Text highlighted with yellow highlighter, I directly quoted in my research paper.
Text highlighted with pink highlighter, help provide context for my research paper, which I would recommend reading.
Sections 4, 7, 17 and 19 are relevant for the research paper.
Dividers are in place sectioning the interview for easy referencing.
I joined a free visiting artist talk at the University of Tennessee, of which the artist and themes discussed still influence my work today. I emailed the Head of Fine Art to see if I could join any further conversations with Cassils, and Jason was delighted to include me.
In total, I attended three talks with the University of Tennessee. The first was their Spring Visiting Artist Programme, of which Cassils was their first artist, that I have made notes on. The second, is a discussion with the University’s Master of Fine Art students around Professional Practice, and the third talk will be with the University’s trans and non-binary students (so not necessarily artist’s).
Section 1: Introduction
Jason: I said a minute ago. If you weren't on the on the call, we've got people tuning in from all over the world, which is really exciting. This is going to be a great lecture and I just have a few things that I need to share with you before we get started. First of all, welcome to the first visiting artist. Public lecture of the spring 2021 semester, sponsored by the University of Tennessee. School of Art Programming committee. We are grateful for funding from the College of Arts and Sciences, Haynes Morris Endowment and support from the PRIDE Centre. My name is Jason Brown. I teach sculpture here at UT Knoxville. Before I introduce Cassils, tonight's speaker, we have a couple of housekeeping items. First, if you have not done so. Already. Please mute your microphone and when Cassils starts their lecture, if you could turn off your video, that will help us reduce the background noise and maintain a strong Internet connection. Please do not turn on your video or microphone during the presentation to ask questions. We will have plenty of time for Q&A after the presentation. If you could just submit your questions via the chat, then we will compile them for our speaker. Thank you. I also want to announce 2 events happening for our local campus events tomorrow here in Knoxville. In addition to their public lecture today, Cassils will engage with the non0binary and transgender discussion group tomorrow at 4:00 PM Eastern. That's hosted through the Pride Centre. The event is private and limited to 20 students. I think we've got quite a few already pre0registered, but you can find that information on our website and social media. A reminder to our MFA graduate students that you also will have an opportunity to meet with Cassils in a small group tomorrow at 2:00 PM Eastern to discuss professional practises. On behalf of the UT School of Art, it's my honour and privilege to introduce Cassils. Cassils is a visual artist working in live performance. Film sound. Sculpture and photography they have achieved international recognition for rigorous engagement with the body as a form of social sculpture. Cassils makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils art contemplates. The history of LGBTQI plus violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture. Drawing from the idea that bodies have formed in relation to the forces of power and social expectations. Cassils work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment. Originally from Toronto. And Montreal QC Canada Cassils is currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. They earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In Los Angeles and their BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Casas has been awarded numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Visual Artist Award and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2020, Cassils exhibited their art and stage performances at the Gardner Museum in Toronto, Canada, and the Festival of Feminist and Queer Culture in Croatia. The Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City, Barbican in London. Additionally, Cassils organised Co organised with Rafa as far as a in plain sight, a national public art intervention project. In collaboration with 80 artists, activists and organisations. Around the North America. Cassils also completed a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada. In 2020, and will be teaching a class with the band Centre next month in March. Please join me in welcoming Cassils to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Section 2: Trapdoor
Cassils: Thank you so very much, Jason, for that warm welcome. I'm going to share my screen. OK, here we go. So as Jason said, my name is Cassils and it is an honour to speak with you this evening. I'd like to thank Jason and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville School of Art Lectures Series and Bonnie Johnson, the director of the UTK Pride Centre for this event and making my virtual visit here this evening.
I am beaming to you today from Los Angeles, the ancestral homeland of the Tonga people of the Chumash nation. California was once home to thousands of people before the Spanish settlers arrived. Around 350,000 across this whole state and the Los Angeles Basin in particular, was hung to the tune of the people and the movements of the tune of the people set the stage that would eventually become Los Angeles. Their footpath through the historic Sepulveda Basin is now the 405 freeway, the LA State Historic Park was formerly the Tonga People's largest known village. Their influence on the eventual metropolis of LA extends far beyond their choice of location, though. The forced labour and enslavement of Tongva people is what allowed the Spanish settlers and their missionaries to develop their reach in the first place. I start this way because it is important for us to understand the long standing history that has brought us to reside on the land. And to seek an understanding of our place. Within this history. Colonialism is a current and ongoing process, and we need to build our awareness.
On March 4th, 2018, I received some tragic news that James Luna, one of the most important performance artists that I have known, had a heart attack and suddenly passed on. I've been thinking a lot about James in recent years. The lessons he taught us and the importance of his presence on this planet, he said in performance art. You show by example. I'm not out here to preach. People can make up their own minds. And in the beginning, he said, he created his artwork as a form of public therapy, having a master's degree in counselling. He knew that the first step to recovery is to speak directly to the issues at hand. In the artefact piece, Luna uses his body to make a powerful commentary on the objectification of First Nature's cultures in museum exhibitions and on the tendency to freeze native people in the past, presenting them as artefacts rather than as living members of contemporary cultures. He wore a loin cloth and laid still in the display case, surrounded by labels. Other cases contain ceremonial objects, personal objects, but in an unsettling twist, the viewers find the subject of their voyeurism looking right back at them. James Luna knew that visibility is a trap and this is something I think a lot about in relationship to my own subjectivity. The increasing representation of trans identity throughout popular culture in recent years is nothing if not paradoxical. Transmissibility is counted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with the political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people, especially trans women of colour, and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. There's a new collection of essays published by MIT Press called Trapdoor that grapples with these very contradictions. It posits that trans people are frequently offered up as doors, entrances to visibility and recognition, but these are actually traps. Accommodating trans bodies and communities only in so far that they cooperate with dominant. Forms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time. The concept of a trap door. Neither an entrance or an exit, but perhaps a secret passageway elsewhere. I had the pleasure of. Meeting James Luna at the Hammer Museum. And James told me this story of chatting with a friend, a fellow artist, on his reservation regarding his frustrations of being pigeonholed in the art world as a native artist. He told me his friend looked at him with perplexity and said you think you're in a box, but for us you're on a pedestal. You actually have a voice. I've thought a lot. About this in relationship to my own practise. Being constantly referred to as a transgender artist and of course that is part of who I am, but it is certainly not the summation of my entire art practise. There was a certain profundity in Luna's anecdote which reinforced the importance of standing up and speaking out.
In each of my artworks, I train my body for different purposes. I think of my body as both an instrument and an image, and whether it's being pressed against ICE, gaining 23 lbs of muscle, pummeling clay, or being lit ablaze. My live durational works, and the resulting performative objects, melt, flash, and burn with visceral intensity.
I think of the body as a sculptural object, bashing through binaries and the notion that in order to be ‘officially’ trans, that you have to have surgeries or take hormones. I perform trans, not as something about crossing from one sex to another, but rather as a continual becoming that embraces a process of indeterminacy, spasm, and slipperiness.
Section 3: Cuts
Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture was a six-month durational performance in the dialogue with Eleanor Antin's 1972 titled Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, in which Antin crash dieted for 45 days and documented her body daily with four photographs from each vantage point. In my iteration, instead of the feminine act of wasting, I used my mastery of bodybuilding and nutrition to gain 23lbs of muscle over 23 weeks via a regiment of force feeding the caloric intake of a 180lbs male athlete, gruelling workouts, and six weeks of steroids. Like Antin, I too took a photograph from the four anatomical positions to document my transition, and my title Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture is a twist on this idea of getting cut. It clears the trans body by showcasing the cut of musculature, as opposed to the cut of a surgeon's knife, and when I reached the peak of my conditioning on the 160th day of this performance, I collaborated with photographer and makeup artist Robin Black to create a work titled Advertisement: Homage to Benglis, in which I stage a homage to Linda Benglis's Advertisement in 1974, which is the image that you see on the right. And rather than buy advertisement space and art form magazine, as Bengalis did, to tap upon the glass ceiling of the art world, I capitalised all my connections in the gay fashion and art publications to disseminate these self-empowered images of trans representation. The work wound its way onto the Internet, ending up on the gay male version of hot-or-not, where I would steadily climb up and up until suddenly someone would scrutinise my pecks, realise they were tits, and my image would suddenly disappear.
In 2016, an advertisement poster for an exhibition shown at the Münster Museum, which was featuring Homage to Benglis, was censored by the Deutsche Bahn, which is controlled by the German government, for being “shameful, pornographic and sexy”. They had deduced that I was assigned female at birth, and therefore my chiselled chests were actually pornographic breasts. And with this essentialist binary viewpoint, the poster was removed to protect the public from its shamefulness. And these are just some images of some of the defaced posters from around the city, the one on the right has my chest crossed out and the word hate (hāt) in German. Contrary to popular hysteria, which considers the presence of trans people to be a threat, gender non-conforming people, especially those of colour, are extremely vulnerable to becoming victims of attack, and it is in this time that art is vital to the project of working against transphobia. And the recent attempts to ban my image from the public sphere only underlines their necessity. To quote Paul Preciado, he writes:
“I do not want the female gender that was assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish, and the state will award me, if I behave in the right way. I do not want any of it.”
Even before this pandemic set in my mind was reeling, the world seemed upside down and as an antidote, I returned to art as a strategy to invoke rituals of both the sacred and the profane. I draw solace from the words of Susan Stryker, an amazing trans theorist who recently wrote:
“If anti-trans discrimination is the worst thing that has ever happened to you, remember that there are others here today. Those who have survived occupation, slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, learn from the traditions of others.”
Section 4: Solutions
Solutions, opened in late 2018 and went well into 2019 at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston Texas, pulls inspiration from a long legacy of artists who have come before me, and is anchored by such a sentiment. We have always been around, and our legacies are ancient. Amidst the crazy raging cultural wars that were being raged, Solutions mobilised the interior architecture of the Station Museum and an exhibition space that was loosely modelled on the Greek Temple of Athena, goddess of war. Currently, the rhetoric of religious freedoms is being used as a justification for curtailing the civil rights of marginalised groups. And so I was asking this question, what if it was the constitutional right? If we had the same sort of religious freedoms which were invoked to protect a religion where our deities were in fact brown people, Muslims, women, queers, indigenous folks, then what would happen to such a body if harm was framed? Would it be framed as a quotidian act of police brutality or xenophobia or transphobia, or would it be seen as an act of religious persecution and will the sanctity of our lives finally be given value? And so, this was the sort of theme and framing for the exhibition. That inspired the Solutions exhibit.
The altar of the exhibition was Pissed, which is a minimalist sculpture in the form of a glass cube containing more than 200 gallons of urine initially collected between February 17th and September 16th 2017. The material was a collection of all of the fluid that my body passed, since the recent administration had rescinded an Obama-era executive order, allowing trans students to use the bathroom matching their current gender identity versus the sex that was assigned to them at birth. I continued this performance for over 200 days. And over the 4,800 hours that my performance Pissed manifested, I made protest visible daily and refused to allow these issues to recede from view. The work was a daily disruption for the public spaces through which I moved over the months of urine collecting. Every day, everywhere I went, I carried a 24-hour urine capture container in a cooler bag on ice, and in the end I had 6 full fridges. The cool presentation of the end sculpture, a gallery-based work, must be understood as the result of hundreds, if not thousands of daily conversations that accrued amongst friends, strangers, colleagues, authorities and acquaintances. My labour for this work, invisible in the sculpture, included shouldering these conversations again and again, as well as enduring the visibility that this performance brought to me, my body and its process. And as I was travelling for 30 days out of the country, and could not bring my urine across international borders, I asked my friends to donate their urine in my absence. Often these people were cisgendered, and asking them to participate, hyper-performed an otherwise private and bodily function.
So when I remounted this work in Houston, at the Station Museum, I decided to make it a sort of public urine drive, and so all the urine in that tank was actually donated by the citizens of Houston, cis and trans alike, through this urine drive, which was kind of like a Kickstarter for Pissed, and an act of solidarity. The collecting of the urine transpired throughout the entirety of the exhibition, and so the goal was to reach 654 gallons, which at that point represented the 654 days that had passed since the ordinance was rescinded. And remounting the work in Texas then imposed a powerful visualisation of the literal burden the 2017 rescindments inflicted, and continues to inflict, on vulnerable trans children. Functioning as an index of what a body passes, in relationship to a government ordinance overtime: formally this tank of glowing urine manifests, which might seem abstract in discussion, the very real content of bodily fluid being regulated by a discriminatory administration.
This sculpture was also contextualised by a four channel installation. It was made of the recorded testimonies from the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia, and these were parent-teacher meetings, where parents and concerned students and faculty would openly share their opinions about the use of the men's bathroom by a 14 year old boy named Gavin Grimm, who was a young trans man. This case started at a parent-teacher meeting, and went all the way up to the 4th Court of Appeals, which was (at that point) the highest court in the land that it could go to. But even though it was raising to these higher levels of judicial proceedings, the ignorance and biases amongst the lawyers and judges as they spoke about this child's body was really devastating for me to listen to. I combined all of the meetings that discussed this one young boy’s body and I spatialised them, such that when you would encounter the sculpture, you would hear these adults arguing over this child's body, and their voices would be volleyed back and forth over the sculpture.
We have a new administration and that's a great thing, really great thing. But the last administration did a lot of crazy stuff, mostly packing the local state courts, and so right now at least 20 states are currently considering at least 31 bills that would attack the rights of transgender people, mostly attacking youth. As more state lawmakers file bills to tear away the limited rights and protections that currently exist for trans people, so I'm talking about Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and, yes, Tennessee are all considering bills that would ban transgender girls from women's sports teams this year, and some of the bills will also ban transgender boys from the men's room, as well as competing in their gender categories. 11 states are also considering bills that would ban gender-affirming care for trans minors, even attacking puberty blockers, which must be taken before a person is an adult in order to be affective.
At the end of this talk, I'll drop a link in the chat that is put out through the ACLU and allows you to track exactly what's going on in which state, and also what you can do as students, as administrators, as faculty to get involved should you want to.
Section 5: Tiresius
In 2010, I made a piece called Tiresias. I often think of trans years like dog years, in that so much happens in a trans year in terms of the ways that we learn to speak about our bodies and to articulate. But back in 2010, there was certainly no term that I had ever heard of – like non-binary or gender fluid, and there was also very little representation of gender-nonconforming people, even within the trans community, and there was a lot of pressure to adhere to the gender binary. So unless you fully embraced a medical transition, you were suspect both by the trans community, but especially by Dominance's culture.
This is an image from a work called Tiresias. In Greek mythology, Tiresias is considered the blind prophet of thieves, who is famous for being transformed from a man into a woman for seven years. In this performance, which is also a sculpture, I embody Tiresias by pressing my body up against the back of a neoclassical Greek male torso, carved out of ice for precise contact with my physique. I melt the ice sculpture with pure body heat, performing the resolve required to persist at the point of contact between the masculine and the feminine. This is from a performance that I did I two years ago in Tasmania, a little island off the coast of Australia, and this is about maybe 5 1/2 hours in.
So back to the opening of that show in Texas, the one that was thematized around this queer religion. I made a collective artwork called Solutions two days before the midterm elections. This was a performance that used that piece you just saw, Tiresias, as a jumping off point for this collaborative iteration. I invited three other artists, Rafa Esparza, an artist named Fanna, and another artist named Juan Thomas. All of are subjectivities differ, but all of us were having our civil rights eroded by that administration, and so together we expanded and reimagined the idea of Tiresias to incorporate their performing bodies. All of us worked with the medium of ice, which also stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, especially when you're in Texas, which spoke to the coming together of diverging expressions, the power of performative actions and the generation of those collective creative forces. We made four films, one for each artist, as they worked with their chosen symbol carved out of ice, these films were installed in a sort of semi arc to look like the name of a church to formally reference classical sculptures of divine figures found in temples of worship.
And so now I'm going to ask that we drop the solutions trailer in the chat. Lindsey. And I'm going to. Have you all just watch that? And then come back to me.
For the opening performance that night at the Station Museum, against the backdrop of these four films, we 4 artists collectively melted a column of ice together, shifting the frozen obstacle between body to body, placing our own warm flesh between the ice of another body as one started to shake uncontrollably from the cold. Together we scrubbed this barrier, we licked it, we rubbed it, we hugged it, we stroked it, and finally we gilded it until it melted, and the collective runoff flooded and gilded the gallery floor.
Section 6: Up To and Including Her Limits
I'm now going to time travel a little bit. We're going to flash forward to a work that Jason was referencing that I made at the Gardner Museum fairly recently, just weeks before lockdown commenced. Looking at this work now, it eerily foreshadows this present moment. This was a brand new work, only performed once, that extends the legacy of a feminist artist that I was very inspired by, named Carolee Schneemann, who also passed away recently. A lot of my work is in dialogue with art history, I don't really have that many examples of artists that I could look to as a guiding post, but I always find a sort of ancestry when I look to the legacy of artists who came before me and I study their work, and I often think about what it would be like to update those works for those contexts. And so this piece was very much about taking this well-known work by Schneemann, which was called Up To and Including Her Limits that was made in 1971 to 76, and adapting it to a trans, non-binary perspective. On the genesis of this physically demanding work, Schneemann writes that it was “the direct result of Jackson Pollock's physicalized painting process”, referring to Pollock's active engagement of his whole body, as he flung, dripped, and poured paint over canvases spread on the floor. Dubbed ‘action-painting’ by art critic, Harold Rosenberg, Pollock's technique was a touchdown for Schneeman. She developed her own approach to art making, in dialogue with action-painting, seeking to insert her own body and her own perspective into a historically male-dominated arena. She says “I am suspended in a tree-surgeons harness, on three quarter inch Manila rope, a rope which I can raise and lower manually to sustain and entrance the period of drawing. My arm extends holding the crayons which stroke the surrounding walls, accumulating a web of coloured marks.” Schneemann writes, describing Up To and Including Her Limits, that her “entire body became an agency of visual traces of vestige, of the body's energy and motion.”
And now, Lindsey, if you could drop that video of my performance into the chat, that would be fantastic.
Audio from the video:
“Up To and Including Their Limits is a new work. It's a performance based work, an endurance based work where I am suspended in space using aerial suspension and stunt harnessing. And I am in a in a box that's coated with rock, clay and the the work is about removing. The clay from the walls under time and creating a platform under my body. For me, the clay is an incredible, responsive gestural material in up to and including their limits, there is the active grabbing, the act of throwing the active stomping, and all of that, all of that human movement is indexed so well with such precision. Through the materiality of clay. It's a homage to Carolee Schneeman Up to and Including Her Limits, a re examining of that piece. Instead of speaking to sort of feminist histories, it's speaking to the self making of a trans subjectivity. And it's using the material expressions of clay and in placement of of crayon and paper, and incorporating the gestures and the action, the restraint and the containment as well as elements of freedom as a way of speaking to that work and to now.”
Section 7: Becoming An Image
Cassils: So in many ways this piece Up To and Including Their Limits is a prequel to my most well-known piece, which is a work called Becoming An Image, and in this work Becoming An Image, which I started in 2012 and perform pretty much every year, and have done subsequently with the exception of this year due to COVID. In this work, I unleash an attack on a 2000lbs clay block, that's the sculpture you see on the left, and I do this by delivering a series of kicks and blows in pitch darkness. The spectacle is only illuminated by the flash of a photographer, and this flash burns the image into the viewer's retina, creating a live-photographic experience.
I initially performed Becoming An Image at the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California, and this houses the largest collection of LGBTQIA+ materials, to my knowledge, in North America. This performance points to the evidence of queer and trans lives that are often missing from historical representation. The piece takes place mostly in darkness and is barely lit, so I wanted to remark upon all that darkness and the experiences that exist between the flashes, outside the realm of statistical notations. But I also strive to problematize and complicate the very act of documenting itself, the photographer is always played by a white male, and he's doing much more than simply documenting this work: he's very much part of the performance, he becomes an instrument of light, and the interaction between us undulates for moments of pure symbiosis, the power struggle. We enter into a pitch-black, blind dance, and our relationship to each other is only made evident by the digital instrument, and the sound of our footfalls, and our collective breath.
The result of these performances is a series of enormous, clay sculptures, that stand in for a bashed body. They're marked with the imprints of fists, elbows, knees, sweat and struggle. In addition to the live performances, I also create photographic installations. For my recent solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Perth, Australia, I asked the photographer to turn the camera right on to the audience members, and the night after the performance was done, he and I worked late into the next morning creating site-specific wallpapers of the audience member’s reactions to the live event. The performance photographs, which are taken blind and at random, are then hung over the audience members wallpaper, so that the same people who had come to see the performance come back to attend the exhibition the next night, find their own eyes gazing back at them. This is my way of carrying forward the ethos and red thread of an idea, which germinates in a live-action, but then becomes an installation, extending the work of those who are not present for the performance. Presenting the work in this way, I triangulate the viewer, the performer, and the camera by folding their gaze into the work itself. You see, I don't believe in the passivity of an audience. No one gets to stand on the sidelines for me. If you are a witness, it means that you are present. You are alive and you too are making a choice, you're accountable.
I've recently cast the bashed remnants from Becoming An Image into durable sculptural materials. There is a concrete cast, a bronze and, with continued support, I'd like to pour a porcelain cast. These traditional sculptural materials will offer historical weight preciousness to lives that are often deemed disposable. The bronze sculpture is entitled The Resilience of the 20%, and it refers to a sickening statistic that in 2012, which was when I first made this piece, the murder of trans people had increased worldwide by 20%. The casting was done by myself, this was the first time I've ever made a sculpture, let alone bronze casting a sculpture, and it was amazing because I got to make it with the fellowship through the Syracuse University, where I taught a class on sculpture. So rather than Jeff Koons-ing, and outsourcing, I actually was provided with this unique opportunity to collaborate with the students and a wonderful man named Tom Hall, who is like the master founder, and together we manifested this work, this bronze monument, in a single semester. With support from Creative Capital, I proposed to turn these sculptures into public monuments, and I wanted to have them placed on sites where acts of violence had occurred against trans and gender non-conforming people, but only having the resources to make two monuments begged the question: how do you choose a site, when there are so many occurrences of violence? Then by choosing to commemorate one history, whose histories are you omitting? So rather than keep the site static, I decided instead to mobilise the monument.
Section 8: Monument Push
In spring of 2017, I launched the world premiere of Monument Push, at the Bemis Centre for Contemporary Arts. This is often deemed fly over country by the blue coastal States, and is located in the heart of scary, red America, but the Bemis Centre and I worked in partnership with members of the LGBTQIA Community, allies and advocates to choose sites that sought to explore the spaces of trauma, violence, celebration and resilience that are very much alive in the city.
One site was the largest prison in the Midwest, and it was chosen by Dominique Morgan, a local activist and acclaimed singer-songwriter, deeply entrenched in advocacy for community and youth. He chose this prison because LGBTQIA+ youth of colour are particularly at risk for detention. As many of you may know, prisons in America are for-profit, the Centre for American Progress found that each year approximately 300,000 gay, trans and gender non-conforming youth are arrested or detained each year, 60% of whom are black or Hispanic. Similar to how transgender adults are often placed in solitary confinement, allegedly for their own protection, these youths are often ‘protected’ in the same way, and Dominique was put into solitary as a teen because he was an out, gay, young person, and this was the prison solution for protecting him against possible rape.
Another chosen site marked the first ever Pride parade in 1985, where the marchers and the viewers at the time were so ashamed to be associated with the event, that they preserved their anonymity by wearing paper shopping bags over their head. I'm going to show you a short trailer of this work, Monument Push, so if Lindsey, we could please drop it in the chat, that would be great.
Audio from the video:
“I grew up as a gender queer youth and received my first death threat by the time I was 14 years old."
“I literally felt like I couldn't live as a fake straight person one more day.”
“I was doing whatever I had to do to be warm and have clothes and eat every day and all of that led me to be interested.”
“The story of of our Trinity, the story of our society. It isn't just one narrative. There are many pieces to to all of those narratives.”
A section of unedited text starts here, but finishes before Q&A starts
Section 9: Unedited
Cassils: So, this last summer. California was smouldering. Against the flames of toxic air levied by the fire and the burnings of uprisings, myself and a collective of artists, I was working with summoned the spirit of the late black pioneering poet Toni Morrison, whose birthday, incidentally, is today. And she prophetically wrote, quote, there is no time for despair, no place for self pity. No need for silence. No room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. Artist Rafa esparza. And I came together to make a work called in plain sight. As hundreds and thousands of Americans were protesting the policing of daily life, especially amongst black communities and communities of colour, immigration policy was and is moving in a noticeably dangerous direction. The system criminalises incarcerates and deports people, separating families and their loved ones forever, and the proving them of their liberty. I was motivated to make this new work as a trans person who had navigated the US immigration system. And during my own 17 year fraught path to citizenship, I had glimpsed first hand the unjust, meritless, financially motivated, bigoted and dehumanising nature of the US immigration system. And that's as a white person from Canada with an advanced degree. Fairness, freedom, opportunity, and respect for human rights should be at the core of the US immigration system. But our country isn't set up to uphold these values. Racism is the root of many of our systems in the US designed to strip people of their dignity. the US immigration system racially profiles people and targets people based on the colour of their skin. In the lead up to our launch of this project, we created a video edited by Graham Collins with music by Amazing Local Los Angeles localist. Check them out if you haven't already named Dorian Wood. To promote this sky typing performance and to educate people about ice detention and to build anticipation, so if we could just drop this last video in the chat, that would be fantastic. And then come back to me.
Audio from the video:
Music, song lyrics:
“A storm of change. And that storm is now. A storm of change. And that storm is now. And that storm is now. And freedom is a swarm of lies. Candle on the curb. Is the fire that could. When the squad car won't burn.”
Cassils: So it is against this backdrop, that fellow founding leader artists in some way came together to form this group in plain sight, which was a coalition of 80 artists United to create an innovative poetic artwork dedicated to the abolition of immigrant detention and the United States culture incarceration. And I felt really propelled to make this work when I figured out the answer to this question. How many camps are detaining immigrants? Many of these camps were profit in the US. And just pick a number in your head and I'm sure it will be smaller than the number of 200. There are these camps are in every single state in this country. They're not just located to the southern border regions. And it's really quite an atrocious number. So over the 3rd and 4th of July last year, Independence Day weekend IPS launched the nation's sky typing fleet to spell out artist generated messages and water vapour legible for miles. These messages were typed over the sky over detention facilities, over immigration courts, borders and other sites of historic relevance. And our goal was to visible aize the hundreds of detention centres and facilities by launching the nation's sky typing campaign to create a spectacle where we could harness people's attention towards our website, which functioned as a tool to help educate and engage the masses to take action. Our strategy was to amplify, amplify, Amplify 3 things. The calls to action from our coalition of 17 immigrant justice organisations, local bond funds that were used to help get folks out of detention while they fight their case from the outside. We asked people to fund those bond funds and we asked people to vote. We wanted to ask anyone. Who could to use their vote to consider this crime against humanity? Because it is a privilege to vote? Had some footage from the cockpit cockpit, so we targeted gaols that hold ice transfers and ice transfer is, for example. They're letting folks out of prison due to COVID, but if that person doesn't have firm immigration status rather than let them go, they'll call up ice. And say, hey, we got one for you and they will be picked up out of one system and transferred into ICE detention. So we targeted immigration courts. This is a message by Beatrice Cortez. This is the Immigration court on Olive St in Los Angeles. And their messages. No cages, no. Yes. We also targeted federal buildings. This is the message by Bambi Salcedo, who is the lead leader of the Trans Latina coalition. This is the Los Angeles Field Office stop emigration now. We targeted city halls. This is a message by Yuan Ree over the San Diego Field office. Your tax dollars cage. Kids. And as I mentioned, we also picked historic sites of relevance like former Japanese American incarceration camps. This is the site that was paired with Karen Ishizuka. She is the leader of an incredible group called Furu for Solidarity and they are people who are either. They're mostly descendant, very few survivors still to this day. Who lived through these incarceration camps? But they are descendants of folks that survived these incarceration camps and the slogan of sort of for solidarity is we want to be the allies that we've never had. Right. And so this is the Santa Anita Assembly Centre of race track, very close by to Los Angeles. And that was it in 1942. And this is it last 4th of July with carrots phrase no more camps X map. We also chose border crossings. This is a message by Marcos era Ramirez at the US Mexico Beach border and his his message translates to I am a cloud of hope and his work is informed by profound understanding of border culture. He explores issues. Identity and race and community in a wide range of mediums, frequently delivering this biting commentary instead of feeling half Mexican or half American, I feel double, he says. And as the planes soared, they made visible in the sky. What is too often unseen and unspoken of on the ground, which is the appalling, profoundly immoral imprisonment. Of immigrants. IPS broke through this wall of secrecy using art as public engagement to expose and scrutinise the sites of detention centres. The artists who participated in Ipps depict a fast rate of range of ages, reflect established and emerging voices, artists who they themselves had been detained, undocumented artists, indigenous artists, artists descended from those who had survived Japanese American incarceration, the Holocaust, and the afterlife of the AIDS. Prices and so although these artists varied wildly in subjectivities, what we did is ask them, in an act of solidarity, to focus their attention on immigrant detention. And here's a couple more example. This is Chengdu Migra, which is by undocumented poet Yosimar Reyes. This was over the Los Angeles Metropolitan Gaol, and Yoshi says in his own words, quote as undocumented people, we are taught to constantly be grateful for the opportunities that this country gifts us. Our labour goes with that acknowledgement. And when we dare to declare just how unjust the system is towards us, we are viewed as ungrateful. I am of a new generation. Of undocumented people who are exhausted from justifying our humanity. I am loud. I am proud. I stand firm with dignity in declaring that my power has kept me here. Chinga to Migra is a curse on the dogs they send after us. We are undocumented magic and negra is like is slang for immigration officer and chinga. That means basically like **** your immigration officer. And a lot of people got a big kick out of that in Los Angeles. This is Rafael Esparza's message, which is a Frontera, Los Crusoes. This is at the Tijuana, San Diego border crossing. The phrase situates the border as a man made device structure by situating it in the Spanish masculine, gendered in the diminutive of El it invokes. Migration as historically preceding the imposed structures of ideology of a border, it borrows from the lyrics of a popular song written by an indigenous metal band named Aslan Underground, which was we didn't cross the border. The border crossed us. This is Dred Scott's message. Dredd is an incredible artist based in New York City, makes a really radical work about racial disparity and racial injustice, and really about abolishing and interrogating white supremacy. This message was dropped over Ellis Island, home to the Statue of Liberty, which was in fact a little known. In fact, was a detention centre until 1942. And Dredg original message was USA kills us, but that was. That was censored and so we had to replace it. And actually like this message better, he ended up choosing the name of a man. Carlos Ernesto Escobar mahea. And this is drede writing. He says this is the name of the first immigrant to die in US detention from COVID-19. His death was absolutely unnecessary and preventable. To the leaders that run this country and those who implement its laws, immigrant lives do not map. In the streets around the country, demonstrators are boldly saying the names George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Ahmed Aubrey and many others remembering the name of Escobar Nihaya both honours him as an individual and contributes to people's efforts to end the system that killed him. American immigration policy kills people. It kills the people that ice detains. It kills the people crossing the harsh desert. It kills the people. At the ports. And this was my message, which was shame. And the hashtag defund hate and this was placed over GEO Group headquarters in Los Angeles. With $3 billion in the private prison industry, GEO Group is the National's second largest for profit prison operator and I am Canadian born an artist and an immigrant now, and new citizen of the US. Sky typing the word shame over the West Coast headquarters of GEO Group Shed light on the immoral intersection between for profit. Immigrant detention and the ways in which our governments have quietly profited off these immigration gaols I followed my phrase with detention watch networks hashtag, which is defund hate. Because for too long, our representatives have said that they care about our communities while simultaneously funding aggressive immigration enforcement, theft, and deadly gaols so cutting the flow of money is critical to stopping this agenda and for the Canadians out there. In my research, I found that Canada's RSP's, which are our nations pension plan. Was heavily invested in GEO Group for a hot minute until there was a massive expose in the Guardian and of course people rose up and were absolutely horrified that their national pension plan was in fact invested. So all seniors in Canada were investing. So that's what I mean about the sort of. The sort of governments that are quietly coming together to create these. Of their populaces that they most often aren't even aware of, and then I'll last message I'll show is a message by Kent Monkman and he's he's an incredible artist, Cree artist based in Toronto, Canada, and his, as you can see at the. Is not in a Roman alphabet. It's actually in the Cree, the Cree language, and I'm going to probably botch the pronunciation, but it's key. What's C Owen? Which means the word absolute compassion. And Kent writes of the statement before colonial governments created borders to delineate their new nations. Enforce first first peoples into reservation. Indigenous people migrated in all directions across the territories now known as Mexico, United States and Canada. These colonial demarcations on stolen land regard indigenous title and impede the free movement of indigenous people on our own ancestral territories across total island. The detention and the incarceration of migrants and the removal of their children at the southern US border to enforce a colonial boundary is criminal, abhorrent and intentionally dehumanising. The United Nations defines the forcible transfer of a child from 1 cultural group to another as a genocidal act. In Canada and the US, starting in the 19th century and continuing to the 1990s, indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and combined it in residential schools where they were abused and stripped of their languages and cultures. The resulting intergenerational traumas are manifest in many aspects of our communities, including the disproportionate incarceration of both indigenous people and Canadian. Prisons. This intolerable act at the US border is both devastating to witness, but also painfully familiar. We must encourage all Americans to have compassion for the families who are being ripped apart because it is from this idea of absolute compassion that radical change begins. And so this project did something that I had never done before. It was a radical experiment. And, UM. What we did is we created something called an impact strategy and we brought together something called an impact team. And you might say like what the heck is that was? An impact team. And it was distinguished by working with a team of socially engaged folks who specialised in in community partner engagement. So the idea was that we would have a team of people that would work. With the people who had the boots on the. And the organisers, while we worked with the artists in the skies to make an artwork that ultimately served the mission of immigrant rights advocates that who had been doing this work so well for so many years, because we really didn't want to make a work about immigrant detention. Moreover, we wanted to use art to elevate the work of our partnering words and ask this question. How can art Pierce through the rhetoric to move people into action? Right? Like how can we tell people about this and how can we teach them what to do and how? To help. So we worked with an amazing impact producer named set of Nandez from Kilio. They are a non binary undocumented immigrant filmmaker and community organisers whose roots come from the Philippines and their work is rooted in the belief that cultural strategies can propel political transformation. And to do this directly impacted people will must embrace. And have the empowerment to tell their own stories authentically. We also worked with Lina Srivastava, who is a social innovative strategist working at the intersection of social action, interactive media and narrative design, and we also worked with Becky Lichtenfeld, who is a human rights advocate, producer and director of social impact for the birth of foundation and who supports forms of activism that aim to bring about change and champions those using media. Law and enterprises tools to achieve their vision. And the impact team was guided by this belief that media and arts can play a vital role in the advancement of human rights. So as the plane soared, we had 12 on the ground activations, AKA protests that were organised. And as we flew over miss of their day detention centre in Bakersfield, typing out Harry Gamboa Junior's message. There was no ice, no ice, no ice. It just so happened that those who were incarcerated had their yard time and they started to collectively chant together in the yard. No ice, no ice, no ice. There was a protest outside the detention centre and two the protesters started to chant. No ice, no ice. The sound of this chant reverberated and reached the immigrants who were in solitary confinement. They were placed there because they were being punished for starting a hunger strike in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. No ice, no ice. They heard the chant and this cemented their conviction. Continue to continue their struggle. Each sky typed message was followed by a hashtag X map, and so when you would search this on the web or an Instagram, you would be driven towards either our Instagram page or our website. And here on our website you would learn more about the movement and you could also access and still can. It's xmap dot US, an interactive map, and this map tells you where the nearest detention centres are to your particular zip code and vicinity. So it tells you exactly where they are. And this website also provides calls to action and other ways that you can help change the lives of those who are unjustly and immorally detained. And it worked right just to give you an example of of like the size of these things, a single sky typed message written over an urban centre on a clear day can reach 3 million people.
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Section 10: In Plain Sight
So with 80 messages in the sky, we brought this issue to 24 million people nationwide, and with A20K Instagram following, which we built strategically, we had over 150 pieces of press, over 100,000 shares on social media and 3.54 billion in leadership from our recent action. So we reached our goal, which was really to use art to reach people, and IPS is really founded in this radical idea that, despite lockdowns and plague and systemic racism and the slashing of arts fundings that we artists have the power to create coalitions, to possess our own agency and wherewithal to create self-produced and self-determined visions for change. Both sides have these spectacles, that our vision is centred in love, community and relative action, not in fear and division.
These last four years have been completely brutal for all of us. I could have never predicted that there would be such openly hostile and very dangerous executive orders, that our president would be so sociopathic and narcissistic and incompetent. Who could have imagined the array of hard-fought rights that were rolled back, let alone all the deaths due to COVID-19 that could have been avoided. With the insurrection, the white supremacists flying Confederate flags in our Capitol building, and then the Inquisition, that, despite the evidence that the violent mob was incited, that we have senators who don't have the balls to convict this man because they're too concerned about their seats.
But then there's the flip side. We couldn't have predicted those spontaneous protests at the airports, the stunning numbers of women out in the streets early on in the administration protesting around the world, or the active football players bending a knee to ignite a much-needed discussion of racism in America. The success of Stacey Abrams, the incredible network of tireless organisers in the South, Georgia turning blue. The sacrifices of our medical staff: my wife is a nurse, I live it every day, but dozens of friends I know who spent countless, unemployed hours sewing masks in the beginning of this pandemic, just trying to make themselves useful. Those working on the front lines because they can't afford to stay in quarantine. And now we got a vaccine coming, so finally, there is a feeling of hope. And I believe that this world is changing around us, now more than ever before, and it's shifting and it's up to forward thinking people: citizens, students, faculties, artists, art administrators, like ourselves, to be part of what this world gets crafted into.
Despite the injustices, the corruption, remember that the actions you take today – seek a conviction for the record books, a conviction for history – this is a time that is going to long be studied in history. So, the question that I ask myself, and that I'd like to ask you, is what's at stake for yourself and others? What can you do? What did you say? What art did you make? How did you act? What is your conviction? I will conclude by reading a hopeful quote, by an amazing scholar: the New York based, Cuban-born, scholar Jose Esteban Munoz, who passed away, and despite the beauty and wisdom of his work, was the very kind of person that Mike Pence would have wanted to cure with conversion therapy or sent back over the border, and Munoz wrote:
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality, and put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of our horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”
Thank you all so much for sharing time and listening to me. I will stop my share and I'm really. Eager and excited to hear any questions you may have. Thanks, guys. See those fingers, I appreciate it. Great. So I think Jason's going to moderate. And so let's let's have it. Let's go for it. Jason, if there's any questions yet.
Section 11: Audience Interaction
Jason: Yeah. Thank you so much, Cassils, it was a really fantastic lecture. I don't know about moderating, but Lindsey's been doing a great job helping us take information from the chat, and I would encourage everybody who's listening to please type those questions into the chat, and feel free to turn on your cameras. It's always nice to see faces as we have a discussion.
Cassils: Yes, I'd love to see faces. And thank you, Lindsey, for all the electronic finagling you've been doing throughout this whole process, I appreciate that very much.
Jason: I could read the first question that popped up a few minutes ago, the question is: “In many of your performances, you pay particular attention to the way that audiences interact with your work, be that as a witness, active participant or voyeur. Often it seems that the audience becomes a central tenant of the narratives that you build. Could you speak to this, perhaps in reference to works such as Becoming An Image, Monument Push, or Up To and Including Their Limits?”
Cassils: Sure. So yes, I do really think about the audience. I think that you have to consider the audience, right? We're not in a void, and moreover, I think that performance offers us a really unique opportunity. As someone who grew up before the Internet, which I know is a crazy concept, I did not have every single nanosecond of my life being mitigated by a tiny box that I was entranced by. And I really feel like there is a disservice that technology has done, it's made it hard for folks to even make eye contact or have direct conversations. Performance has been around for a while, but I feel it's all the more important, and necessary, as a technique for exchanging pheromones, for feeling the pulse of the audience member next to you. It creates a very visceral and physical feeling that we don't get, unfortunately, through these mediated dialogues, and it's something I miss very much.
My work comes from a space in the early 2010s, where I'm speaking to a cis-audience, as someone who has a subjectivity that has yet to have definition in public culture, and I'm saying “wake up, what you're doing is wrong!”, but you can see that as my work continues, I start to coalition build and I start to make work for the community, and also for others in a way that's thinking about how we can collectively change these things, versus simply point out or highlight the discrepancies or the violence. So, I feel like that's a real shift in my thinking, and in my work, and in the ways that I address the audience. But in something like Becoming an Image, it was very much about equal parts confronting the audience, and also confronting the idea of ‘the document’. So often in performance, we did something on the stage and then there's a Polaroid or a badly shot video of it, and I really like to think about the ways that mediation affects the way we experience something. What you experience on Instagram is not real, there's certain ways in which we construct narratives and truth through the way that we frame images, either in moving image or in still image or in sound. So, I'm very interested in engaging our audiences beyond performance in a critical dialogue with the formation of ‘the document’ as well. So that's my answer, thank you for that question.
Jason: Are you seeing the questions in the chat or do you want me to just keep reading them?
Cassils: It would be great if you could read it, because otherwise I'll get lost.
Section 12: Trans Fitness
Jason: It's a lot to manage, yeah, okay, question: “I know you mentioned that fitness and nutrition are highly important to you, how has fitness shaped your trans identity? What advice do you have for a trans person just beginning their fitness journey?”
Cassils: Yes, great question. And yes, you know I think. For me, when I was a child, I was really like a a little scrawny person, and that was because I was ill. I had this undiagnosed gallbladder disease, which is like, whatever. Does something like your alcoholic grandfather gets. But like I had it as the youngest person in Canada. And so it had never been seen before on a young body like mine. And so I was just told that it was psychosomatic. And so I was very, very ill for several years, vomiting daily, very thin, very week and finally, you know my like bile ducts ruptured and my eyes turned white. My skin turned jaundice and finally the doctors listens to me. And so I had that experience at the very young age of being like regarded as a hysterical young female, and being told that mikes Perence wasn't real, which is very congruent with the trans experience, especially if not tiring, too strict. Binaries and so I think like fitness or strength for me, I wouldn't have had the words at the time, but for me it was about agency and being able to feel my body because I think so many trans people. Feel like that? You know, they feel like scrutinised, they feel scrutinised in public, they feel they feel fear in relation to their body. They feel pain, they feel trauma. But being strong is in a different way. To be in your body and it gives you an incredible sense of agency, right? One of the last slices of agents we have left is is to is to have the sort of. Ability to to like what feedback we give ourselves. And so I'd. Say you know. Firstly, I don't subscribe to this idea of you train men this way and women this way. A body is a body is the body and I'd say you know that there's so many ways in and I think the best way is to think about finding a way that makes you feel powerful and pleasure. You know, as opposed to, oh, I have to do this to get this. You know, superficial results that that won't make you feel good. So I really try what I'm working with. People and I still work with people in that capacity to find out. Like, what makes them feel strong or powerful and whatever that may be, if it's like choreographed dance or boxing or weightlifting, or maybe it's something really, really gentle, you know, it's about taking the time to allow yourself to experience those things. And I'll also say there's a gym that I work at here now and called everybody Jim and it's it's like a gym that's made for like trans and gender nonconforming people. That has the only non gendered locker room in the entire. And we also have an amazing online component right now that's extremely affordable. So if you want some really crazy queer workout classes, you should check out everybody gym.
Section 13: Categorical
Jason: Alright, thank you, next question, I think this is in the right order: “From your artist perspective, why is there such a deep-seated notion of “the world in binary, categorical”, when the living world is so continuous and non-categorical?”
Cassils: Well, I think we can chalk that up to good old Western colonialism. You know, it is an imported ideology, you know, being framed and reinforced very much in the 18th century by, you know, a sort of European tradition in many countries across the globe. There was no idea of thinking of people in terms of their gender, you know, in many parts of Africa, for example, people were certainly delineated, but more in terms of age. So you would think of young. People and old people, not male, female. And so this idea of determining someone's. Sex by their genitals is a relative invention. Since the 1800s, that has been reinforced and exported and and and like kind of naturalised, but it is in fact completely a social construction. And so yeah, it comes from hegemony. It comes from the. Built to maintain power, it also comes, you know, it's it's tied in with ways of also like. In like it's integrated into the discussions around race, for example as well, like we have amazing track athletes like Caster Simonyan, who is, you know, one of the fastest women in the world. But she's been, you know, repeatedly forced to take tests to test her genitals, to test the levels of her testosterone. It's as if there is a sort of. Sensualist lying in the sand where all of a sudden wait, that person is too strong, too fast. They can't possibly be a woman and therefore they have a disadvantage and this is a construct that is an example that shows how. Forces of power are trying to be reinscribes, so I really do believe it comes from, yeah, a desire to hold on to power.
Section 14: Personal vs Political
Jason: These are good questions, okay, there's two questions here from the same person, so I'm just going to go ahead and read them even though they came in a bit apart: “Is your work shifting from the personal to the more political?” And then follow up: “How might a person making personal work, think about pursuing more public and personal work?”
Cassils: There is no divide between the personal and the political. Anything you do, whether you consider it political or not, is a political act. There is no outside. We all have stations in society that are anointed with different levels of privilege and experience, and how we choose to to enact in these sort of. Meat puppets that were born into. Is is in relation to the environment, to politics, to all sorts of the web in in which we live. There is no we, you know, we love this idea of of individuality in America, but we are in relation. There is no outside. And so I would say that. Uhm. You know, it's actually like a like a classic seven 70s feminist slogan. The personal is political. And so I think in many ways, the more personal you make your work, it can be extremely political because you're speaking from your own lived experience and your own lived experience is radically different than Jason's or mine. Right. And like what you have to say is unique to your generation, to your medium, to how you grew up to your belief systems, to how you've, you know, been culturally, you know formed essentially. And so I'd say you can. It's I don't think 1 is more right or one is more wrong. It's really for me about what what makes sense for me to make in plain sight. Last summer felt really urgent, like I felt like we were in a time where this issue was extremely pressing and I felt that it was the sort of thing that if I didn't do something. That there was that, like I couldn't really live with myself. Like I felt incredibly called and and and in doing that and making this incredible work with all of these artists, there was this. There was this amazing feeling of solidarity and of agency again agency in a moment where you know there's so many times where our voices are stripped from us. And so I think. As artists, we have this incredible sort of superpower to be really creative and imaginative, and sometimes that that needs to be a really didactic and political act and sometime. It it can be like a very personal thing, and that too can be like a vulnerable political act, and I'll just end by just saying that this idea of the personal, you know, I think we think about the personal we think of feeling, we think of emotion. We think of Subjecthood and that's kind of deemed as not political or not serious or not real. And that's actually kind of forged in this, like masculine notion of, like, it's very gendered that way of thinking, right. Like men think of ideas. Women have feelings, but feelings and experience and trauma and all of that stuff, which feels personal. Is for all the reasons I explained. I think personally I see. It as political.
Section 15: Performance
Jason: Thanks, we have about 3 more questions, but I think we're okay on time: “Do you find that the protests that have happened over the past four years were, in themselves, an active performance? And if so, do you find that the rhetoric and conversation around the performance is sometimes more important than the piece?”
Cassils: I think something is a performance if the author of that action dubs itself. So, I can't say “that is a performance” personally, I'd say “it's performative”, but I think we could say everything we do is performative. Absolutely every engagement we have is performative. I think it's a Petri dish, and you can look at it as a microcosm for the ways in which the world is shaping around us, but I would not say that it is itself a performance, unless it is an artwork that is delineated by an artist who is deciding that it is a performance. I think it's important that we don't name and authorise other people's movements, I think we get into a sort of murky territory there, but I'm sure there are many artists who are at these protests who were performing, and I think there is probably a strong history of performance as protest. I'm sure we could find many artworks, in fact I can think of some off the top of my head, where there is this idea of performance as protest, but I would say that not all performance is protest. And then I forgot the second part of the question, did I get it?
Jason: I think so. Let me just go back up there, make sure I didn't miss something. I guess the second question was: “If do you find the rhetoric and conversation around performance is sometimes more important than the piece?”
Cassils: Again, I think it really depends on the work. One thing I love about performance art is, especially when you're thinking about- It's an oral history, it's an ephemeral thing that is often really poorly documented, and so when you're hearing about an early work from the 60s, or the Dadaist movement, or even the futurists – those crazy Italians who are like “we're going to drive our car into the Louvre”, no one ever saw that. And I heard that the car ran out of gas before they even crashed through the Louvre, but this idea of a bunch of artists being so incensed that they want to destroy the hierarchical status of the grandness of the French tradition, and hurl at speed their vehicle into the side of the Louvre – it's a great story, and it gets the point across. So, I think sometimes that is true and I think that that's great as well.
Section 16: Clay
Jason: Okay, next question is: “I have a rather specific question about Up To and Including Their Limits, you mentioned the materiality of clay, did you find the rock clay dries and hardens as time passes? If so, how did that affect the performance?”
Cassils: OK, so I use a kind of clay. When I first made becoming an image which is a work, I started a long time ago when I had the idea, I went down in in Los Angeles. There's a clay company down in Laguna. Maybe. And now we're South of LA called the Laguna Clay Company and. They. Like every clay you can imagine. And so I went down there and I told these, like clay dudes. All right, this is this idea. I'm going to. I'm apologies. I know this is weird. I'm a performance artist. I want to punch some clay. And I explained to them the concepts and, you know, Clay is very dense, has different kinds of densities. And when you push. On clay, it pushes back on you with equal form, so as much as I form the clay, the clay forms me back. And so depending on the density and the granular mix of the. Right. You know, it can be like such a hard, impactful, dense clay that you can break your hands or tear your tendon, you know, break your tendons. And so I needed to find the clay that was malleable but also also wouldn't dry because it was about the sort of amorphous continuing of a sculpture and process. And so they. Brought down like maybe 5 or 6 bricks. I punched them all. I was like Goldie locks of clay punching and I found this one. I was like, this one feels great and it turned out to be just, serendipitously at a clay called WE D2 E 17, which is a clay that was manufactured and patented by Walter Edward Disney. And it is the clay that we use for stop motion animation. So I loved that, like accidentally I had when I'm talking about, you know, on for close trans identity that I stumbled upon this clay that's like, designed specifically to not dry. So I used the same clay for the performance in Toronto. However, it was up right. The installation of the cube was up and over the course of even I'd say within two to three days, the clay did dry during the actual performance. The hour and a half or so that I was like kind of digging away at it. It's it dried somewhat, but it was manageable. I did not have any nail beds. By the end of that performance though, I will say which was something I hadn't expected and it was quite painful. But yeah, it started to like it. It stayed at first and then over the course of the exhibition chunks just kind of fell. And so we left the cube and the door. And I got in and out of the cube open and we left the hanging sort of. Harness that I was wearing just kind of swinging in the centre, so over the course of the accident more and more chunks would kind of fall off and it started to feel like this very derelict sort of, almost like a war zone or something. So it kind of did its own thing and had its own sort of material function after the performance.
Jason: Super interesting. Gosh, I have like 10 other questions, but I'm going to save those maybe for some other conversation, maybe tomorrow with the grad students.
Cassils: Yes, we have lots of time which I'm really excited about.
Section 17: The Effect of 45
Jason: We have two questions left from the chat, and this might be a really good way to sort of wrap things up. “How do you feel the Trump legislation has affected you as a person? And do you feel that art has given you a platform to respond to how Trump has affected both you and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole?” It’s painful to even say that word that begins with T, so I just thought you have to read it as it’s typed.
Cassils: Yeah. I mean, of course, 45 will – 45 affected my life and the lives of many people, and not just trans and queer people, but people of colour, immigrants, labourers, migrants, old people, sick people. I mean, basically, unless you're a really rich white guy, his administration affected you negatively, when you're looking at policy. So yes, of course it had an effect on me. Just hearing the rhetoric that allowed for fragrant displays of misogyny, the ways in which he would talk about other people from different backgrounds, and the words that he would use, and the fact that he was not upheld to any standard. That kind of behaviour, bigot behaviour, that was trickling down… I experienced hate crimes, many of my friends experienced hate crimes, and so yes it gave permission to behave in a way that unleashed really negative behaviour, and that's unfortunate. As I was saying, it's not just Trump, right? And I don't want to get into didactics, we all have our beliefs and we're in this amazing country where we can have those beliefs and that's cool, but we need to respectfully engage with each other about our beliefs. I'd say that unfortunately, during that administration, a lot of the federal courts were packed with people who, again, even though we have different administration now, many of the courts on the state level are packed with judges that will continue to harm and pass very, very discriminatory and devastating legislation that will continue to affect trans people's lives, and not just my life. I'm 45, what I'm thinking about is children, I'm thinking about young people, and it's the future of how you all as students, and your kids, will get to be free in this country. It's not just about trans or LGBT, it's the principle, right? It's the principle.
Section 18: Non-binary Artist
Jason: Okay, last question: “could you say more about your experience navigating the art world as a non-binary person, and navigating your non-binary experience as an artist?”
Cassils: Still figuring it out. As I said in my talk in the beginning, I was talking to my really good friend, who's Mexican American, and he was saying how frustrated he is to always be in these Latin X shows, and he said, “it’s like I'm being put in a ghetto, when I'm being forced to be in a show that's limited to my identity”. And it's like what I said about the James Luna quote, that's true, there's stuff beyond one's identity, and sometimes I do feel frustrated that most of the exhibitions that I'm in are anchored in notions of identity and a curatorial framework – with the exception of the Gardner Museum, which is the one in Toronto. The Gardner Museum, please forgive me if I say this wrong, but it's a precious ceramics museum that has lots of old lady teapots, and so the idea of my work being contextualised purely through material, through clay, was extremely refreshing to me. So, I'd say it can be frustrating to have your work always reduced to your identity, and as I said in my lecture, certainly identity is part of our lived experience, right? Personal is political, but there's a lot of other things about my work that don't get spoken about, a lot of imaginative, formal inquiries that have to do with shape, light, composition, sound and things that are concerns of artists, and sometimes I long for more of a discussion around my work in that regard. I'd say, being non binary, which I actually identify more as like trans masculine, but due to my experience with the medical industrial complex as a child, I'm reticent to sign up for a life dedicated to Big Pharma – not that there's anything wrong with that, but personally I'm a little ‘raised eyebrow’ about it. What that means is, although I identify more as trans masculine, I often get read as – especially by people that aren't of your generation – an angry lesbian, which is frustrating. “Why are you going against your God-given, lovely, feminine, wily behaviour?”, “Why are you being so direct?”, so I do feel like not adhering to a binary, in a way that's conventional. You are punished because you are behaving in a way that is, still to this day, societally unacceptable – especially as you get higher up. It's insidious, it's not so direct, but it's definitely there, that being said, there's a lot of folks that aren't like that. So, my advice around that would be to go where it's warm, find like-minded people, and create works, and shows, and exhibitions on your own terms, with community, and people around you that reflect what it is that you would have put out in the world, if you're not getting it from those external circumstances.
Jason: We had one more question come in, we're right at 9:00. Are you OK to do one more?
Cassils: Sure.
Section 19: Pressed
Jason: Okay, and I'm going to type in the chat to everybody just a reminder to the link for the discussion group that we're doing tomorrow for trans and non-binary students with the Pride Centre, you could still sign up for that, and then also just the General School of Art link for future events and lectures. So, here's the last question: “could you talk about Pressed and how that was to perform for World AIDS Day?”
Cassils: Ohh yeah, that was part of a work called Cyclic. That was an artwork that was a fairly recent collaboration, that I made with an artist named Ron Athey, another artist named Fanna, and it was an exhibition that took place at Mocha Tucson, and the show was called Blessed Be: Mysticism, Spirituality and the Occult in Contemporary Art. It was about spirituality and religious experience, and I guess at that time, it wasn't something I was thinking about that much, but I know artists that do. Someone like Ron Athey, who was a legendary performance artist here in Los Angeles, I call him my father, but he's also an incredible mentor and figure, and just an outlandish, creative, incredible human being. I'd always wanted to work with him, and he was raised very Pentecostal – being told that he was literally “the chosen one” and put a mirror in front of his face until he would channel God – that was his upbringing. I thought that it would be interesting, since he had this really strong relationship to religion, to bring him on and it would give me an excuse to collaborate with him. And Fanaa is another artist I work with, who also makes really interesting work around mysticism and Sufism. I thought that the three of us could make this beautiful collaboration, and I let Ron direct a bit, and he decided to task us with this idea of performing our own death rights.
Ron's work is really important, because he was one of the artists that was held up by the NEA, by Senator Jesse Helms, and his work was prosecuted as being too outlandish, too sick for y'all to fund individual artists. As a result of his works, and several other artist work that were brought before the Supreme Court, there is no individual artist funding. But Ron's work was very much about the AIDS crisis, about surviving the AIDS crisis, and what it was like to live in a body that might expire at any day, and what it was like to live through that plague and that loss. Working with Ron was really a chance to have an intergenerational passing of knowledge, and so choosing that day, World's AIDS day, really harkens back to the work that Ron had done all through the 90s: Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, the many incredible works. He actually has an amazing solo show up at Participant Inc in New York City right now, and a lot of the work can be seen virtually, there's panels and all sorts of stuff, I really recommend checking it out if you haven't seen it.
So Pressed was something that I made in relationship to, to foreshadow a work that Ron did, which is a piece where he carves a symbol into his chest, and he becomes this Human Printing Press. There are pieces of paper that are pressed into his wound and strung up, almost like a clothesline over the audience, and this was the first time that he had ever re-performed this work since it was censored at the Walker Arts Centre in the early 90s, and it felt meaningful to bring that work to life, full circle, in this. And Pressed was a work where I am crushed under a plane of glass, and so I was using the medium of glass to talk about this idea of being looked at as a specimen, of being divergent. But also working with real glass, very heavy real glass, and the possibility of dropping and cutting, and that cutting ‘gesture’ foreshadowing Ron’s Human Printing Press. So sorry, a little long-winded, but there you go.
Section 20: Goodbyes
Jason: Thank you so much. Thank you, Cassils. I was very generous with all the Q&A. Thank you everyone for attending the event tonight. Yes, those hand gestures, the snaps, the claps, it's all good. You can even take off your open, open your mic and say. Farewell. So hope to see some of you tomorrow in the. Small discussion groups. Again, check out the School of Arts arts.uk.edu backslash events For more information. On the semesters upcoming lectures. And virtual events. Cassils. Thank you so much.
Cassils: Thank you, Jason, and thank you students and faculty, really an honour to spend time with you all and look forward to chatting with more more of you tomorrow and many different capacities. Looking forward to it. Take care everyone have a good. Night. That was great. Thank you. Bye.
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