Picturing the Modern Amazon - Panel Discussion

This conversation, held on May 18, 2000, explores the relationships between some of the bodybuilders and artists, and the three curators who took part in the exhibition Picturing the Modern Amazon, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York from March 30 to June 25, 2000. Participants included bodybuilders Andrulla Blanchette and Laurie Fierstein (also a co-curator), artists Bailey Doogan and Seth Michael Forman, and co-curators Judith Stein and Joanna Frueh. It was moderated by Janet A. Kaplan.

Kaplan: How did each of you come to the project?

Frueh: I had been interested in women's bodybuilding as a scholar and critic for almost twenty years. In my early thirties, I began to read a lot about it and started bodybuilding myself, though I'm certainly not hypermuscular. I find muscular women exceedingly beautiful and moving and respond to their discipline, whether it is punishment or a kind of erotic will, in a very positive way. I have a kinesthetic response to pictures of hypermuscular women and to seeing them perform. Laurie contacted me about the project, which sounded fascinating, so eventually I agreed to co-curate the exhibition.

Stein: I had begun weight training a year or two before and had found it such a transformative experience that I was telling everybody I met about it. Lisa Coffin, a curator now at the Serpentine Gallery in London, heard about Laurie's project, knew my enthusiasm for weight training and my curatorial experience, and put the two of us together. But it all became most real to me at the Ms. Olympia Contest, in October of 1997, when I saw my first bodybuilding competition. I was captivated and fascinated and started to think about how to deal with the intellectual aspects of it. This led to my catalogue essay about the overlap between performance art of the seventies and eighties and the bodybuilders as self-proclaimed works of art.

Doogan: I was asked by the curators to be part of the exhibition. My work up until that time had been very involved with the body, not necessarily the idealized body, but the specific body, and specificity was extremely important to me--specificity as far as size, shape, age, and condition. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed like the perfect project.

Blanchette: I'm a bodybuilder and a friend of Laurie's, living in London. I did some live posing work on video for Jayne Parker. And I was interviewed over the internet by Joanna via email. I'm a big fan of women's bodybuilding, and I like to see it get thrown into the mainstream, to let people see what we're really about. People think that we're segregated from other people. But I do normal things like everyone else.

Forman: I was invited by Judy. I have been doing emphatically narrative figurative work, playing basically with a very traditional mode of oil painting. But I challenge myself to come up with provocative imagery. I suppose that is why they were interested in me for the exhibition.

Stein: Some of the artists who are part of Picturing the Modern Amazon had already made works that represented hypermuscular women, and others were invited to create works for the show. Some artists had left a paint trail, as it were, that would make them likely candidates. Others were leaps of faith.

Fierstein: I created the project, but it really is far from my project because it's very much a collaborative effort.

Kaplan: What prompted you to bring this concept to the New Museum?

Fierstein: Having been a competitive bodybuilder and having experienced personally the responses, which are extreme and varied, I had been trying to grapple with some of the contradictions relating to women's bodybuilding. If you're not within that experience, it's hard to get some of the depth of it. This is much more than women getting up on a stage and posing. I competed from 1989 to 1992. During my last few competitions, I started to write a piece titled "Bodybuilding and the Female Physique," in which I dealt with what I felt, from the perspective of the bodybuilding community, were some of the more important issues relating to a woman wanting to be and being very visibly muscular. Out of that I organized an exhibition, called A Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World, which was an attempt to show the women simply as they were, rather than within the framework of a competition. It was a live performance at Roseland. It was very campy, strange, funny, and interesting, because the women were invited to do whatever they wanted. They were everything from superwomen to those tragic Wagnerian creatures who died with chain mail and sword.

In terms of the project, artists had to be the ones to deal with this. It is a very visual topic. I felt it had to be an art exhibition because there's really no other way that the issue could be explored very thoughtfully and profoundly except through visual discourse. I didn't feel there was anyone else who would really be able to grasp the subject matter. You look at this woman, and your response is not from the idea of who she is but from the visual impact that it makes on the human brain when you see her. There had to be women artists, artists of color, artists who had different experiences, because the points of view on this topic are vast and varied. It could not be any one idea of what the muscular woman is because she is many things.