Defiant Embodiments: Broderick Chow
Channel: Dynamic Tensions
Date: 2017-05-08

Defiant Embodiments in Theatre, Sport, and Performance: An Interdisciplinary Symposium. Brunel University London, 29 April 2017. www.dynamictensions.com

Broderick D.V. Chow (Brunel University London)
“Artist/Model: The Defiant Embodiments of Stanley Rothwell’s Photo Archive”

This paper is the first examination of the archive of Stanley Rothwell (1904-1986), a British former miner, artist’s model, bodybuilder, boxer, wrestler, writer, and physical educator. Born and raised in Lancashire, Rothwell worked as a miner before moving to London where he eventually became an artist’s model for numerous prominent sculptors including Charles Sargeant Jagger and Josefina de Vasconcellos. His papers, now housed in the H.J.Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, University of Texas at Austin, document a life of ‘image-making.’ His muscular body is captured not only by the sculptures he posed for, but also hundreds of photographs, from his teenage mining years into his seventies.

Although Rothwell’s archive is composed mainly of still images, pictures of him posing, I argue that these still poses are charged with a kind of defiant embodiment—thus, they might be considered something akin to performance documentation. Reading the images in this way challenges discourses on or about physical culture and fitness practices that read the trained body as a disciplined and therefore dominated body. Instead, in studying the physical culture archive I employ a method informed by practice, which raises methodological issues for the status of the still image as evidence for a form that is about the moving body.