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An erotic relationship between horse and rider? "Everybody knows it's there," says Deborah Bright, Bunting Institute fellow in visual arts, "but it would upend the order of things to admit it...Puritanism is alive and well, particularly for those in charge of youthful girls." In a recent sequence of photographs titled "Being and Riding," Bright explores the potent attraction of horses, especially for young girls.

Girls perform "undeniably erotic functions" with horses, Bright asserts: they feed and stroke the animals, entrust them with secrets, allow themselves to be carried off by the beast between their legs. "It's a turn-on before you can name it-having that soft muzzle in your hand," Bright says. "There's an incredible gentleness these big creatures have. And though it could kill you, the horse allows you to take command. A lot has to do with inhabiting and controlling a powerful other body." And whether quivering flesh-or gleaming plastic, like the toy replicas Bright photographs-horses breed fantasies of flight and escape. "Horses can take you elsewhere," she suggests.

"Just touching so magnificent a creature," writes Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of Love, "I entered the gates of paradise." Ackerman notes that girls "forced to boil with the lid on tight"-without benefit of male athletic outlets that "jolt the nerves and make the heart stampede"-could find, with real or toy horses, actual or fantasized release: leaping fences, racing the wind, dawdling into the "bud-breaking chaos of spring" at a lope. Ackerman claims she's discovered informally over the years that 8 out of 10 girls experience a stage of horse idolatry.

"The phenomenon doesn't really interest psychologists," says Bright, "because girlhood passion for horses isn't considered an aberration." Bright herself was one of half a dozen elementary school "horse-girls" who mimicked equine behavior-galloping, trotting, and whinnying around the schoolyard. She remembers losing interest in "horse-play" around puberty, and recalls one girl who was ostracized for playing horse games past age 13.

"We give kids license to embrace a free-flowing energy toward all sorts of erotic possibilities. Girls really feel their oats between 6 and 12 years old. They're good at math; they're feisty," says Bright. "But at some point, as [Harvard professor of education] Carol Gilligan and other psychologists note, girls' spirits change. They lose their assertiveness, defer instead to boys."

In Bright's photo "Wild Secret Girl," a white horse gallops, mane cascading, toward the right margin. A gauze bandage that both blinds and binds her streams off the left margin, affixed to or held by an unseen agent. "Something insubstantial restrains her," says Bright. "Like gender, social conditions, a soft constraint you know exists, but can't put your finger on." In "Novice," a colt's body, legs splayed, strains against the thick chain around his torso that lashes him to a black field. "His stance suggests he's fighting a powerful force," says Bright. "The foolishness of youth doesn't let him see he doesn't have to strain."

Some of Bright's images (each is about two by three feet) have a crisp edge, others a dreamlike, soft-focus quality. Using a computer, the artist has digitally manipulated shadings and retouched the photos in places, to blur the line between reality and fantasy. Bright wants her photos to hover in a "liminal place," evoking an emotional edge, not sliding into S-M or kitsch.

She borrowed or bought (at old junk stores) most of the figurines she uses. Why toy horses? "You don't have to have a physical horse to get at these ideas," she explains. "It's a control issue; I wanted to do things to these horses." Things like fabricating miniature tack for her toy models. "In bondage, in most practices that use props, the visuality of tied-upness is what's erotic," Bright explains. "Of course, leather, that tactile, seductive object, is a highly eroticised fetish; we like to have it on our skin. When I put myself around a saddle, leather is a mediation material between bodies."

Freud claimed that only men have fetishes, for reasons he linked to alleged castration anxiety. "Hogwash," says Bright, echoing "queer theorists" like Teresa De Lauretis, who, in The Practice of Love, "posits that the 'lost object' is not the penis/phallus, but the female body itself." Consequently, Bright argues, we can understand women's fetish choice of a powerful animal substitute, rather than an inanimate object like a high-heeled shoe.

"I like to make art about the open secret, to force issues, to help people think in new ways about desire and its complexities," Bright says. "The female body is a bankrupt image-each photo is about an attitude projected." In the horse photo called "Missy," Bright captures female sassiness. "The name suggests a real tartiness," says the artist. "She's flashing a gold shoe, showing us a bit of ass." Bright smiles, "She knows what she's got."

~ Katrina Roberts

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Deborah Bright may be e-mailed at debobright@aol.com.

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