Cassils\u2019s Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200athe re-enactment forty years on, of feminist artist Eleanor Antin\u2019s legendary performance Carving: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em>5<\/sup>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Composed of 148 full-length self-portraits of Eleanor Antin naked, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture <\/em>documents the artist\u2019s weight loss between July 15 and August 21, 1972.<\/span>\u2014\u200ais unarguably a deconstruction of heteronormativity and an essential contribution to renewed feminist thought. In the footsteps of Antin, who followed a drastic diet for forty-five days in order to literally sculpt the flesh on her body, Cassils also kept to a strict diet, took steroids, and followed an intensive twenty-three-week training program to gain as many pounds in muscle. As Antin did, Cassils documented the process through photography. Although the iconographic rhetoric of both propositions is presented as a response to the violence inherent to the imposition of dictates of beauty on the female body and tends toward a critique of its ideological perpetuation in the world of art and historiography, these performances differ greatly from one another in their political import.<\/p>\n\n\n\n initely follows the path set by Antin\u2019s work, with strategies of self-representation characteristic of feminist artists of Antin\u2019s generation, Cassils seeks to reverse the relationships of objectivization and instrumentalization of the female body by producing a body that is in fact hyper-masculine. The goal is not to perform the teleological endeavour of \u201cbecoming male,\u201d but to take a critical stance with respect to what philosopher Paul B. Preciado calls the \u201cbiocodes\u201d of gender: the stereotypical\u200a\u2014\u200aand thoroughly arbitrary\u200a\u2014\u200acodes attached to the male-female binary. Foiling the physiological plasticity6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Translator\u2019s note: The author uses the word plastie<\/em>, or \u201cplastic surgery,\u201d in a very general sense to denote all technological intervention on the body.<\/span> of these codes, Cassils, in this performance, denies any ontological truth to masculinity or femininity beyond an assemblage of highly normative fictions that current technologies encourage us to replicate. These technologies permeate our flesh to such an extent that they become integral to who we are, claiming to participate in maintaining our \u201cnormality\u201d or, worse, our \u201cnaturalness.\u201d Makeup, implants, wigs, silicone, false eyelashes, and other corporal extensions, as much as contraceptives, hair removal, and steroids, contribute to the technologized production of gendered subjects. All these elements help to maximize and glorify the bi-categorization of gender and render unintelligible or abnormal identities that do not conform to this logic.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - \u201c\u2026\u2018persons\u2019 only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility,\u201d Judith Butler, Gender Trouble<\/em>, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 22.<\/span> What Cassils brings to the fore in Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em> is a body laid bare as a laboratory of queer identity, as a \u201ctechno-organic interface, a technoliving system segmented and territorialized by different (textual, data-processing, biochemical) political technologies.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biobolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era<\/em>, translated by Bruce Benderson (New York: The Feminist Press, Grasset, 2013), 114.<\/span> While it transcends, almost to the point of caricature, the stereotypical image of a white, North-American cisgender male, Cassils\u2019s body remains nonetheless blurred and unstable, bearing iconoclastic traits of breasts and effeminate facial features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a provocatively titled book\u200a\u2014\u200aTesto Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200athat has become a reference in queer theory, Preciado develops the concept of \u201cpharmacopornography.\u201d Inspired by Foucaultian biopolitics and referring \u201cto the processes of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity,\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Ibid., 33\u200a\u2014\u200a34.<\/span> the concept takes into account the literal (bodily) incorporation of systems of production, surveillance, and heteronormative control under the aegis of science, thus embodying one of the great truths of contemporary life. Connecting with such pioneers of postmodern feminism as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Monique Wittig, Ilana L\u00f6wy, and Nelly Oudshoorn, Preciado intertwines medicine, pornography, culture, race, history, sex, science fiction, and self-determination in a mash-up that incubates queer identities. Preciado\u2019s pharmacopornographic regime tells of a medical economy in the production of truths concerning gender and the sexes and denies bodies the multiplicity of genetic, hormonal, sexual, and sensual configurations that may be performed on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Borrowing sex and gender technologies from both Teresa de Lauretis and Michel Foucault,10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Teresa de Lauretis, Th\u00e9orie queer et culture populaire: de Foucault \u00e0 Cronenberg (Paris: La Dispute\/Sn\u00e9dit, 2007); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualit\u00e9\u2009: La volont\u00e9 de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).<\/span> this new reading of the machine-organism enables Preciado\u200a\u2014\u200aand queer multitude artists\u200a\u2014\u200ato envisage a technological body plugged directly into the matrix of what we call \u201creal\u201d life. In this sense, Cassils\u2019s work presumes no longer to reveal the asymmetry or even the performative evidence of genders, but to reappropriate the political, cultural, and medical processes by which the body, as technique, acquires a natural status. In this scenario, queer subjectivities, favoured for their \u201csituated point of view,\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Sandra Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2004).<\/span> are endowed with an epistemological proximity to the tools of resistance in Preciado\u2019s pharmacopornographical regime. Cassils\u2019s performance, consisting of ingesting steroids and performing a \u201cbody and mind\u201d reappropriation of the capitalist pharmacopeia, enacts a space of micropolitical\u200a\u2014\u200aor, rather, somapolitical\u200a\u2014\u200aresistance to a coercive, binary regime of mutually exclusive genders. In other words, Cassils\u2019s work interconnects with the heteronormalizing endeavour that medicine effects in and on bodies from the moment of birth and even before, if one thinks of ultrasounds during pregnancy. It is in some sense a process of \u201cnaturalization\u201d legitimized by \u201cscientific objectivity,\u201d but here made over through the artist\u2019s self-determination and agency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Tangential to Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em>, and in collaboration with makeup artist Robin Black, Advertisement: Homage to Benglis<\/em> prompts a reflection on the structures of subjectivity and on our outmoded relationships to an ontological body supposedly independent of all technicity. This work refers explicitly to the famous and outrageous ad published by Lynda Benglis in the pages of Artforum<\/em>; here, though, Cassils has become that dildo, that conspicuous phallus that Benglis exhibited in 1974 like an appendage or prosthesis. A slippage occurs between these two generations of feminists, between two registers of art criticism as regards the body. Both performers certainly interrogate the reification of the object-body, instrumentalized by centuries of artistic practice. But whereas Benglis spotlights the prevailing sexism in the art world by parodying the excesses of macho attitude, Cassils literally embodies this masculinity in order to deconstruct its ontological pretention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The critical position adopted in queer \u00adthought questions the very notion of \u201csexual difference.\u201d By problematizing from the outset the intrinsically misogynous nature of this concept in Western philosophy\u200a\u2014\u200awomen being the taxonomic counterpart, the \u201cother\u201d subject, to whom man, keeper of the universe, refers\u200a\u2014\u200a\u00adpostmodern feminists transcend binary logic in favour of hybrid, contemporary subjectivities born of contradictions. The reformulation of Cassils\u2019s technologized body in this performance, rather than leading to political confrontations, stages an alchemy of oppositions. The project underscores precisely the process and transitional nature of identity, a strategy encapsulated in the work\u2019s serial aesthetic. Encompassing performance and performativity, the artist engages a political and aesthetic dialogue on the masculine form as sculptural material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The autobiographical element is what ties the work together and inspires Cassils\u2019s entire approach. Inscribing their trans body in the political domain, where it is deemed deviant, even a perversion, in the heteronormative regime, the artist, a weightlifting aficionado, challenges the falsely naturalizing relationship with gender, apprehending the body and its technologies as a set of physical and aesthetic interventions. Cassils\u2019s work, like that of other queer multitude artists, is distanced from the essentialist identity politics of their predecessors in a way that fosters a plural reflection on the very legitimacy and validity of categorical identity. Their reflections are nonetheless indebted to a constantly enriched theoretical and artistic feminist heritage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Cassils_TimeLapse_Front\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO05_Dubois_Cassils_TimeLapse_Front-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cassils_TimeLapse_Right\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO05_Dubois_Cassils_TimeLapse_Right-scaled.jpg\")
Time Lapse (Front, Back, Left, Right)<\/em>, performance details, Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em>, 2011.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cassils_Day](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO05_Dubois_Cassils_Day-1-of-Time-Lapse-scaled.jpg\")
Day 1 of Time Lapse (Front)<\/em>, 2011.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/ESSE\u2013ID-SiteWeb-Gabarit_DOSSIER_Photographie-complete2-scaled.jpg\")
Day 161 of Time Lapse (Front)<\/em>, 2011.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cassils_TimeLapse_Left\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO05_Dubois_Cassils_TimeLapse_Left-scaled.jpg\")
Time Lapse (Front, Back, Left, Right)<\/em>, performance details, Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture<\/em>, 2011.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cassils_TimeLapse_Back\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_DO05_Dubois_Cassils_TimeLapse_Back_jpg-scaled.jpg\")
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