Long before most of Youtube's fitness gurus were born, people shaped up to Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda and anonymous women with tips for maximizing your bust. Artist Michael Itkoff brings them to life in How To, his gloriously groovy GIFs of '60s-era fitness, dance, and martial arts instructors.
The project started four years ago when Itkoff found a quick-and-dirty guide to mastering the ancient art of karate. He scanned each photograph and put them in sequence, which inspired him to start animating the images. He made stop motions from similarly self-empowering sources, chuckle-worthy manuals like Beautify Your Bust and Bowling to Win.1 The results are oddly mesmerizing, their stars bending, reaching, twisting, and punching their way to health without ever losing their gusto and pep. "There’s something universal about the rhythm of the movements and the characters themselves," Itkoff says. "The gestures are really organic."
The series includes 50 animations that, seen together, offer a fascinating look at the human form—and psyche. "They become almost a lexicon of human gesture," he says, "while I explore this interesting and funny subculture of the self-help movement."
Itkoff admits he’s a sucker for fitness. He studied karate when he was 10 and earned a black belt at 14. These days he tries to hike daily and kayak when he can. He finds health nuts like Richard Simmons touching. "I’m a hetero male who doesn’t really do aerobics, but I have a lot of love for the persona that he is and was—that positivity, that ’80s zest, that never-flagging smile," he says.
To Itkoff, people like Simmons embody a utopian pursuit for self-improvement that dates to the ancient Greeks' obsession with bodily form. From YouTube exercise channels to Crossfit-obsessed Instagrams, everything you need to know about building a better you is a swipe away. "Suddenly you have this excess of information," Itkoff says.
Yet having access to this information doesn't mean people apply it. For every ab workout video on Youtube, there’s at least one providing winning strategies for, say, winning a hot dog eating championship. This contrast in extremes isn't lost on Itkoff. "We have all these competing ideas and different ways to approach a healthier, fulfilled life," Itkoff says. "It puts the burden on us, as our own curators and editors of our media stream."
UPDATE: 3:18 08/19/15: This post was updated to correct the series title and manual name.
