As far as one can possibly tell, the work of German-born photographer Theo Ehret provides the crucial, and perhaps only, link to the extravagant, inexplicable, histrionic, and downright reptilian world of predominantly female flesh that was, and maybe in some places still a little anachronistically is, Apartment Wrestling. A late 1960s, early 1970s, largely US phenomena, Apartment Wrestling involves, in its most basic form, a couple of nubile, scantily clad girls; the ability to imitate the moves and facial expressions of various pro wrestlers; a studio that can be easily transformed from living room to penthouse to hotel-room; and a rather unassuming, steadfast, and Teutonic way with aperture. The result is truly a cabinet of curiosities where contorted limbs and splayed genitalia fight for consonance in a setting of shag carpets and supermarket lighting.
Interestingly, Ehret himself plays down his role in all this. In fact, for a man who has spent so many hours, so close, to so many wriggling, beckoning orifices, he comes across, in print, as almost ridiculously matter-of-fact and uninterested. "Something about it made people want to see it. I was shooting it for years and years. It was a job, that was it." Or, "The girls didn't interest me: neither did... the wrestling." One hesitates to justify anyone's sensibility with recourse to their past, let alone someone skilled at capturing Twister-esque bodies that simultaneously suggest orgasms of Vesuvian proportions and the slow devourment by garbage disposals, however in Ehret's case this temptation is particularly difficult to resist. Born and raised in Mannheim, Germany, Ehret was drafted into that country's navy in 1939. He spent the next seven years there, including an eight-month stretch in a POW camp in southern Italy. He then left Europe for the United States in late 1952 with little else besides a young wife, their daughter, and a Contax 380 given to him by an aunt. Arriving in the New World, the Ehret family went through all the predictable, mid-century emigratory acts: the boat trip with New York City skyline upon arrival, Ellis Island, a Chicago winter with no food or money, the subsequent flight to the heralded 355 days of yearly sunshine that is Los Angeles. All the while, Theo Ehret's modest, workmanlike, and thoroughly technocratic approach to photography flourished, as did his mercantile instincts. First a PR agency came along asking for pictures of people and buildings for large corporate clients, so Ehret set about mastering the art of documenting operating rooms, newly built modern homes, business parks, interiors - "anything, in any situation" as he puts it. His own studio on Sunset Boulevard followed shortly thereafter. The first work that came in was doing publicity stills of boxers over at the Olympic Auditorium, a seminal L.A. venue of the time. This, in turn, lead to work with some of the big Boxing magazines back East. Which lead to commercial wrestling photography, and so to Stan Weston. "It [Apartment Wrestling] was started by Stan Weston, who was owner of those "Detective" magazines. One day he called and said, 'What do you think about getting a couple of gals in bikinis, and have them pretend to wrestle in an apartment?' He [Stan Weston] wanted to start having this 'apartment wrestling' thing in pro wrestling magazines."
Exquisite Mayhem: The Spectacular and Erotic World of Wrestling is quite possibly the largest book, physically, that I've ever had in my home. In fact, much like the cockroach, it appears to have a durability, not to mention girth, capable of withstanding nuclear war. (It truly adds another dimension to the term table thumping: I needed two hands to lift it). As it turns out, it is rather more, but also rather less, than one might expect from such an undertaking. Now, admittedly, Apartment Wrestling is not the sport of Kings as practised by Richard the Lionheart, or Henry VIII as he wrestled with the King of France on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Nonetheless, I desired some good old-fashioned context beyond Roland Barthes's typically asymmetrical catalogue essay in order to assure me that, as a sub-genre of the sport of wrestling, Apartment Wrestling actually existed in a quantifiable, objective space beyond a few years in the pages of magazines like "Battling Girls" and "Detective" and more recently Taschen's marketing department. I did not necessarily expect to learn from this book that the in the 1800s William Muldoon became the first official world wrestling champion, when travelling side-shows and challengers from the ground were the norm, but a nod in this direction would have been useful. But really this is to miss the point. Ehret's "wrestlers" are all about uncommon prurience - by turns befuddled, full of bloodlust, clumsy, earnest, mock-ferocious, and ridiculous. And apart from the complete lack of jelly wrestling and whipped cream wrestling, I have no other complaints. I would have liked to have seen more of this.
Reviewed by Kim Hjelmgaard
