Essay

'A New Sandow Pose'

BUILDING THE BODY

How the ambition of self-making reveals similarities between the relationship with one’s body and with one’s house—and why it is so difficult to capture this ambition in image

The term “Bodybuilding” was coined by Eugen Sandow. 1 Since at least as early as the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, humans have been intrigued by their own body and its portrayal. Statues of male heroes and gods depict their naked bodies as youthful and muscular. As the first bodybuilder, Eugen Sandow was not just interested in bodily strength—rather he found inspiration in the ancient statuary to pursue an ideal of health and beauty.

Sandow gained some fame in the late 19th century in Europe, performing in muscle shows and displaying his perfected body. Yet the break-through for him, as well as for the sport of bodybuilding, happened in America. In 1903, the first American bodybuilding contest was held. Its advertisement read:

‘In nearly every country in these great United States there is held an annual fair in which prizes are offered for the best specimens of the various domestic animals—horses, cows and pigs. But never on a single occasion has a prize been offered for the best specimen of man or woman’.

The sport was widely popularised in the 1970s, as the ideal of the athletic body spread around the world and as bodybuilding legend Arnold Schwarzenegger gained an unprecedented following. Schwarzenegger, even more than his antecessors, emphasised the importance of training for aesthetics over strength.

'The Great Competition'

'Physical Culture Exhibition, 1903 Poster'

'Physical Culture Exhibition 1903 Programme'

‘Even his body was—and this is what Schwarzenegger thinks himself—always more image and sculpture than force and flesh: [...] Apart from a few prizes in earlier years, Schwarzenegger never won a sports competition. But he did succeed as a bodybuilder, and thus as a living sculpture.’

Here, Jörg Scheller compares the body with the hard, cold object of the sculpture, an analogy which had already arisen with the first bodybuilder Sandow and his pursuit of the ancient aesthetic ideal. While this connection might not surprise when striving to remodel one’s flesh, the analogy of the sculpture for self-making in general also repeatedly appears in Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is referring to two manners of building “living” sculptures, both through the bearing of children and through the building of the self, when he commands:

‘Living monuments shalt thou build to thy victory and emancipation. Beyond thyself shalt thou build. But first of all must thou be built thyself, rectangular in body and soul.’

Nietzsche said that ‘the human being is no longer an artist, he is become a work of art.’ And while the sport of bodybuilding has sought the comparison to art, bodybuilders themselves do not tend to see themselves as artists—they do refer to their bodies as pieces of art, however. They, as well as Nietzsche, see the human body turned into a work of art through the act of “building”, or becoming oneself.

The sculpture was repeatedly the image that Nietzsche chose for the shaping and fostering of the self, leading as far as that for Nietzsche, the sculpture itself could even come to life.

If the sculpture does come to life in the bodybuilder, Sandow eventually proceeded even further and reversed this transformation. After he had successfully transformed his body into a living sculpture, it was measured and cast as an exhibit for the Natural History Museum in London, thus returning once again to plaster.

Turning the body into a sculpture and a piece of art is not the purely superficial activity it might seem at first glance. Scheller observes: ‘Bodybuilding, first of all, is ritualised work on the self. It regulates and structures the daily routine, gives—by means of the body—a distinct form to life ...’

The improvement of the self is a continuous effort without a fixed endpoint. In offering a path, infinite, yet with a very clear direction, the act of bodybuilding can serve as a way to orient oneself in a world perceived as chaotic and meaningless. This view was taken by Joe Weider, an early bodybuilding legend and Schwarzenegger’s mentor. Scheller relates that:

‘… the improvement of the body [is] an endless task […] For [Joe Weider], bodybuilding was always more than just a chance to perfect appearance and health. Bodybuilding is a religion of the here and now, a chance for rebirth, meaning in its purest form …’

Weider, born around 1920, first brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to America and, according to Schwarzenegger, was as close as a second father to him. Weider guided him on his path to becoming a better bodybuilder, but also mentored other aspects of his life: through him, Schwarzenegger says he gained an understanding of business and learned to fulfil a public role, adding that Weider even gave him a first appreciation for art and antiques.

Providing limitless aspiration, bodybuilding is turned from a mundane sport into a life philosophy and pseudo religion. As if to illustrate this, Weider made 10 predictions, analogically to the 10 biblical commandments, in his magazine Physique, 1950.

‘I predict that bodybuilding will spread to every corner of the world and that it will one day be recognized as the king of all sports and physical activities. I predict that those who practice bodybuilding will live healthier, happier and more useful lives... that bodybuilding will one day become one of the greatest forces in existence [...]’

The ambition to remodel one‘s body has expanded into an all-encompassing call for self-betterment.

Nietzsche’s approach to the call for human self-betterment and even self-conquest was no less vehement than Weider’s: he introduced the concept of the Übermensch, to which the practice of bodybuilding has been compared to. Carl Jung explains in a lecture on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

‘[Nietzsche] gives a certain definition of the [Übermensch] as the being that can be created by man’s making a heroic endeavour to create something beyond himself. The essence, the very principle, of creation would be man-beyond-himself, and that is the [Übermensch].’

Nietzsche’s idea of self-conquest brings forth an entirely new being, strong and invincible. Even if this is not achievable, in some form or another, the wish for self-betterment is ubiquitous. Therefore, while bodybuilding is often seen as a niche sport, Niall Richardson points out that to a certain extent, everyone is practising it on a daily basis: by shaving or waxing body hair and styling the hair on the head; by applying make-up, paint and cosmetic procedures to take care of the appearance of the skin; and even by ornamenting the body with piercings and jewellery. Almost everyone also makes an effort, at some point, to better or maintain the shape of the body through clothes, diets and exercise.

‘In contemporary culture the “body” is now viewed as a project, rather than an essential or fixed attribute, and all of us, to some degree or other, are involved in the practice of body-building in that we are shaping or styling the tissues of our body.’ 20

As one’s own body is treated as a project—a sculpture, an object—a new kind of understanding of this body is required. Bodybuilders in particular gain pharmacological knowledge in order to pursue their ambition. Bordering on self-harm, the goal is to maximise control over one’s body while trying

to avoid serious injury. Bodybuilders may justify their use of steroids by claiming that it is a ‘plus drug’ which is taken in a ‘constructive’ way. Lee F. Monaghan quotes a respondent to a study about steroids: ‘You’re trying to build a body—whether you call it art or sport—you’re trying to build something and there is an end product …’

In the act of building the body, it is turned into a material. Leslie Heywood describes:

‘... your own body is the construction site, the bodybuilder’s dream is the dream of endlessly re-arrangeable flesh, the manipulation of the material without limits, the ultimate victory over “nature”…’

A bodybuilder may describe him- or herself as an ‘alchemist’, alluding to the transmutation of the ‘base metal’ of one’s own body into gold by transforming the flesh. If the body is seen as a material, the choice of metal is an interesting one: assessing its power, architectural historian Robert Harbison comments how, forged under fire and heat, metal becomes smooth and perfect, ‘belies the trouble of its birth’ and is ‘properly the stuff of science’. In bodybuilding, the fire and heat described by Harbison are easily translated into the pain, sweat and struggle marking the sport‘s pursuit. In its mirroring of the forging process, the metal analogy suits the scientific approach of the bodybuilder to the body. Treating the body as an object can serve to deny its proneness to failure—yet once a fragile balance is lost, the body, whether considered object or not, will collapse. Noone is invincible, as Jung illustrates, again in his lecture about Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

‘And of course if you ill-treat the body, it can throw you out of the house entirely, out of your body. It is like ill-treating objects. You know, objects are inanimate things; they lie about heavily, have no legs or wings, and people are often quite impatient with them. For instance, this book would like it very much better, I am sure, if it were lying near the center of the table where it is safe, but I have put it on the edge. It is an awkward position for that poor creature of a book.’

Jung calls the body ‘the house‘, out of which one can be thrown if it is mistreated. Indeed the house as an analogy for the human body (and mind) has appeared in many different contexts: for one, the human body has been suggested as a direct inspiration in conceiving the make-up of a building. Harbison describes [the] parallel between the physical organization of ourselves and our buildings […] which includes a head, trunk, limbs, peripheries, and even elements equivalent to intestines.

The notion of a house being organised in the same way as the human body uses the analogy of house and body in a narrow sense. More generally, Harbison comments that the house may come to resemble one’s own skin just through the act of living in it:

Places thoroughly lived in become internalised in a series of adjustments till they represent a person to himself …’, and ‘… the outside of a house will hardly exist for its dweller, who knows the inside better, [...] a situation which bears resemblance to our relation to our own bodies.’

This relationship does not just extend in one direction, from inhabitant to house. While the inhabitant nudges the house to become a more and more perfectly fitting skin, Harbison describes how the house itself and its furniture also shape the life of the inhabitant in more or less subtle ways. The simple experience of being pushed through a space that narrows in the middle, applying a ‘mild squeezing pressure’ 28 and thus encouraging a certain kind of movement, can intensify into spaces that demand much more of their inhabitant, requiring the body to mould into the building:

‘[The inhabitants] must thread their way up the tunnel of the stairs and once inside must dispose themselves carefully, a good fit like an old piece of clothing.’

Same as the body of the inhabitant, of course the building has to be maintained continuously. As the pinnacle of this relationship, Harbison presents the Dogon shrine in Mali. This kind of shrine has to be “fed” by its devotees—millet porridge offerings are poured over it, the process being repeated so often that the building’s size visibly increases over time.

‘The point is that the building grows and changes, consuming the provisions its devotees bring […] participants treat buildings as if you had to feed and tend them like persons.’

A manifold of interactions and relations between body and house allows Jung and Harbison to present them as equivalents, but also as an extension of one another. In bodybuilding, the body becomes part of the house, part of the objects around it—this is made apparent when Schwarzenegger talks about his possessions. He states that he would not like a “little” desk, car, or office, because he himself is not “little”. Treating and improving his things similar to his own body, he remodels a “regular jeep” to have bigger tires, a bigger engine, and so on. 31 Jörg Scheller relates that:

‘[Arnold Schwarzenegger] seems to surround himself only with things which he feels mentally and physically connected to, even akin.

The big things are material reflections of his own felt magnitude. Schwarzenegger merges with them, to an organic-anorganic group of totems: the Übermensch amongst his Überthings.’

The body has become an attachment to the house, a piece of furniture amongst furniture, an object. This kind of objectification becomes apparent once more in the depiction of bodybuilding contests. The way in which the displays are photographed is objective, dispassionate and completely asexual, even though the sport centres around the display of nearly naked, aestheticised bodies. The photos are meant to convey desirability, yet they remain strangely unappealing. They do not carry forth desire as an image, as Kenneth Dutton states:

‘If the [...] meticulously photographed physiques in the quality muscle magazines seem totally uninspired [...], it is precisely because they are lacking in mystery and desire ...’

The bodybuilder remains the author of the art piece, which is his or her own body 35 —the photos can only objectively record the aesthetic achievement of the bodybuilder. As such they can claim to be “true”.

The photograph has been indispensable for the sport: taken at precisely the right moment, the recording photograph is the closest the bodybuilder will get to the dream of eternal perfection and vitality. The winning poses, even if trying to emulate the timelessness of ancient sculpture, can only be held for a brief moment. Leading up to the contest, strict dieting and severe dehydration are necessary to achieve the desired appearance of clearly visible muscles under paper-thin skin. This treatment of the body would lead to serious problems for the contestant if maintained over time.

While the recording photographic image might have served merely as proof of the perfected body initially, it has achieved an importance in its own right. The moment of triumph is so fleeting, so dependent on the right preparation of the skin and the ideal lighting, it is only ever really visible in the image.

'Chelyabinsk Contest'

‘For many bodybuilders, our own bodies often exist for us as representations. […]’, observes Richardson, and he describes an acquainted bodybuilder’s attitude as follows: ‘When asked to demonstrate a pose, he nearly always refused to do it and instead always extended his mobile phone which contained an image of the specific mandatory pose.’ 37

The bodybuilder does no longer trust the body itself to fulfil aesthetic expectations—the image has become the ultimate goal the body is shaped and created for.

Just as the objectified body of the contestant, the building likewise makes a striking appearance in the photographic image. While the photograph allows the bodybuilder to freeze taut muscles and veins into a body sculpture for eternity, it enables the building to perpetuate a perfect moment—the moment before inhabitation, before smudging fingermarks, footsteps, rain and sun can attack its perfect surfaces. The photograph might capture the moment of a perfectly lightened up facade, clouds dramatically emphasising its elegant form, the building’s steel and concrete still clean and impeccable. The building lives in the heads of its admirers as an image, unaffected by decay, just as the bodybuilder in the contest photograph. The image is proof of the aesthetic victory of the built body.

While the writer W. G. Sebald gave consideration to photographic images as proof, going so far as saying ‘The photograph is the true document par excellence.’ 38 , he himself challenged this truth by using photographic images to “prove” fictional texts. He was also very aware of the fact that a moment captured in a photograph necessarily belongs to the past, and can never be retrieved. Sebald cited Roland Barthes in calling them ‘relics of the continually dying life’ 39 . For him, the photographic image could thus not serve as proof for lasting vigour, quite the opposite: it removes the ever changing, living reality of the human body.

Photography in the context of the bodybuilding contest is not only a dispassionate and objective medium, it also fixes one moment in time forever. In effect, it finishes the transformation of the human body into sculpture.

The journey of self-betterment has come to an abrupt conclusion in the photographic image.

'KVA Josefstrasse'

'Josefwiese'

Bodybuilding depends on the image, and yet the photographs it produces do not fully convey the reality of the sport, as they deny the elusive nature of the perfect winning pose. In order to visually explore the nature of bodybuilding, it is thus worth taking a look at a different medium.

In direct comparison with photography, Sebald discussed fine art, or painting. Whereas for him, photography pinned down a moment of the irretrievable past, he stated that different rules applied to fine art, which requires ambiguity and polyvalence. Comparing the two, he declared: ‘What sets apart art from such macabre business is that proximity to death is its subject, not its yearning.’

He also commented on the ability of the painting to convey the autonomous existence of objects, which may outlive us and which we, as ‘blindwütige Arbeitstiere’—‘workhorses in our blind rage’ are dependent upon. He referred to Maurice Merleau-Ponty in describing the way objects look back at the painter, the relationship between author and subject suddenly reversed.

This ambiguity between thing and body, as described by Sebald and found in the practice of bodybuilding, can be observed particularly well in the work of painter Giorgio de Chirico. In his art, the borders between the sentient and the inanimate are frequently blurred. One example is his painting Ulysses (1968), fig. 8, in which furniture and objects seem to take on human aspects. The painting shows a young man rowing on a small water surface. With the water mysteriously held in a rectangular room and its inconspicuous wooden floor, the setting is strongly reminiscent of a set design. Furniture, such as chairs and a cupboard, unexpectedly jump out from the background of the image. Out of scale, they lose reference to walls and floor, but instead surround the pond in a way that gives them the air of sentient spectators: each of the objects stands alone, each is turned in such a way as to exactly face the rower. Deborah Walker observes that:

‘[The painting ‘Ulysses’] is also an example of the artist’s portrayal of furniture. Anthropomorphising and personalising various objects give symbolic meaning to the non-figurative elements within the image.’

While in de Chirico’s works, objects gain unexpected qualities of consciousness, human figures themselves are absent, blind or dreaming—less sentient: thus, the human and the object become more and more similar to each other. In a series of his paintings, such as Piazza (1913), fig. 9, the human figures keep to the background, seemingly standing still or not moving much. Not receiving much detailed treatment, they remain indistinguishable. Their shapes seem slightly transparent and lack in substance, especially in comparison with the prominent statue—painted in the same dark green paint as the human figures—looming over them.

Similar to the anthropomorphised furniture in Ulysses, statues in de Chirico’s paintings do not remain lifeless, as many critics have observed. Walker states that ‘Certainly, the half-shadowed statue in The Enigma of the Day appears to register a sensation ...’ 44 and Robert Melville is going so far as to claim two of the figures being in love: ‘... they appear to be powerlessly yearning towards one another …’ 45 Likewise, in the painting Piazza one is left with the impression that the two human figures are standing directly under the gaze and observation of the dominant statue. In a way, they seem more stationary than the statue itself, so that were they to walk away, one almost expects the statue to turn its head in answer, following their movement.

Fig. 9 'Piazza'

Fig. 10 'Self Portrait'

If sculpture and things are gaining human or sentient quality by appearing as protagonists in de Chirico’s paintings, in some cases, the ambiguity and closeness between human and statue becomes even more apparent, such as in Self Portrait (1928), fig. 10, in which de Chirico can be seen imitating the pose of the statue situated right next to him. ‘What we have here, to some extent, are statues that transform into living beings’, observes Adriano Altamira, ’indeed in his selfportraits de Chirico often chose to represent himself as something between a man and a statue.’

In de Chirico’s paintings, the human seems to be in the act of becoming a sculpture, while at the same time, the sculpture itself is becoming more human. There seems to be no final state to the transformation. De Chirico was an avid reader of Nietzsche, and was inspired by his ideas when developing his technique of metaphysical painting.

‘De Chirico was drawn to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. [...] This philosophical approach accepts living and thinking as being in a constant state of becoming; it denies that the object of human life is to discover ‘being’ or ‘truth’ but rather that desire is best channelled towards living in a state of perpetual ‘becoming’.’

As Walker’s statement suggests, the statue, as well as the human body, seem to be portrayed as ‘in becoming‘ in his work. Never arriving at an unambiguous state, the journey these figures undertake has no real destination. This is true for all self-betterment, and thus bodybuilding. After all, the perfecting of the body is an endless task—even if this fact is denied by the frozen, photographic image taken of the immaculate body at the contest, or of the building on a glorious day.

In addition to developing a visual technique in his paintings, de Chirico explored his philosophical views in writing. His texts hold further connections to Nietzsche, but also to the never ending journey of self-betterment. His 1929 published novel Hebdomeros is a singular book whose writing style reminds of a painting being written down— its love of words has been compared to brushstrokes. The book contains scenes that can be recognised from his paintings as well as other, meandering descriptions of scenes and places. Its form owes much to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: both books follow a solitary protagonist’s wanderings and philosophising. Chirico states through his protagonist Hebdomeros, much like Nietzsche would speak through Zarathustra:

‘… there were always people who reproached him for going beyond the scope which seemed to be assigned to him by nature itself, for they were astonished by the tours de force carried out and the innumerable difficulties overcome.’

Difficulties, as Hebdomeros refers to them, are innumerable— they are never finally overcome. This view is very different from the photographic portrayal of bodybuilding contests. There, as the camera captures a fleeting moment of triumph, one gets the impression of having reached an end point. The image remains disconnected from the appeal and desire that emanates from an ongoing journey, as seen in de Chirico’s paintings.

Apart from the ambiguity of human body and sculpture, the paintings’ portrayal of place and time is such that it is simply impossible for the viewer to come to rest in a fixed location or moment. This fact arises from various contradictory elements in de Chirico’s paintings, particularly of his early working period (1910-1917), such as Piazza.

De Chirico made reference to a certain mood, ‘the melancholy of autumn afternoons in Italian cities’ which served him as inspiration for this early period. Indeed, the long shadows and partly the colours seem to belong to the calmness of the autumn sun. Yet the extreme regularity of the shadows makes one think of a spotlight, not of the sun—as if these city squares were not lit up by an external sun, but from within, an impression reinforced by the fact that the sun is never visible in the paintings. Often, the shadows follow the shape of their objects only very loosely, betraying their less-than-real quality. The colours, while retaining a certain warmth, have a tinge of impossibility: a green and yellow sky, statues and people merging in colour. The viewer is further dislocated by the impossible vanishing points of the perspectival construction, which are jumping to a different place for every single object in the painting. The scene continually seems to fall apart, even as its strong foreshortening draws the eye into the painting. The view point of the spectator contributes to this disquieting feeling, as his or her eye is floating at an impossible, undefined height over the ground, not able to settle in the scene.

A final touch is given by the train seen in the background, always just passing through. It is a journey undertaken in nearly every painting of the series, never to be concluded.

De Chirico’s paintings embody the impossible: one’s mind is drawn further and further in, trying to find something to hold on to, while simultaneously being pushed out of the picture. One is left with the wish to grasp the place, a longing to arrive.

‘... it is the story of how something gets further and further from happening; we slip back instead of advancing [...]. But it is not even a negative progress because we cannot tell how far we are at any point from completion.’

This description of Kafka’s The Castle, as explained by Harbison, resounds both in de Chirico’s art and in the act of bodybuilding itself. As the journey goes on, the goal may always just be a step away, yet it is never reached. Finally, de Chirico’s Hebdomeros describes the real end of this journey:

‘… he was dying slowly, and his house was dying with him. Earlier, when his vigorous body glowed with health, his house with its green shutters stood smiling in the midst of the gardens …’

Fig. 5 Photographer unknown, Chelyabinsk Contest. Source: Bigstock. Available from: https://www.bigstockphoto.com/de/image-167675936/stock-fotobodybuilder-flexing-back-and-biceps-muscular-athlete-posing-on-stage-topsportsmen-at-bodybuilding-competition-opponents-are-watching (accessed April 25, 2018).

Fig. 6. KVA Josefstrasse. Photograph my own.Fig. 7. Christian Kerez, “Fotoessay KVA”, Archithese, no. 3 (1995): 188–23.Fig. 8. Giorgio de Chirico, Ulysses. 1968.Fig. 9. Giorgio de Chirico, Piazza. 1913.Fig. 10. Giorgio de Chirico, Self Portrait. 1928.

Fig. 4 Physical Culture Exhibition 1903 Programme. Courtesy of Conor Heffernan, Physical Culture Study. Available from: https://exerciseeggheads.files.wordpress. com/2015/10/xc1999_17_050.jpg (accessed May 20, 2018).

Fig. 3. Physical Culture Exhibition, 1903 Poster. Courtesy of Conor Heffernan, Physical Culture Study. Available from: https://exerciseeggheads.files.wordpress. com/2015/10/xc1999_17_000.jpg (accessed May 20, 2018).

Fig. 2. “The Great Competition”, Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, no. 7 (December 1901): 285–91.

Fig. 1. Dr. Bernard & Co., Melbourne, A New Sandow Pose (VII). Source: Wellcome Collection, photo taken from ‘Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture’. Available from: Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/ works/vfj8aepb (accessed May 20, 2018).