iT haS leGs!
Selfie, La Dogana,Venice, June 2016.
"Sometimes it looks to me as if, in my role as psycho-historian, I tried to diagnose the schizophrenia of Western civilization from its images in an autobiographical reflex."
Aby Warburg, Journal, 3 April 1929, in Gombrich, Aby Warburg : an intellectual biography.
I started collecting pictures of legs in 1992. Legs as the main object of representation.
My fascination with the imagery of legs ?
Eighteen years spent in the UK, a fertile ground for nonsensical humour and eccentricity.
Also, the hunch that legs and their depiction would cease to be solely objects of desire.
After having been hidden, ignored or merely admired as sensual objects, legs would appear as "autonomous subjects".
Indeed they now live their own lives, in all kinds of states : leg up, legless, pulling someone’s leg, without a leg to stand on, and so on.
Many documents are works of art, but many are not, and come from the press, television, the street, the web, social networks etc.
For all of them - which I have photographed, scanned or made screenshots of - I have kept their "raw", homemade aspect untouched.
I mounted two hundred and forty-six pictures in forty-three categories, according to what the French call a "marabout bout d’ ficelle" progression or, if you will, as one plays dominos and abuts two similar ends.
Here, the similarity between two end-pictures is mostly a similarity of shapes, themes or aesthetic choice, which anyone can decipher as (s)he pleases.
The set, if seen as a whole, can double as a mirror - however slanted it might be - in which my epoch can behold itself.
In the playful way I have adopted for its montage, I have named my document : "It has legs!".
"Think often about the connection of all things in the world and their mutual relations. They are unarguably intertwined in friendship and within that connection all matter is unified."
Marcus Aurelius
Marie-Thérèse Weal, ara mtwww wealwildweb 😜