Holy Leg
Please focus your attention on one aspect of the environment while ignoring all other things, to the blurring of lines between public and private places, to the privatization of places classically seen as public, such as my legs, buttocks, breast, etc.
Please create in me a feeling of always being watched, so that I become at times self-policing and at others perfect. Even if I cannot directly see who or what is watching me. This possibility of surveillance, whether real or unreal, is a convincing cliché, conventional, therefore delinquent.
Which way would you like to look? At me. Which way would I like to look at myself? Through you?
No, I look at myself through the eyes of objects, the eyes of my thighs. My marrow. My breath.
They are no different than my mind. My mind is my body and the separation between the two is just a formality that points to a certain inheritance, a certain construction. But me, I often feel I simply cannot help myself: to abstain from objectification is to abstain from all sexuality. Sex requires object, something one can
touch
and pay attention to.
Sometimes, I am a woman who welcomes an objectifying gaze in silence. One that occasionally elevates herself to the status of an object, one that believes objects hold
great power.
I welcome such objectification as a cunning exhibitionist but also as a sincerely human condition, a taboo. One that is cruel and yet carries the potential for significant pleasure, for either subject or object —
depending on how savvy and lucky you are in the world.
And contradictorily so, I feel it is impossible to ever be just one of the two. Now and again I too am a man but most time I’m neither. To be neither is possibly another word for abandon.
Remember my legs are classic,
a work of art with recognized and established value. A garment of a simple yet unfortunately long-lasting style: olive, long, thin, young. My legs are a betrayal. This repetitive gesture. Overly surveilled, sexual. They may not even be mine. They may only be what you see.
Cristine Brache often takes her personal and family history as a starting point to explore shared histories and trauma, womanhood, and the inevitable power dynamics that accompany these themes. Predominantly working in installation, sculpture, text, and film, the artist, filmmaker, and poet is interested in how people codify their behaviors and appearances for survival and adaptation in oppressive environments. Brache received her MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, with recent solo exhibitions including those held at Fierman Gallery, New York, Miami’s Locust Projects, and Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in festivals and group exhibitions internationally.
