Before it became clear that I just
didn’t have the time to take care of my body anymore, I used to go to the gym. Whenever you join a new gym these days, you’re required to do a fitness test and — as the early-modern European laws on torture used to say — you had to be ‘shown the instruments.’ Unlike a visit to the dungeons, if you’ve already done this at other gyms, it can be quite boring and irritating, a pure legality protecting the gym’s proprietors from possible difficulties. There was, however, one recurrent aspect of this introductory session that always perturbed me: the instructor would invariably stroll into the weight-room, the heavy smoke of ancient sweat writhing amidst the arrhythmic clanking of weights, and pick up a barbell. ‘First thing, mate,’ he or she would say, ‘is to get yourself a mirror.’

The phrase is like a contemporary inversion of Hamlet’s simulated outburst to Ophelia: ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ Rather than the cloistered chastity of spiritual meditations, ‘get yourself a mirror’ enjoins the exposed promiscuity of physical activity. You’re meant to stand there, watching yourself bending and flexing, among others who are all doing the same thing, watching you watching them watching you…. Comparison and competition, narcissism and envy, pure repetition and self-transcendence are productively entwined in the scopophiliac regime of gymnastic self-fashioning.

Positioned between true fitness and superficial appearance, between personal development and social expectations, between the unheard-of specification of muscle-groups and the excesses of the post-Schwarzeneggerean body, the contemporary gym suggests that physical being is reflexively subordinated to its becoming: you are seen there to be seen becoming something else. This goes beyond the usual notions of physical ‘maintenance’ or ‘improvement,’ which are always gauged with reference to a base level; the gym today has more to do with fantasies of total transformability, and of the instability of all measuring units. After all, if human bodies are so mutable, then the very yardsticks by which their performances can be measured are multiplied: the freaky excrescences of the body-builder or the invisible capacities of cross-trainers.

The etymology of the word 'gymnasium' derives from the Greek gymnos, 'naked,' given that the ancient Greeks used to exercise in such a state. For the Greeks, athletic training was closely bound up with training for war, and so men of all ages would exercise at the gymnasia. But such training also implied an intellectual education as well - the three Athenian gymnasia, the Lyceum, the Academy and the Cynosarges, ended up becoming major schools of philosophy. This movement from care of the body to the rigours of abstract thought is probably not so common in today's gymnasia (although it's perhaps not altogether lacking).

But as my introductory anecdote may suggest, what is centrally lacking from contemporary gymnasia is not nudity, nor an overarching function (e.g. training for war), nor even simply an intellectual element (how can action and appearance suggest ends beyond their immediate or instrumental ends?), but a sense that the physical — in its double role as potential for action and aesthetics — ought to be closely articulated with the intellectual. This would be a question of ethics. It is a lack of a sense of this ethical with? that vitiates not only the gym itself, but the life of eggheads like myself who can’t manage to sustain body and mind at once.

I hope this doesn't simply sound like a familiar, nostalgic lament about the 'dissociation of sensibility' or the deleterious fragmentation effected on the human sensorium by capitalism. What I want to emphasize, on the contrary, is that the genuine, utopian appeal of modern gymnasia - which offer a competitive social democracy of the body - could still offer an intellectual aspect as well. Rather than crying at the discotheque (or the battlefield or nunnery or dungeon), it's time for some thinking at the gym, and particularly about the status of with?: physics with physiques, power with aesthetics, mind with body, the individual with its community.

Strangely enough, it is precisely also an absence of with? that vitiates so much contemporary craft practice. I’m not sure that the contemporary craft world — at least in Australia — offers the requisite sense of narcissism and envy, aesthetics and activity, of technical competitiveness and sociability that the ancient Greeks, at least, presumed were necessary for any kind of glory, whether athletic, political, or philosophical. Nor does contemporary craft appear to grapple seriously with any injunction to think. So it is time for a new kind of gymnasium, the Infernal ©raft Gymnasium.

My proposal for a craft gym is that craftspeople should get together to design and build it. The perfect craft gym would not be a finished place or product; it would rather be the process of its own design, discussion, organization, and construction. Or, again: training at the Infernal ©raft Gymnasium would be about the fraught relationship between process and product, to the point where means and ends are no longer easily distinguished. If you think about what’s involved in the architecture, materials, and technologies at any gym, you’d realise that it offered unbelievable opportunities for craftspeople. Glass, wood, metal, textiles and even ceramics are key features of gyms; the possibilities for building a gym — whether full size or scale model, fully-functioning or absolutely decorative — are legion. Would a craft-dumbell fit the hand more or less snugly than the machined metal of standard equipment? Would the mirror reflect in a verisimilitudinous fashion? What muscle groups would it exercise?

Despite the allusions made above to dungeons, cloisters, war-training and self-fashioning, it’s possibly more helpful to think of gymnasia as the gothic cathedrals of today. Those cathedrals — built not by mere manual drones under the intellectual control of a master-architect, but by diverse groups of craftspeople confronted with shared practical problems — are routinely invoked by commentators as the technico-aesthetic pinnacles achievable by collaborative craft labour. The Infernal ©raft Gyms would offer a perfect opportunity for a contemporary version of these.

Craft has never quite been the domain of the individual craftsperson, nor simply an archive of accumulated and impersonal knowledge.  Craftspeople have always incorporated techniques of making, learning them with their bodies through repetitions, but this is — at best — only in order to extend and transform those techniques in the production of objects that are both eminent and novel. To do this they are forced to encounter other craftspeople, from the same discipline and form others, and to share and compete in a market…as such, they need to invent little languages, jargons, for speaking to each other, jargons that are simultaneously technical, theoretical and aesthetic, and which have to be reinvented with each new problem and every new collaborator.

The construction of the Infernal ©raft Gyms would force their crafters towards recognising that the tongue is often the most important part of the hand. The Infernal ©raft Gyms would require their designers to be nomadic, at once specialised yet open to new connections. Gym work is by definition a work of fabrication and subterfuge, requiring the invention of new postures for the hand, the tongue, and spaces in their encounters. Craft is not reducible simply to hand-work or ritual-practice or functional object, or all the other Procrustean beds into which people try to fit it. The very building of an Infernal ©raft Gym would show this by extending the limits of craft practice, and setting new parameters for crafts — far more than a matter of just looking good or keeping fit.

But it's up to craftspeople to decide how to do it, and what they want to become. And what else is a gymnasium for?