Consume Me
Objectified Bodies as Art
I often write about staying inside my experience, of witnessing myself, of being the main subject of my life. But as an artist, I must face an essential paradox, one that invites me to embrace the inevitability of my own objectification.
All of us are storytellers.
And whether we tell stories through novels or dance or paintings or textiles or just over dinner with our friends, we are wired to share our stories. Our stories are the way we connect, create meaning, and find belonging. (In Greek, story and history is the same word: ιστορία.) To hold our stories inside of us is to deny a core wildness of ourselves, a thing that makes us human.
Stories are meant to be shared and consumed. They are meant to be taken into the body, metabolized, and utilized as nutrients for our lives.
The nature of dance especially (or music or acting or modeling for photography) means that my body is part of the piece. It is my breath, my voice, my limbs, my face that are telling the story. In many ways, I become the story.
And if stories are to be consumed, then that means that my body is to be consumed, as well.
Of course, an audience can view me as a whole person when I perform a story. They can be watching me dance or sing just as a friend would listen to a secret or a confession. They can hold a non-judgmental space for my self-expression. I call this witnessing. It’s therapeutic. It’s deep healing. That is how I first learned to pole dance and it is how I learned to start accepting my own shadows.
But sometimes it’s important that the audience doesn’t see me as me.
The whole point is that they see me as a character in a story that I’m trying to tell. My body becomes something else, something Other, something that is to be consumed, imbibed for their own utilization.
They will take the story and they will make it their own. They will see themselves or people they know reflected in it, or they will ignore it. They will love it, hate it, or be indifferent about it. They will use it as inspiration or avoidance. They will critique it, adore it, or abuse it.
And that means, of course, that they will be doing all of those things to my body, as well.
None of that is in my control. When I share a story, it is no longer up to me how it will be experienced by the consumer. My only job is to be the best storyteller I can be.
Whether it is dance or music or poetry or photography or these essays, I want to tell more stories. I want to make more art. And that means opening myself up to the dangers of being consumed by people who are not willing to hold space for me as a subject.
They will only see me as an object and forget that I am also a whole person.
But I cannot hold those stories inside of myself any more than I can constantly hold my breath and expect to be a healthy, functioning human. Telling stories is inevitable, just like breathing is inevitable. It is wasted energy to hold them in. And they will both only stop when I’m dead.
And even then, my stories will hopefully continue on like compost — feeding the roots of another person’s story — which is fodder for another person’s story — which is nutrients for someone else’s story — on and on and on and on.
In this way, I am both the subject of my life and an object of art. I am both a consumer and the compost that feeds the world.
I remember many years ago hearing a quote by Glennon Doyle Melton, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” And my immediate thought was, “Of course I want to be at the table. I want to be the subject of my life. To be a decision-maker. To have agency, to be empowered. But I also want to be on the menu.”
I also want to be on the menu?
Yes. I want to be consumed. Ravaged. Devoured. Taken in by others and absorbed like nutrients. Consumed and used as fodder.
But consumption has a bad reputation. In a society that glorifies both greed and anorexia, this makes sense. Many of us view the earth as a resource to be tapped, devouring without giving anything back.
Or we swing to the other extreme and deny the needs of the body through physical-spiritual-emotional starvation masked as holy asceticism or a twisted form of “environmentalism.”
In our fear of producing or becoming compost, some of us are only taking. Or in our fear of over-consumption, some of us are trying to deny that we need anything at all.
But I think we are totally capable of holding space for nuance and paradox. We can be both an empowered subject and an object at the same time. We can be both a consumer and provide sustenance for others.
This is the way of nature. Breathe in. Breathe out. Consume. Excrete. Observe. Express. Be a subject. Be an object.
The problem is when we get stuck in one state or the other. When we stop the dance between opposites. When we fail to Vine the Axis.