THE WRESTLERS
Sculpture: High density urethane, polyester resin, acrylic, wax, and wood
58” x 36” x 20”
2015
Wrestling as a genre enjoys substantial precedents both throughout the history of athletics and throughout the history of art. Employing an innovative combination of technologies such as 3D scanning, motion capture, motion building, and CNC milling, The Wrestlers, and accompanying film, Role, creates a contemporary artistic iteration of the wrestling body in motion.
Made in collaboration with Farhad Akhmetov.
Wrestlers: Farhad Akhmetov and Uri Faynsod
Project Assistants: Arielle Marom, Yuka Murakami, and Alex Uhler
Special thanks: Tad Linfesty and Rey Diogo
This project was made possible through in-kind support from Rey Diogo Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the UCSD Visual Arts Department, the UCSD Media Teaching Lab, Xsens Motion Capture, xxArray Human Capture, Coastal Enterprises, and ADM Works.
THE WRESTLERS (ESSAY)
“The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, with bones underneath.'“ —Georgio Vasari
1. Ritualized Aggression
Aggression has had a pivotal role in the development of our species. It is present throughout the animal kingdom for the hierarchical selection of the fittest, for balancing the distribution of the species, and for defense in cases where the young take a relatively long time to develop (as in humans). And yet it often, if not always, carries with it negative associations, due in part to our desire to separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom. To this end, humans have rendered aggression symbolic by developing rituals such as protocols of war, rituals of slaughter, religious practices, the theater of athletics, sexual pursuit, and parenting. The performance of these rituals produces and reproduces a simulation of what was once a biological imperative.[1] This simulation might also be referred to as “play.”[2]
Sports are a type of play that have been used as an outlet for societal aggression for millennia. From the gladiatorial fights of the Roman Empire to contemporary American football, the theater of male athletics has provided a simulation of unchecked testosterone – virile, stoic, and unapologetic – that feeds our collective hunger for violence without forcing us to reflect or act on that hunger. I am interested however, not only in this sublimation of violence, but also in the expressions of intimacy that this sublimation makes way for. And, in fact, in the animal kingdom, bonding cannot occur without displays of aggression.
Wrestling, perhaps the most ancient of all sports, is the clearest example of this continuum of violence and intimacy, as near naked bodies fight one another with no space, fists, or objects between them. While the Greco-Roman form still reigns king in our minds when we think of wrestling, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has superseded it as the form of our day, its wide-spread success dating back to 1993 when 176-pound Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt Royce Gracie defeated 216-pound kick boxing champion Gerard Gordeau in under two minutes in the very first Ultimate Fighting Championship. In that seemingly miraculous moment, Royce who was the lightest fighter in the league and often teased for wearing a Gi, the ritual robes of martial arts, proved Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to be the most effective and destructive combat sport in the world. It has since then grown to become the most popular wrestling form in the Americas and Europe, used not only in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournaments but also in Mixed Martial Arts and Ultimate Fighting Championships.
In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and other forms of wrestling, submissions (inescapable situations such as arm bars, leg-locks and chokes) are often achieved through micro-movements as opposed to the sweeping strikes, jumps, and kicks of boxing, Muy Thai, or Krav Maga. Positions typically considered submissive or female in mainstream society become the most powerful positions on a Jiu Jitsu mat. For example, “full guard,” Brazilian Jiu Jitsu’s primary position, entails a fighter wrapping his legs around the waist of his opponent to pull him close. These visual elements reflect the intimacy below the surface, both of the sport and of society itself, making it rich subject matter for a work of art.
Figure 1.1: Unitled (From Wrestlers Study #1) by Ava Porter, 2015
Whether among opponents in a competition or teammates in practice, a sparring match is a consensual act. Athletes consent to fight within limitations – codes of sportsmanship are adhered to, a point system is enforced, and certain moves are restricted. The goal of the fight is submission through technique, not death or injury by way of brute force. This enables fighters of different genders, ages, or weight categories to safely practice and compete with one another. If an injury occurs within the sport’s limitations, it is accepted by both parties (and other team-mates) as an inevitable accident. If injury occurs because protocols have not been adhered to, it is criticized and remembered – many schools have had cases in which they have had to bar an individual from training. By fighting according to these protocols, fighters are in a constant state of identification with their opponent. They construct their opponent not as the “other,” but as their partner. This facilitates the development of trust among fighters, not unlike the trust that is developed within a consensual sexual relationship where rituals of dominance, submission and bodily adornment may also apply.
2. Wrestling in Art History and the Cinematic Dilemma
In art as well as in sports, wrestling as a genre enjoys substantial precedents. With examples as diverse as murals on Ancient Egyptian tombs, Renaissance and Baroque sculpture, and Realist painting, wrestling, used to allegorize commitment, strength, religion, and power or to simply present the everyday, can be placed within the art historical canon of traditional subject matter.
Figure 1.2: The Wrestlers attributed to Myron, Cephisodotus the Younger
or Heliodorus, 3rd century BCE
Figure 1.3: The Wrestlers by Gustav Courbet, 1853
Figure 1.4: Males Wrestling by Eadweard Muybridge, 1887
In the 20th and 21st centuries, explorations of the wrestling human body have been taken up by photography and film. The first ever American wrestling film however, Leonard-Cushing Fight, shot by William K. Dickson, was not made until three years after America’s very first sport film - Men Boxing in 1891, also by Dickson. This fact is indicative of the course of 20th century filmmaking and culture, in which boxing superseded wrestling in cinema. This is not solely due to the sport’s widespread socio-cultural popularity, however.
Wrestling presents a huge challenge for filmmaking. Paintings, sculptures, and photographs can freeze in time the most dynamic and intelligible moments. These dynamic and intelligible moments are generally related to verticality: points in the fight when one or both fighters stand erect. By nature, boxing remains vertical for the majority of the fight and camera angles can therefore be diverse and dynamic. Scores are easy to understand, as strikes are clearly visible and a fall to the ground quickly signifies a loss. In wrestling, however, the sport itself is complex to follow, with obscured, internal moments dictating scores. Erect moments occur mostly at the beginning of the fight and rarely or never throughout it, with the majority of the fight taking place horizontally on the ground. Falling means, at most, a number of points and rarely, if ever, a loss of the competition. Fighting from the back can sometimes present an advantage. In these horizontal moments, camera angles are limited. Bodies blur together and the nuances of athletes’ movements grow difficult, if not impossible, for a general audience to read. And while a painter, sculptor, or photographer is not bound to these moments, a time-beholden filmmaker is.
Figure 1.5: Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese, 1980
3. Cinema and Protocinema in The Wrestlers
I work primarily with camera-based media. My work spans simple single-channel films to mixed media installation or immersive cinema. I am interested in both the visual analysis of motion itself and the social, historical, and scientific implications of movement. Movement in art leads inevitably to film. Despite the experimental nature of my installations, at the root of my interests lies a concern with traditional cinema. I see my installations as ways to unpeel the filmmaking process and to splay it out on multiple walls and surfaces in order to examine it spatially and metaphysically. But I have been spending most of my installation-making time unpacking issues of the camera, when for decades filmmakers have been praising the power of editing, from the early Soviet filmmakers who applied dialectics to montage to Stanley Kubrick who believed that “everything that precedes editing is merely a way to produce film to edit.”[3]
Editing is where a film is ultimately shaped. And this idea of “shaping” evokes a simile in the minds of many filmmakers and editors – a comparison between editing (often in relation to mis-en-scene) and sculpture. For example, Andrei Tarkovsky’s film memoir is titled Sculpting in Time,[4] and Thelma Schoonmaker has said of the editing process, “It’s absolutely like sculpture.”[5]
A completed film appears to exist in two dimensions, albeit two dimensions manipulated through techniques of lighting, composition, and cutting to appear three dimensional (much as Renaissance painting attempted to beget the illusion of a window onto the world). However the process of a film’s creation is in the third dimension. For a viewer, sculpture might not seem so obvious a simile, but for a filmmaker, it is what is lost in the end – the three dimensionality, the physicality, the sweat, the movement through space. These statements about sculpture are reminders of what film really is, not just what it appears to be.
In 21st century filmmaking, distinctions between 2D and 3D spaces have blurred even further as motion-capture, animation, and CGI are utilized more and more in both animated and live-action films. This complexity of 21st century technology opens up new possibilities in investigating the editing process via this sculpture simile. Real people and objects are now being scanned into virtual 3D space so their replicas can be carved or printed into real space by CNC machines and 3D printers. Films use similar technology to alter limbs and faces, to animate the bodies of actors according to the movements of stunt doubles, or to give animated characters life-like movement.
By merging these technologies, it is now possible for the editing process to be not just like sculpture, but sculpture itself. The Wrestlers sculpture bridges the gap between 2 and 3D space by marrying photography, filmmaking, motion capture, motion building, 3D modeling, and sculpture to capture an ephemeral moment in time, which would otherwise be impossible to see in person or in a traditional film or photograph. This captured gesture implies a beginning and an end and therefore represents a complete story within a single moment thus maintaining the narrative elements of cinema. In many ways, this desire is a return to the Baroque and demonstrates a cyclical relationship to art history wherein the Baroque becomes one of cinema’s beginnings, allowing the work to bridge the gap between contemporary and historical. In Bernini’s David, for example, by way of the character’s gaze and gesture, the viewer is brought into a scene in which Goliath’s body is implied and his slaughter imminent. This single frozen moment generates a complete story, as opposed to the David of Michelangelo, who rests in contrapposto with no beginning and no end and therefore remains an eternal icon, acinematic.
Figure 2.1 David by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1624 and David by Michelangelo, 1504
Another art-historical return in this piece is to that of the protocinematic, the early photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. When Muybridge photographed a galloping horse in 1872, he creatively and artistically pushed a technological innovation to show what had previously been invisible; that in a horse’s stride there is a moment when the body of the horse is completely air-born. But this moment was not accomplished by taking a single photograph. Instead, Muybridge had to devise methods by which to shoot sequences. Only then could he extract the most pivotal momento(s) that would signify the series.
Figure 2.2: Galloping Horse by Eadweard Muybridge, 1872
Similarly, The Wrestlers sculpture selects a single image from a motion-capture sequence to allow viewers insight into the flying arm-bar in three dimensions and to visually analyze and therefore understand the shape of a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu submission. In a sense, I have here begun to solve the 20th century problem of “filming” horizontality. I should note that, while to some this sculpture may seem to depict a vertical moment, it instead represents the transition from verticality to horizontality. The lower figure stands erect, however the superior figure is entirely horizontal. It is this horizontality that dictates the motion of the fight and therefore the composition of the piece. It is a physically impossible moment where, without the aids of sturdy materials, these bodies would (and in a real fight will) fall immediately to the floor. This piece is the first in a series of horizontal sculptures and a logical first sculpture to construct as it, in addition to being the most challenging to engineer, also represents the transition from what is essentially Judo (the vertical) into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (the horizontal). It is only once a fighter is pulled to the ground that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu truly begins.
Protocinema also holds the key to a filmic justification for wrestling as cinematic subject matter. Though influenced a great deal by Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey photographed motion time-lapses within a single plate. Instead of image sequences, he produced composites, images in which motion over time became a single form.
Figure 2.3: Flight of Gull, Etienne-Jules Marey, 1887
These images rendered his subjects’ bodies illegible, however the legible body is, in fact, a distraction from the form of motion itself.[6] This concept was taken up by many modernist artists in the 20th century, for example with Futurism and Cubism.
Figure 2.4: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by Umberto Boccioni, 1912
Figure 2.5: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp, 1912
Therefore, a film that truly attempts to portray motion should not be concerned with the legibility of the human figure. Boxing, with its distinct bodies, blinds us to pure motion. The very illegibility of wrestling renders it an appropriate subject with which to
demonstrate the shape of motion over time. The Wrestlers performance film exploits this ambiguity to present a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu match between opponents who would otherwise never publicly fight – a male featherweight purple-belt and a female featherweight white-belt.[7]
In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and its relatives (Mixed Martial Arts and Ultimate Fighting Championship), while men and women do train together, and while there is an “open” bracket in many wrestling competitions where people of the same gender fight against opponents of different weight categories and/or belt levels, there is no official athletic competition space where men and women have ever, and possibly will ever, compete against one another.
Ronda Rousey is currently the undefeated women’s bantamweight MMA champion. She has done for MMA what the Williams sisters did for tennis, bringing the amount of speed and strength historically attributed to men to the women’s league. The Ronda Rousey/Cat Zingano fight of 2015 was the MMA’s headlining fight, the first ever women’s headliner in MMA history, and Rousey defeated Zingano in 14 seconds flat – a huge disappointment for ticket-holding or satellite television subscribing viewers. There is almost no one left with which Rousey can fairly compete, and it was recently suggested that she be put in the ring with a man. Though Rousey has claimed that she could beat 100 percent of male bantamweight fighters,[8] she has recently clarified her position on the subject:
“I just don’t think there should ever be a situation where there is an arena full of people gathered around cheering about a man hitting a woman. I really don’t see how that would be right. I really don’t see how that would help the sport at all. It would do nothing but hurt it.”[9]
While I don’t disagree with this in the context of professional athletics (though I would not present the concern as one-sided, pointing toward the victimization of women, and would instead be against the two-sided yet overly-simplistic “battle of the sexes” sentiments that would likely emerge), in an art context there is room to disagree and to dissect expectations of power, dominance and gender by placing a man and a woman on the mat together. Athletic competition is a form of theater in which, for the sake of drama (and capital), there must be a clear winner and loser. But this construct is merely the surface of the sport.
I began training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu because my partner, Farhad, suggested I join his class. I really liked the idea of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I liked the idea of fighting, particularly as a woman, at least in theory. But in practice I didn’t enjoy the classes, though this was mostly because of the environment, and not because of the form itself. The school where I started was a macho space that wasn’t just a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu dojo, but also a Muy Thai, MMA and general training gym. The guys there didn’t seem to know what to do with me and it felt as though they didn’t want me there.
I had to force myself to go to class and, because I felt so physically uncomfortable in my body within that space, I became interested in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu visually, more as a spectator (or artist) than as a practitioner. I soon after began The Wrestlers sculpture in order to carve out my own entry point and to claim Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as my own, and continued to force myself to train occasionally for the sake of the project, until our school closed.
Farhad eventually joined Rey Diogo’s Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy. After a few months I decided to start training again, and I went with him to a class at Rey’s. Rey was warm, welcoming, and attentive and he attracted the same personality type to his gym. I was immediately accepted into the “family,” and am often told by the guys that they wish their girlfriends or wives would come too.
But the space is still a male space. Aside from the coach’s wife, I am the only woman in the entire academy. And while there are schools that have a number of women, and even a few that are exclusively female, my situation is the norm. I initially decided I had to make peace with the fact that it wouldn’t matter how much I trained, or how many pull ups I could do, or how well I ate, or how much I ran. Nor did it matter how much I cared about and dedicated myself to the sport. I would never be as strong as a man of my same size who also trains. But I still chose to go to class, to defend myself against men of all sizes, to sneak in the occasional choke or armbar when I could, and to participate in formal competitions.
Uri Faynsod, one of my teammates and also one of the wrestlers in my sculpture, once wrote to me, “Jiu Jitsu has given me everything I value in life… I've learned to be humble, kind, disciplined.”[10] This is a statement echoed in some form by most of the men I have met throughout my two years of training. I have come to understand that men have to deal with similar limitations to mine and are forced to acknowledge that there is always someone stronger or faster or younger. But still they train to build muscle and develop skills so that they can hold their own against bigger men. In fact, the story of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the story of David and Goliath. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was conceived out of a need for a smaller person to be able to defeat a larger opponent in a street fight or to, at the very least, defend himself. The ways to do this are to bring the fight to the ground –height no longer matters if one is on the floor – and to pull the other body close – at a close distance a punch can’t do damage. Through techniques of sweeps and leverage, a person of any weight can topple another body, no matter how massive, and can move to the top position. If a fighter is on the top and knows how to distribute his weight correctly, he can make 150 pounds feel like 200. And there are also a number of chokes and submission from the bottom position, so a fighter can also win from his back.
Within all of this is a feminist or, rather, humanist statement about the invention of difference: victimization is sometimes (though, of course, not always) a construction within one’s own mind developed out of a selective reading of occurrences. Accepting defeat is in itself a type of power once one has pushed the limitations of his or her own body, because within each loss are many small victories.
I demonstrate this in The Wrestlers film, which presents a 5-minute uncut, unchoreographed Brazilian Jiu Jitsu match between Farhad Akhmetov, an advanced male fighter, and myself. In the film the fighters are nude, stripping the specificity imbued on a gesture by costume, thereby making literal the process of submission, and rendering the performers entirely vulnerable both to each other and to viewers. The point is not that I lose (am victimized) in the end. Rather, it is that I manage to endure 5 solid minutes (and, in fact, 20 minutes if one considers the 3 fights preceding the selected take) against this mismatched opponent, taking the top on occasion, forcing him to struggle as well, and managing, after a bloody strike to my nose and a severe choke-out, to recover, stand up, and calmly step off the mat.
4. Reflections
The method of sculpture production employed through 3D technologies is no more efficient or simple than producing an entirely hand-hewn work. The total time to produce, not a final piece, but a model has totaled over a year, and there are still numerous problems in the original file that need to be corrected before going to final fabrication. Furthermore, the machine cannot produce fine detail or a totally smooth surface, so much of the work must still be done by hand.
What is unique about this process, however, beyond the capturing of an otherwise impossible to see moment, are the limitations that are placed on idealizing a form. By using scanning and motion capture, flaws in the body that would otherwise naturally be ignored by the eye of the trained artist are captured. Sagging skin, hyperextended limbs, and bodily contortions remain in the form. It is then up to the artist to retain or eliminate them before sending the file to mill.
The idealized figure or abstracted body is anonymous. Like Michelangelo’s David, it represents the iconic as opposed to the individual. However, sculptural and video processes leave the particulars of the individual intact, producing an uncanniness that has only heretofore been described in the context of traditional photography. The body in motion that has been captured represents, not only an ephemeral moment in the sport but also in the lives of the fighters themselves, producing an index of “that-has-been”[11] that points toward their death, and ours, which is always the final resting place of each and every narrative.
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[1] Lorenz
[2] Huizinga
[3] Walker
[4] Tarkovsky
[5] Hynes
[6] Doane
[7] The order of belts in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu from lowest to highest are white, blue, purple, brown, and black. Purple is considered the first of the professional belts and requires on average 7 years of training, 5-7 days a week.
[8] Alexander
[9] Crum
[10] Faynsod
[11] Barthes