Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
. . . The painting I produce and the one I look at may carry both the rays of a phallic gaze, the extensions of a symbiotic one and the aerials of a matrixial gaze. The phallic gaze excites us while threatening to annihilate us in its emergence to the screen, while giving us the illusion of participation in mastery; the symbiotic gaze invites us to sink inside while threatening to annihilate us together with the screen. The matrixial gaze thrills us while fragmenting, multiplying, scattering and joining grains together, it turns us into what we may call wit(h)nesses: participatory witnesses to traumtic events of an-other at the price of fragilizing and fragmenting us. It threatens us with disintegration while allowing participation in a drama wider than that of our-individual selves.
Copyright © 1999, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, all rights reserved
