
* Thomas Gramstad, editor: thomasg@ifi.uio.no *
* Administravia/Listserver: amazons-request@ifi.uio.no *
* Submissions: amazons@math.uio.no *
* http://www.math.uio.no/~thomas/lists/amazons.html *
* *
* The Amazon Connection -- Links to Amazon web sites: *
* http://www.math.uio.no/~thomas/lists/amazon-links.html *
*****************************************************************
"A Hard Woman is Good to Find" -- The Valkyries
Female Bodybuilders the Subject of Museum Exhibition and Book, Picturing the Modern Amazon
NEW YORK, NY (September 1, 1999)-Picturing the Modern Amazon, the first
museum exhibition devoted to the hyper-muscular woman as represented by
the female bodybuilder, will open at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
in New York City on March 30, 2000 and will remain on display through
July 2, 2000. Much of the art that will be included in the exhibition
was created expressly for the project, and features bodybuilders who
posed for contemporary artists.
The exhibition will include paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, sculptures, comic books, and installations by over sixty artists. Participating artists include:
Matthew Barney, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Reneé Cox, Bill Dobbins,
Nicole Eisenman, Jane Hammond, Oliver Herring, Annie Leibovitz, Alfred
Leslie, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, Sarah Van Ouwerkerk, Herb
Ritts, Alison Saar, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Spero, Marnie
Weber, Eli Xyr, Barbara Zucker, and many others.
The exhibition consists of three separate sections: historical images,
contemporary works, and comics. The historical component includes over
150 images of women in physical culture, the earliest of which dates to
1783, and encompasses documentation on modern women's bodybuilding from
the 1970s to the present. Steve Wennerstrom, Jan Todd and David Chapman
served as project historical consultants. Over forty artists are included in the contemporary section.
In the third section, comic strips, comic books, and unique art works that focus on muscular female characters and superheroes represent a half-century of work from comic illustrators and artists. They include Jennifer Camper, Robert Crumb,
Diane DiMassa, Roberta Gregory, John Howard, and Turtel Onli. The exhibition is organized by Laurie Fierstein, a bodybuilder and social activist, Joanna Frueh, an art historian, art critic, and performance artist, and Judith Stein, a curator and critic.
Women Bodybuilders to "Pose and Perform"
On Friday evening, March 31, 2000, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Museum will present Posing and Performing, a live physique exhibition of a dozen women bodybuilders. A discussion series on the topic will also take place in tandem with the exhibition.
NYC High School Students to Get Involved Through Visual Knowledge Program
The New Museum's Visible Knowledge Program (VKP) pairs teachers in New York City high schools with artists in collaborations that expand curricula in the humanities, sciences, and arts. This year, VKP classes will concentrate on issues surrounding the idea of the hyper-muscular woman, and will tie into the Picturing the Modern Amazon exhibition. Lesson plans from Picturing the Modern Amazon VKP projects and other VKP projects will be available on the VKP web site, www.vkp.org.
Full-Length Book Published in Conjunction with Picturing the Modern Amazon
A fully illustrated book accompanying the exhibition contains interviews
with five female bodybuilders including the legendary Bev Francis;
six-time Ms. Olympia, Lenda Murray; bodybuilding pioneer of the 1940s &
50s, Abbye "Pudgy"Stockton; British IFBB pro, Andrulla Blanchette, and
California amateur, René Toney. It will be published by Rizzoli
International, Inc. in March 2000. Laurie Fierstein, Judith Stein and
Joanna Frueh, the co-curators of the exhibition, co-edited the book, and
each contributed an essay. The book will address the history of
bodybuilding, the aesthetics of the body, muscularity as a manifestation
of female power, and related subjects. Other contributing writers
include Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Cunningham, historians
Steve Wennerstrom, Jan Todd and Pierre Samuel, long-time strength and
physical culture sage Al Thomas, Belgian bodybuilder Nathalie Gassel,
scholars Carla Williams and Leslie Heywood, New Museum founder Marcia
Tucker, and art historian Irving Lavin. It will be available in the New
Museum Bookstore.
Curatorial Team
Judith Stein is an art historian, art critic, and curator. As curator
of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1981-1994, she organized
over eighty exhibitions of contemporary art for the Academy's Morris
Gallery, as well as the touring show I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace
Pippin. Her writing frequently appears in national art journals, and
she was a contributor to The Power of Feminist Art (1994). She is
co-president of the International Art Critics Association (AICA),
American Section.
Laurie Fierstein, a bodybuilder and social activist, is a central figure
today in pioneering creative expression for and new discourse about
muscular women. In 1992, she wrote Bodybuilding and the Female
Physique, a paper discussing the muscular female's complex social
position. Fierstein, Picturing the Modern Amazon project creator,
produced the watershed performances of female bodybuilders and strength
athletes, Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World
(1993), and Evolution F: A Surreal Spectacle of Female Muscle (1995).
Joanna Frueh is an art historian, art critic, and performance artist who
has written extensively on the female body and contemporary art.
Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love (2000), her most recent book,
explores many subjects, one of which is female bodybuilding. She is
also the author of Erotic Faculties (1996) and Hannah Wilke: A
Retrospective (1989), and is a co-editor of New Feminist Criticism: Art,
Identity, Action (1994), and Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology
(1988). She is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada,
Reno.
Funding
Picturing the Modern Amazon is supported by a generous grant from the
Peter Norton Family Foundation.
The Visible Knowledge Program is made possible by generous grants from
the Albert A. List Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts,
and Consolidated Edison. Additional support is provided by the William
Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for the Visible Knowledge Program. Teacher
training programs are made possible by The Chase Manhattan Teachers
Workshop Fund at the New Museum.
The Visible Knowledge Web Site, www.vkp.org is supported by generous
grants from the Albert A. List Foundation and the National Endowment for
the Arts to provide educators and students nationwide with the curricula
and teaching methods of the New Museum's high school outreach program.
New Museum Information
Location 583 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
(between Houston and Prince Streets in
SoHo)
Telephone 212.219.1222
Fax 212.431.5328
Hours Wednesday and Sunday: noon - 6:00 pm
Thursday through Saturday: noon - 8:00 pm
Closed Monday and Tuesday
Admission Free to members
$6.00 general
$3.00 artists/students/seniors
Visitors 18 and under free
Thursday 6:00 - 8:00 pm free
Web Site www.newmuseum.org
Directions Subway:
6 to Spring Street or Bleecker Street
N/R to Prince Street
A/C/E to Spring Street
B/D/F/Q to Broadway Lafayette
Bus:
#1/#5/#6/#21 to Houston Street or
Broadway
The New Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibitions are made possible by
the Director's Council and members of the New Museum. The New Museum of
Contemporary Art receives general operating support from the New York
City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts,
and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency.
May 15, 2000
Lost in Amazonia
by WENDY STEINER
After a century of repressing or deriding Woman as a symbol of beauty, high culture in the West has suddenly gone over. Victorian fairies, Pre-Raphaelite nymphs and sirens, Edwardian fashion plates and modern-day pinups smile down from the walls of major museums, and novelists such as Andrei Makine, Philip Roth and Penelope Fitzgerald examine female beauty as a central metaphor for value. Oblivious to Kant, evolutionary psychologists do not hesitate to collapse beauty into feminine allure, which they consider a powerful reproductive adaptation. Meanwhile, feminists excoriate Madison Avenue for reducing women's faces and bodies to commodities. For aestheticians, these are heady, if complicated, days.
The latest entrant in the field of female beauty only increases this euphoric unease: the New Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition "Picturing the Modern Amazon" (until June 25). The picturings in question are paintings, photographs, sculptures, comic books, videos and jewelry representing female bodybuilders, those women for whom working out turns symmetry, balance and proportion into weapons of liberation. As the bodybuilder Nathalie Gassel states in My Muscles, Myself, "My muscle has been built to assert its power and presence: its movement indicates my life's fundamental principles which are to be, to do, to show."
According to this exhibition, to be a "hypermuscular woman" is to re-create one's body as a work of art for public display and self-realization. "You are an artist creating a sculpture," claims Heather Foster. "You put on muscle like clay." This process involves a double role for bodybuilders that is reflected in the title of Phyllis Bramson's painting Being Both Object and Subject. Many people would argue that in this respect the female bodybuilder is just a special case of all women, who willy-nilly design an appearance that is taken as their identity. Several images in the show play up the parallel between bodybuilders and more conventionally "designing women," for example, Deborah Willis's Untitled, Bodybuilder #14, which suspends the red salon-sculpted nails of Nancy Lewis against the pattern of veins in her gym-sculpted thighs.
"The female masquerade" in the case of bodybuilders, however, is more literal, for it involves an erasure of "natural" femininity and the addition of a synthetic variant. With body fat reduced to 5 percent for competition and steroids coursing through their blood, it takes silicone to give female bodybuilders breasts and "big hair," makeup and sexy lingerie to signal their femininity. The crudeness of the signs employed inevitably suggests brothel scenes (as in James Salzano's Hannie Van Aken, NYC) or transvestite parodies (as in Susan Meiselas's Evolution F)--an off-color aesthetics of nude muscle accented with fetish.
The exhibition stages a curious paragone between the picturers and the pictured as to which, in effect, is the controlling artist. Several of Andres Serrano's gorgeous photographs of the spectacular Lesa Lewis, for example, cut off her head at the jawline, as if Serrano were appropriating agency for her art to himself. The hypermuscular women at the exhibition opening, in their turn, upstaged the art with their extraordinary presence in the flesh. The curators of the show are old hands at subject-object competition: Laurie Fierstein, a champion bodybuilder who writes about the sport; Joanna Frueh, a professor of art history who is also a feminist performance artist and gym enthusiast; and Judith Stein, a distinguished curator whose sense of empowerment from lifting and pumping gave rise to the exhibition in the first place.
The rhetoric with which these curators surround bodybuilding is the exuberant optimism of liberation, independence and self-actualization. Upon entry into art, however, women's self-creations cannot help but become, as academic jargon would style it, "a field of contestation." Through bodybuilding, a woman may turn herself into a work of art, but representing that transformation turns her ambiguous. She may be either a creative agent or a victim of her judges; an irresistible seductress or a pawn of male fantasy; a heroic actualization of female strength or an unavailing compensation for female weakness; a classical feminine ideal or a masculinized freak. Dizzying contradictions like this always result when the "like" in an analogy is suppressed--in this case, when a woman "becomes" a work of art. The curators stress the euphoria of this triumph, but its pathos is inescapable. "I have a kinesthetic response to the real nude," writes Frueh. "In her presence I am invigorated, my posture improves, I feel my strength and flexibility, my capacity for many powers, my allure. This, I think, is why she moves me to tears."
I would be willing to bet that the tears have a less empowering origin. The male bodybuilder Samuel Fussell has written that he "became a bodybuilder as a means of becoming a caricature. The inflated cartoon I became relieved me from the responsibility of being human." Female bodybuilders, in contrast, claim that the "inflated cartoon" they create is their way of becoming human, a difficult paradox, indeed. "Picturing the Modern Amazon" dramatizes as powerfully as any art the intolerable contradictions in women's experience and the desperation with which some search for a way out. The show would rise to the level of tragedy if it were not pervaded at the same time with the deflating breezes of the ridiculous. As Judith Stein observes, the major difference between a bodybuilder and an artist is that "one pumps iron, the other, irony."
The sources of this irony are manifold. Anything as extreme, hyperbolic and at the same time apparently earnest is bound to inspire humor, and everything about these female bodybuilders reads like a double-entendre or a camp subversion. Even the typefaces in the catalogue shift from modern sleek to comic-book chunk to romantic filigree in the course of a single title. The "muscle hussy" costumes look like a cross between stripper gear and the undersized tatters of the Incredible Hulk. The bodybuilders' "window performance" suggests the "performance art" of prostitutes in Amsterdam's red-light district. Circus strongwomen are called "understanders," not because of their feminine empathy but their position at the bottom of human pyramids; understanders such as Pudgy Stockton and Dunlap Kaan hoist their husbands over their heads, a feat particularly pleasurable to Amazons.
Over and over, traditional poses display the female body to untraditional effect. When a bodybuilder puts her hand on her hip, she shows off not her breasts but her biceps. The first female bodybuilder with a man-scale physique, Bev Francis, mugged girlie poses in the 1985 documentary Pumping Iron II: The Women, to make fun of the pressure on competitors to look feminine. The demure bondage victim comes in for similar parody in Bill Dobbins's photograph of Laura Creavalle dressed in a few strips of leather, her arms locked in stocks, her eyes lowered, her toes pointed, her muscles bulging.
Female bodybuilders always appear to be quoting men as they strike poses from classical sculpture or superhero comic books. Renée Cox, for example, photographs Heather Foster with helmet, gun and thigh-high leather boots in front of a wall-sized flag; Nicole Eisenman draws The Largest Woman looming over the viewer. Yet the bodybuilder's steel-hard muscle and taut skin find a female analogue in the pregnant belly and lactating breasts, and the hoarse breathing of the bench press sounds like nothing so much as childbirth panting. Samuel Fussell experienced his built physique as oddly feminine: a nonfunctional appearance of strength--useless, ornamental and masking vulnerability. In a similar gender reversal, Pumping Iron begins with Arnold Schwarzenegger in ballet class practicing poses in front of a mirror.
In certain respects, female bodybuilding seems no more liberated than fashion modeling. Indeed, the group poses in competitions suggest fashion shoots and chorus lines, and models and bodybuilders share an obsession over fat, firmness and "look." If they are "artists," they are artists of the body. But of course, the aesthetic in each case is utterly different. The exhibition catalogue makes this point by juxtaposing a photo of the rope-veined Laura Binetti with one of Twiggy standing among mannequins. The model, abnormally tall and thin for a woman, inhabits verticality; the bodybuilder, typically short or average in height and astonishingly wide with muscle, is horizontal. The ethereality of models implies an escape into aristocratic sublimity; bodybuilders are rooted to the earth, plebeian morlocks. Until the recent fitness craze, models' flesh-lined skin hid any signs of functionality in the body except those connected with sex. For female bodybuilders, the absence of a fat screen and the hyperdevelopment of muscles and veins exposes the machinery of the body, and the darkly tanned skin over muscle and blood vessel evokes nothing so much as a flayed carcass. The model looks helpless and weak but at the same time flawless, invulnerable; the bodybuilder looks overpoweringly strong but "ripped," exposed. The model's smooth surface covers hidden depths; the bodybuilder's "solid lean meat," claims Marcia Ian, contains no space at all. Muscle "connotes exteriority, the exteriority of the phallus."
The language the body speaks for model and bodybuilder may be different, but both use their bodies to speak for them. One wonders what is wrong with their tongues. There is a story that Dustin Hoffman prepared for the torture scene in Marathon Man by not eating, sleeping or bathing for days. When he came onto the set in this pitiful state, Laurence Olivier observed, "But Dustin, acting is so much easier." One wants to say the same to these women who starve, drug and exhaust themselves day in and day out, giving up "normal" life for their art. Speaking is so much easier. Complain a little. Rail against the situation of women in this gender-challenged, family-failed, female-oppressing, love-starved world. Maxine Hong Kingston may invent a "woman warrior," but she gives her the power to express her anguish in words: "Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure.... no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet."
After millennia of double binds on female bodies, it seems that some women can speak only bodily. Kingston reveals the revolutionary logic of their painful display in her woman warrior, trained with all the rigor of a bodybuilder. "We are going to carve revenge on your back," say her guardians, and she welcomes the message. The bodily marking of a woman may be unavoidably ornamental: "If an enemy should flay me, the light would shine through my skin like lace." However, this ornamentation is not powerless, but a mighty weapon. "I saw my back covered entirely with words in red and black files, like an army, like my army." And with this army of words written on her, the woman warrior assembles a real army to avenge the injustice of the ages.
This theme of body marking is one of the staples of feminist writing in our day. Andrea Dworkin's "song of myself" is a "flesh poem" that male oppression cuts into her body. The slave girl Sethe's back in Beloved is scarred by a whipping and then transformed into a "chokecherry tree" through the imagination and kindness of a fostering woman. The point is to do the marking oneself rather than suffer it at the hands of others. And so the "muscle definition," the "ripped" flesh, the veins "like an anaconda that winds around a granite boulder" are supposedly proud marks of self-assertion. Barbara Zucker's steel tracery of a muscled back might as well be Sethe's chokecherry tree, and likewise the muscle outlines beaded onto Amelia Lavin's Tigress. Tattoos and piercings speak too, as in Deborah Willis's Nancy Lewis, but muscles and veins are the bodybuilder's true eloquence. No pain, no gain. It makes us cry, perhaps, but we might wonder whether it is ultimately an effective rhetoric. Will it turn into words and then armies?
* * *
Such is the tough triumph of the Amazon myth itself, which like everything else in this exhibition is fraught with grotesquerie and contradiction. Robert Graves reports that the Amazons were offspring of Ares and Aphrodite, war and beauty. Tracing descent through the mother, they fought and ruled while their men kept house. The limbs of boy infants were broken accordingly, to insure domesticity. Unhobbled, Amazons were said to have opted for another injury, cutting off one of their breasts. "One half pure woman, one half pure warrior," John Barth explains cheerfully in his postmodern rewrite of mythology, Chimera. The mastectomy aided archery and created solidarity among the sisterhood.
As the exhibition presents it, to reassert the Amazon is to reassert the matriarchate, woman begetting woman and passing on strength and self-determination as part of an empowered, male-disdaining legacy. The ancient Amazon myths spawned Rosie the Riveter, Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Xena the Warrior Princess and Kingston's "white tigers." According to the organizers, "the 'modern amazon' is presented as a culture with a history, as a dazzling and transgressive current phenomenon, and as an avatar of the future." She is the Magna Mater, "mother, chieftain, champion," and her images assembled in this exhibition are the remnants of an unacknowledged matrilineage. As often as not, however, these picturings suggest discontinuity in female history. Kathleen Gilje's Comtesse d'Haussonville, Restored (1996), for example, shows an Ingres beauty standing before a mirror, oblivious to her reflection, which is a Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon. Here, women's past and present may meet in the mirror, but they do not match; not every sister is an Amazon or, more accurately perhaps, not every male artist has depicted strong women. And of course, the meaning of matriarchy differs from culture to culture. "The complexities of defining such heightened displays of strength, femininity, and womanhood," according to Carla Williams, "are further compounded within the boundaries of a matriarchal culture in which black men's lack of power is deemed the fault of strong, 'castrating' black women." Matriarchy is no simple matter.
But neither is motherhood simple, especially for a bodybuilder. "Now when I was naked," observes Kingston's woman warrior, "I was a strange human being indeed--words carved on my back and the baby large in front." In the exhibition catalogue, the hypermasculine Bev Francis grimaces during a power lift, but on the facing page she smiles pacifically, surrounded by husband and children, her muscles, veins and bone ridges softened by fostering flesh. Can these two selves coexist in the same picture? Sarah Van Ouwerkerk's remarkable photograph of Jennifer Greenbaum's daughter lovingly leaning on her mother's tensed leg implies that Amazonian motherhood may not be a contradiction in terms, though the absence of the mother's face is disconcerting. Mary Ellen Mark, in contrast, shows a stony-faced bodybuilder hoisting a barbell over her head, oblivious to her 3-year-old daughter below. Hypermuscularity may not be incompatible with maternity, but even women artists are struck by the challenge of combining the two.
The most persistent fact about Amazons, however, is that all the myths end in defeat. Achilles bested the Queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, in battle and then was so overcome by her beauty that he raped her corpse; his fellow soldiers dishonored her body, subjecting the double effrontery of female strength and allure to a double punishment. Shakespeare's playfully skeptical marriage comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, celebrates the wedding of Theseus to the Amazon Hippolyta, whom he has recently conquered. John Barth's Bellerophon in Chimera defeats and ravishes the Amazon Melanippe but then redeems himself by making her his muse and scribe--no doubt a consolation as he saw it. For Robert Graves, the vanquishing of the Amazons is disguised history. "The victories over the Amazons secured by Heracles, Theseus, Dionysus, Mopsus, and others, record, in fact, setbacks to the matriarchal system in Greece, Asia Minor, Thrace, and Syria." Perhaps they do, but maybe this repeated story is simply a favorite male fantasy. Unlike Judith or Delilah or Salome, an Amazon fights men fair and square, disdaining guile and sex appeal for honest brawn. She is a worthy opponent for a man who enjoys a good fight, and heroes generally do. The preordained prize seems all the sweeter when the hero has to work so hard for it.
The battles of modern Amazons pit one against the other, appearing to leave men out of the picture. "To be, to do, to show." But showing--there's the rub. Display is tied to judgment and less rule-governed forms of voyeurism. Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of "Picturing the Modern Amazon" is the utter incompatibility between the bodybuilder's stated motives and the public's reactions to her art. She sees display as a means to dominance, self-realization and artistic triumph. She is an "aesthetic-erotic self-creation," says Joannah Frueh, cultivating a "severe voluptuousness of form" and "fulfillment in carnal thingness." She is Umberto Boccioni's sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space: all form, all primitive force and abstraction. The audience, under the circumstances, matters not at all: "In the final arena, there will be no judges," Fussell quips, "only witnesses to...greatness." Nathalie Gassel reports her thoughts as she poses: "Ha! One more, one more, in front of those looking at me with their gluey eyes, wanting to feel me. So let them touch this hard body, so let them touch it and understand my muscle's determination to turn into steel. I know what they want. They tell me of their desire to be under my influence, to be enslaved by me." Tina Lockwood's photograph of Jan Tana--pumped, greased, flexing, with an imposing shadow rising behind her--expresses this desire to prevail without resistance.
But this is the wish of a naïve artist, woman, competitor: to enthrall, seduce, dominate without opposition. "Nobody needs criticism, only appreciation," as Gertrude Stein put it. We all understand this desire, but it turns the critic into a presumptuous irrelevance and ignores the fact that art and love and competition are in the last analysis forms of communication. The bodybuilder needs an audience as much as she needs a gym. No matter how uncomfortable she may be with the "direct personal scrutiny by others," as Steve Wennerstrom calls it, the hypermuscular woman offers herself to judgment at every turn. Leslie Heywood goes so far as to argue that female bodybuilding assuages the "hunger for visibility, the hunger for the kind of meaningful life that powers late-twentieth-century culture.... the contemporary sense of being in America, masculine or feminine, might be summed up not by 'I think therefore I am,' but rather by 'I have an audience, therefore I am.'" The path from Descartes to Berkeley to Warhol is clear: To be is to be perceived, and fifteen minutes, covered in body oil, might be just the ticket.
* * *
But just like the Amazons of old who fought men on male ground, this self-creation through audience approval is a recipe for disaster. The novelist Katherine Dunn sees right through it in her brilliant fiction Geek Love. If you try to be beautiful it is because you want to be loved, and that puts you under other people's power. Instead of the Greek ideal you must substitute the Geek ideal, presenting yourself as if you could not care less how others see you. Is the exaggerated physique of the bodybuilder the answer? No, "technical, illustrative, and predictable." Perhaps a "flayed, emaciated cadaver" might do the trick. But no again: "Classic and totally predictable." The "answer" for Dunn is amputation and other willed self-deformations, with lobotomy the ultimate route to P.I.P.: "Peace, Isolation, Purity." Perhaps the artists in the show who depict headless bodybuilders have this goal in mind.
As soon as the bodybuilder submits to judgment, she falls victim to fantasy and desire. The International Federation of Bodybuilding long insisted that competitors not look hypermuscular, since women would not be attracted to the sport if it made them appear unfeminine. "We don't want to turn people off," say the judges in Pumping Iron II; "we want to turn them on." Women, the theory goes, are turned on by female bodybuilders either through narcissistic projection or lesbian attraction. However, the more typical audience for woman warriors is young boys, or men who enjoy masochistic titillation: R. Crumb's Frightened Little Man in the Land of the Vulture Goddesses. Some men, like Achilles, fancy women who offer a rousing skirmish before succumbing. Gay boys and men, in contrast, might identify with the purported invulnerability of warrior women. As Michael Cunningham's "Dream Girl" describes her: "She wasn't regular. She wasn't a 'normal' girl but she wasn't a girl posing as a boy, either. She wasn't even a tomboy. She was herself. She was potent and tenacious; she was butch and femme; she felt deeply and fought hard. She was heroic and, like many heroes, lived a solitary, defiant life. Like many heroes, she could hardly have cared less about satisfying the dictates of conventional taste."
It is geek love all over again, adoration of those who couldn't care less and who show their indifference through an aesthetics of disdain: Joanna Frueh's "Aphrodite/Amazon" with her "monster/beauty." The failure of this alleged invulnerability is apparent in Louise Bourgeois's St. Sebastinne. As with Serrano's photos, the bodybuilder's head is omitted, for the speaking body is as oblivious to women's brains and emotions as the most blatantly sexist pinup. The body is pure surface, a contour map of protuberances and hollows, and as such, it also resembles a target for the arrows of observers. If medieval art imaged love as the exchange of barbed eye beams, in St. Sebastinne the arrows indicate no mutuality of scrutiny and promise nothing but victimization and pain. Here hypermuscularity becomes a new form of martyrdom.
Perhaps no work in the exhibition interprets the contradictions of the modern Amazon more clearly than Judy Chicago's Arcanum in Shades of Gray. It consists of a lamination of glass sheets on a base, with the outlines of female bodybuilders incised into them. If you stand in front and look through, you see a scrambling palimpsest of hulking figures with multiple arms, legs, and breasts, like a hypermuscular Indian goddess. Every change in viewing position realigns the sheets of glass and increases the impression of vigor and motion. On the base of the sculpture are the words "Picturing Modern Amazons." In addition, each pane has two words at the bottom. Read across, the words are: "Female" and "Power" on one pane; "Body" and "Pleasure" on the next; and "Building" and "Perversion" on the last. Read from front to back, the left side produces "Female" "Body" "Building"; and the right "Power" "Pleasure" "Perversion." These heterogeneous judgments are visible only by looking between the panes--into the "arcanum" of the artwork. Otherwise, the image conveys only the official face of women's bodybuilding: strength, energy and assertiveness as unambiguously positive values. The reality, however, lies in the shades of gray.
The gods offered Paris a choice among feminine Beauty, Strength and Wisdom, and we all know which he chose. But his mistake lay not in preferring Beauty but in accepting the premise that the three virtues were separable, indeed mutually exclusive. The old circus poster of the strong lady calls the lie to this assumption, heralding the marvel of "Strength and Beauty" in a single female form. If we could only return Wisdom to the mix, we might end up with something resembling a woman.
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Wendy Steiner, author of The Trouble With Beauty (Free Press/Heinemann, forthcoming) and other works, is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Humanities Forum.
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