Enllleshed

Recent Work by Christopher Braddock

STEPHEN ZEPKE

Christopher Braddock's recent work accomplishes

that rare thing; it addresses the most complex
philosophical issues facing us today, with a great deal
of humour, and a technical virtuosity rarely seen in
sculpture in this country. His often heretical work has
produced a lot of negative reaction and, like most
dissent, this is one of the clearest indications of its
strength and value. I find that, when faced with his
work, distance is collapsed and all I can do is be
enthused, to go with the flow and be carried
away . ..
II
The human is a contrary thing, defining itself by first
deciding what it is not. Through this self-imposed
dictatorship of subjectivity, the great binarizing
machine churns out all us 'not-thats' and 'not-thems',
a whole dialectic of horror and fear, a world of
identities based on exclusion.
Schools of philosophy are based on this abstract
machine, Lacan and his desiring subject premised on
lack, and Derrida and his deconstruction of the
dialectic which requires the border in order to mark
its impossibility. According to them, then,
Christopher Braddock's Untitled: mesh 1 to 5 would be
about 'rims', the drive, and the impossible object, or
an ambiguous object both sacred and profane (for
example). But always as tied to the border, as outside,
inside, or as somehow both. As having a relation to
the subject, unchallenged in its excluding identity.
III

But what if this was all bull-shit? What if the border

between the subject and its object, the subject and its
outside, was all a crock? What if we were connected to
our outside, what if we were traversed by it, what if
this was the nature of consciousness, as it were,
'against itself'? Where would we be then? A long way
away that's for sure.
The arse-holes are not just displayed but are
splayed open, wide and gaping, proclaiming their
penetration. The stretch and strain of their exercise
obvious in the taut, chicken-wire skins stretched over
the pine boxing, their membrane close to collapse. As
clearly penetrated, they are at their most penetrating.
These non-gendered arse-holes are about penetration.
What we see is not the arse-hole as such, rather the
anal canal and rectum with the anal sphincter
removed (or perhaps stretched extremely wide).
These works are not about the opening, the distinction
of inside and outside, or about the control of flow this

opening provides. These works go deeper than that,

unrestrainedly penetrating a body whose inside and
outside are smoothly involuted (we see the inside of
the outside of the inside). Not only are the anatomical
privacies of the body ignored, along with their flows,
but the skin itself is permeable, as if the boundary of
the skin no longer protected and contained the inside.
The layers of stretched wire are allowing a fluid flow
out of and into these mesh bodies, a body of mesh,
bodies meshing. Subject I object, inside I outside now
one, a field of intensities, a molecular flow, a freedom
of possibilities beyond subject and object.
And this flow hits in torrents. These works demand
dissolution, for us to break down and be 'absorbed' in
them, to move from being a solid spectator to being an
amorphous event. No viewing subject, no art object,
only invention. Invention of a new body; a body of
flow, a body of mesh, the artistic body.
Possibilities other than male and female (subject
and object) appear in these ungendered buttocks. It's
not that they are 'male or female', nor 'male and
female', they' re 'neither male nor female' : ungendered.
These are not works about homosexuality, nor about
anal sex, they are about penetration and its
possibilities. Penetration by things both imagined and
real. The meshing of inside and outside, the flow that
constitutes multiple journeys, a connection w hich
creates a penetrating and penetrated machine. In
Untitled: repeated cross fo r example, the maze formed
by the stack of connected crosses is punctured at
regular intervals by holes. The inside of this work is
filled by its outside, travelling its interior demands a
confrontation with otherness, its maze suggesting
penetration and connection rather than containment.
These works of Braddock's present a body no
longer created and controlled in the binarized system
of gender. An ecstatic plastic surgery constructs this
body, not as a search for knowledge but as an
experiment of sensation. These mesh pieces offer a
careful research, a considered programme, imploding
their integrity and abandoning themselves to be
penetrated and to penetrate, to change, to mutate our
insides and bring them out, to flow so that the border
is no more. This connection is not simply suggested
diagramatically in the works' form, but also in the
sensuousness of their effects. Against all odds these
wiry bodies are sexy, their stretched surfaces and
gaping apertures seducing us, enticing us to feel, to
imagine, to flow in a sensational participation.
(opposite above) CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK
U11titled: 111irror 2 (1994)
Wire mesh, w ood & mirror, 360 x 935 x 170 mm.
(opposite below) CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK
U11titled: 111irror 4 (1994)
Wire mesh, wood & mirror, 170 x 240x 690 mm.

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(left) CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK Untitled: mesh 5 (1993)

Wire mesh on wood, 350 x 420 x 230 mm.
and Untitled: mesh 2 (1993)
Wire rriesh on wood, 405 x 410 x 210 mm.
(right) CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK Untitled: mirror 3 (1994)
Painted wood & mirror, 190 x 123 x 70 mm.
(Collection of The James Wallace Charitable Arts Trust, Auckland)
(Photograph: Stephanie Donald)

IV

The penetration of the social body (generically male

and heterosexual) by its other has been prevented
through the illegality of anal penetration. The
discreteness, not to mention discretion, of this body
maintained in the face of a penetrative threat. The
first appearance of the prohibition of buggery in
English secular law was in 1533 during Henry VIII's
reign. As part of the Protestant ascendancy and an
anti-Catholic politics, buggery was associated
with Catholicism and the Pope. This was
somewhat ironic given that the Catholic Church
had itself associated buggery and heresy to
condemn Islamic invaders and other
European heretics (and so there is more than a little
irony in Braddock's conflation of the sacred heart and
of the cross, with the arse-hole). For Catholicism,
Protestantism, and English law, buggery has been
associated with dissent. But where English law has
attempted to reduce buggery to a description of a
physical act between men, and make it coincide
with homosexuality and hence illegality,
Braddock's Mesh works elevate it to a construction of
experience beyond gender. This is precisely the nature
of their heresy and of their dissent. These works
suggest a sexual politics revolving around an
ungendered experience of penetration, beyond the
types of essentialisms which have dominated the
feminism and homosexuality debates. Apart
from this dissenting voice to PC, the Mesh works enact
an event outside of the essentially human, a
post-human experience of penetration, a mystical
heresy seeking to transcend the social.

Untitled: mirror 2 and 4, like the Untitled: mesh works,

are about connection, but they also address the issue
of restraint. The mirror lying behind the wire mesh
gives reflections of the viewer, incorporating him or
her into the work, giving a specificity to each viewing
act that makes difference one of the works'
underlying themes. We no longer view the object as
outside, inasmuch as we are part of its representation,
there in its body, watching ourselves watching
ourselves. Between us and our reflection are the layers
of chicken wire through which we look, which are
seen again in front of our reflection, changing the
depths of the image, and confusing us as to where
exactly our reflection lies in relation to both the wall
and the interior space of the work. This confusion is
multiplied in the repetition of reflections in each
section of Untitled: mirror 2 as we walk along, and
through, its length. This confusing spectacle produces
similar problems for our interior space, our
consciousness of consciousness now multiplied and
restrained. In Untitled: mirror 4 our reflection is also
obscured, this work placing eight layers of chicken
wire between the viewer and his or her reflection. It is
found on the floor, meaning we must lean over the
work in order to see ourselves. This obscures the
light which, added to the effect of the layered wire,
makes the view of our reflections highly
problematic. The mirror on the floor creates a
depth to the work which dissolves the solidity of the
floor. Unclearly reflected, and with an unsure ground
to stand on, the subject is being dissolved by
degrees.

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The mirrored confusion of the body in the work,

indeed of the body of the work, which appears
doubled and doubling, confusing as we are in and
out of the work, and no longer able to unconsciously
maintain our interior space in a simple and detached
way. Subject and object in these mirror works
combine, and that we look at them from outside is
no longer clear, as we also look out from within.
What we see when we look into the depths of these
restrained works is ourselves restrained with wire.
We look through the wire in order to see the reflection
in the mirror, but that wire is also reflected in front of
our face's reflection. Doubly restrained then, it brings
to mind the phrase 'Just because we're not behind
bars, doesn't mean we're not behind bars'. Walking in
the freedom (!?) of the gallery only to come upon
ourselves caged and restrained, imprisoned through
our attention, captured by an image of our restraint. Is
this like Lacan's 'mirror-stage'? Not at all. Where his
intellectual prison was designed to capture the subject
in the ego's misrecognition of itself as more than it
actually was, Braddock's work takes the utopically
free individual in her misrecognition and reveals the
restraints of such a subjectivity, always already
enchained in its dialectical relations.

(below) CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK Untitled: repeated cross (1993)

Wire mesh on wood, 1480 x 410 x 150 mm.

bodily mutations which are post-human in their

possibilities and capacities. Such are the enormous
excitements of being cheek to cheek with Christopher
Braddock.

VI
Untitled:mirror 3; a small mirror lies behind a white
roundly triangular frame that protrudes from the wall
about 7 centimetres. Looking like a 'box' (genital
protector for cricket players) and hung at groin
height, the work lets you 'crotch-watch' yourself. The
voyeuristic in art (yawn)? How about sports
equipment as art, crotch watching as sporty art (arty
sport)? The name 'box' is itself a bizarre gender
inversion reflecting the masking, or is it ef-face-ment,
of phallic projection. But unlike cricket wear, this 'box'
is see-through and permeable, offering a view of what
it contains, only as already contained, concealed
under our clothing, tucked away from view.
Untitled:mirror 3 puts a grill across what is already
concealed behind the cloth and so gives a view of the
doubly constrained. The work is a meeting of
outsides, the inside of the work actually containing
the image of our outside. As pure outside, or as
outside multiplied, Untitled:mirror 3 enfolds an
outside and an inside so that they are the same thing,
an object of involuted space, a dextrous interiority
containing its outside, a moebius box.
The mirror in this work forms a triangle between
eye, art and crotch. A veritable Eyedipal triangle
providing protection from castration, and so
u ggesting a subjectivity not so isolated in its ego,
more connected to its objects, and more fluid in its
flows.
VII
If the facial shapes of the Untitled:mirror works bring
us face to face with our dissolving boundaries, and
unrecognized repressions and restraints, then the
u ttocks of the Untitled: mesh works suggest flows and

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