Arm Wrestling in Academia

In this piece I invited my professors to come into my studio in order to engage them in a match of arm strength. In Arm Wrestling my Professors I attempted to elicit a rarely seen side of the academic elite. If my professors are experts in their field then in engaging them in a competition I hoped they would loose their cool and for an instance they would act out of animal instinct and thus loose a moment of their constructed human composure. No professor played into this more then writer and media theorist Dick Hebdige. In the provided film still you can see Professor Hebdige trying so hard to win that, as one witness accounts, “his face turned purple”. I found this losing of ones self in competition to be of the greatest interest as I moved forward in my research.