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From http://newyork.citysearch.com/E/E/NYCNY/0014/91/57/cs1.html?fp
One enters an exhibition billed as the first to
focus solely on
representations of
hyper-muscular women with
some
preconceptions. Even if your
exposure to
female bodybuilders has been
limited to
haphazard glances at
late-night EPSN and
discarded weightlifting
magazines at the
gym, the subject tends to
provoke a strange
mix of repulsion and
curiosity.
"Picturing the Modern
Amazon" takes a
broad historical view,
tracing the origins of
female weightlifting back to
the late 18th
century, but it won't erase
your ambivalence.
While there's plenty of work
here devoted to
the natural beauty of these
female bodies,
there's no mistaking the
fact that the show's
primary aim is to play the
gender
provocateur.
The bulk of the show is
contemporary.
Arranged more or less
chronologically and
divided into three distinct sections幼omics,
archival material and art擁t
includes drawings, paintings, video, sculpture and
photographs by the likes of
gender-bending artists Cindy Sherman and Matthew
Barney, photographers
Herb Ritts and Annie Liebowitz, and sculptor Louise
Bourgeois.
Some of the works, like
Bill Dobbins'
photographs of
Gillian-Serret Hodge and
Yvonne Vasgutez, are
beautiful
black-and-white
full-length portraits which
simply celebrate their
subjects. Mostly,
though, the images are
chosen to defy
stereotypes of
femininity. In Susan
Meiselas' "Evolution
F猶icturing
Heather Foster, Kimberly
Roberts and
Nikki Fuller," for
example, three
muscular women are clad
in revealing,
low-backed satin dresses,
their backs
flexed and buttocks
firmly clenched,
directly challenging such institutions of
femininity as beauty pageants.
As a group the works are almost uniformly
laudatory in their representation of muscular
woman, but there are some exceptions. Dianne
DiMassas' comic strip "Something a Real Girl
Can Live By; Hot Head Paisan: Homicidal
Lesbian Terrorist," lampoons the commitment
and fanatical discipline required to maintain
these buff gym bodies. Elie Xyr's painting,
"L=Amante Religeuse (The Praying She-Lover),"
depicts an arachnoid man-eating femme fatale.
Although physically strong women were
traditionally deemed deviant and often relegated
to the position of street performers and circus
acts, one can hardly help but admire the
discipline, determination and strength傭oth
physical and spiritual熔f those portrayed here.
But the exhibition's emphasis on the
theatricality of these flexing bodies ends up
objectifying them almost as
much as masculine stereotypes have done in the
past.
In contrast to their rippling torsos, most of the
women wear distinctively
feminine outfits, often with lacey frills, makeup
or jewelry. The effects of
obsessive calorie counting, exercise regime and
narcissism which they
display seem to perpetuate the premise that the
status of a woman is
intrinsically defined by her body and her
appearance. In that respect,
"Amazon" continues to fight the war of gender
politics on the same terrain it
has been played on for centuries.由ebecca Friedman