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The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development. - book reviews

Art Journal, Winter, 1996 by Monroe Denton

For Cole Porter, it may have been enough that "Birds do it./Bees do it," but these days what they do and how they do it is an academic growth industry, and least of all one in biology. One of the few job openings in higher education in a recent Sunday New York Times Week in Review section was in the area of "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender student services" at a major university. Need I point out that there was no opening in the visual arts listed that entire month?

More Articles of Interest: Perceived and ideal physiques in male and female university students.; The Greek ideal - immortals and man in Greek art - Between the Visible and...; Measuring masculine body ideal distress: development of a measure; This is the world's most beautiful couple; Male beauty - the current trend on gay-male aesthetics

Our current sensitivity to the topic of sexualized identity was born of the feminist movement, transfigured through gay studies, and now has spawned the field of gender studies. Last year, making small talk with a graduate student, I asked her thesis topic. "Mary Kelly," she replied. I allowed as how I was interested in the issues raised by Kelly's works (included in the exhibition The Masculine Masquerade), but largely on the philosophical, textual level rather than for their visual qualities. "Oh, I don't like the work at all," this young woman responded. "Then, why write on it? This is a degree in art history, isn't it?" I asked. "Gender studies is the hot area. I want a job." I felt very old.

Each of the titles under review (with the exceptions of the books by Callen and Orr) reconsiders the nature/culture dyad, articulated by Joan Riviere as early as 1929 in her essay "Womanliness as Masquerade." But at least since the rise of feminism in the 1970s, discussions in the visual arts have stressed this construct. Sherry Ortner's early essay framed the question "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?"(1) This question is here posed through the "re-engendering" of sexual distinctions. Thus, "sex" is usually allied with nature, masculine and active; "gender," with nurture, feminine and passive. Titles such as The Masculine Masquerade and Masculinities in Victorian Painting (note the plural) show just how deeply rooted these assumptions are.

Kenneth Dutton's study, The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development, is frankly not about nature - unless male strippers, bodybuilders, or underwear models are "natural." Dutton is voyeuristically interested in the transformations of the male physique from the works of Polyclitus to those of Herb Ritts. The author, a professor of French at the University of Newcastle in Australia, states that his work is "not intended as an academic study, but as a work for the informed general reader. It certainly makes no claim to originality of scholarship" (p. 18). Nevertheless, the author deploys scholarly boilerplate to discuss representations of male anatomy - sculptures, comic strips, art photographs, advertising, and documentary images - exuberantly at a variety of levels. Whether they be mythological, literary, symbolic, or artistic, all permutations are documented in the best scholarly tradition. Among the writers considered here, Dutton alone dares approach Arno Breker:

The new [Nazi] fighting elite was to possess in physical form the god-like humanity of classical antiquity, and ideologically pure male nudes proliferated in the sculpture of propagandist artists such as Adolf Hildebrand and Arno Breker, given theoretical justification by the writings of compliant art-historians and critics. These derivative and artistically worthless attempts to recreate Hellenic beauty took the conventional form of advanced male muscularity, symbolizing German racial perfection through idealized physical "purity" (pp. 206-7).(2)

Dutton would do well to explain what makes these works (illustrated here with Breker's Avenger and Sentinel) "artistically worthless," especially when he deals with Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of Breker's true physiological heirs, much less critically:

[T]he overt sexuality he [Schwarzenegger] exuded was unambiguous - it was masculine, dominant, potently virile. Woman [sic: Note how the female here is a class.] could desire him, but men could also watch him with admiration or envy, free from any overtones of sexual deviance. . . . [George Butler's book Pumping Iron] had been rejected by one publisher on the grounds that "No-one in America will buy a book of pictures of these half-unclothed men of dubious sexual pursuits," and when it did appear with Simon & Schuster it set, out quite deliberately to change the picture of "body-builders as narcissistic, coordinatively helpless muscleheads with suspect sexual preferences." . . . The Schwarzenegger phenomenon was instrumental in enabling bodybuilding to shake off much of the suspicion of abnormal sexuality which had dogged it for a generation or more (p.145).

I don't believe as Dutton does that "the fundamental question raised by Schwarzenegger is whether America adopted him or whether he adopted America" (p. 225). The entire question of sex, gender, desire, performance, and the body is far more complicated than that. Perhaps Bernard Rudofsky's concept of "erotic numbness" is more relevant here; is the body a living thing or a motif of art?(3)

The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development. - book reviews

Art Journal, Winter, 1996 by Monroe Denton

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