STILL PUMPED UP.(celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 'Pumping Iron' motion picture )

What with the budget crisis, the reappearance of the homeless, and the return of swingers' parties, the city is beginning to resemble its nineteen-seventies self--or so it seemed at the Whitney one night last week, when Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, and several hundred guests gathered to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of "Pumping Iron," the documentary about bodybuilding that made "the Austrian Oak" famous and launched a thousand gyms.

Back in early 1976, George Butler, a photographer and documentary filmmaker who had spent months tracking Schwarzenegger, Ferrigno, and several other musclemen as they prepared for the annual Mr. Olympia contest, had run out of cash. Rather than give up on the project, Butler persuaded Palmer Wald, an administrator at the Whitney, to organize an evening of performance art featuring Schwarzenegger and two other bodybuilders. Butler expected a few hundred people to attend the show, which was called "Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art," but several thousand turned up, and they overran the museum. "When the night came, there was a blizzard," Butler, who went on to make "Pumping Iron II" and a series of films about the explorer Ernest Shackleton, recalled, as he sat down to dinner in a third-floor gallery. "Suddenly, there was a massive crowd outside. When the elevator doors opened, people would explode out of them. We took in so much money we had to put it in piles on the floor."

Some of the people who attended the show twenty-five years ago were workout enthusiasts, but many, including Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Sam Wagstaff, were not. Prompted by some clever publicity work on Butler's part, the art-world sophisticates had bought the notion that crunching weights and striking poses was a valuable form of self-expression. Vicki Goldberg, a writer for the Times, chaired a panel discussion on historic representations of the male form, which took place between the displays of beefcake, and several ...