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  • Embodied Risk:Cassils
  • Jeanne Vaccaro (bio)

How does a body feel the sensorial crisis of vulnerability, capture and transform its aggregate physiologies and emotions? The artist Cassils exploits questions of intersubjectivity in Melt/Carve/Forge: Embodied Sculptures, a solo exhibition organized at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts by Curator of Contemporary Art Jodi Throckmorton (November 19, 2016–March 5, 2017). Cassils uses the plural pronouns they, them, and their as "this plurality reflects, through language, the position Cassils occupies as an artist." In the performance Becoming an Image, Cassils attacks a 2,000-pound block of clay as stroboscopic flashes of light made by a roving camera person illuminate the artist's body. Straining in the dark to glimpse partial and obstructed scenes of the performance, participants rely on the sounds of movement, breath, and fatigue, hearing for the kicks, punches, and jabs corresponding to grunts and exhaustion as Cassils pummels a block of clay twenty times their weight. In Becoming an Image Cassils works with the raw, material density of intimate risk to choreograph the sensorium of vulnerability. It isn't a fair fight. The opponent Cassils constructed is meant to symbolize overwhelm, inescape, and being stuck, feelings incited by transphobia, racism, and sexual violence. The fight is staged between two bodies, both fleshy, but differently so. One is made of skin, the other clay. An intimacy is forged between the bodies, unequal in shape, weight, and capacity, as contact is made. For the duration of the performance, some thirty minutes, Cassils endures to conquer their opponent, defiantly attacking the clay with their hands, knees, torso, and feet, throwing all of the weight of their body on to the clay, pouncing on top of it, circling it, exhausting themselves in all dimensions to stomp out some of the enormity of its presence. While it isn't a fair fight, it isn't static or hopeless. The clay wobbles. The angularity of its mold softens. Although it is [End Page 112] dark, the participants can sense a vibrancy in the exchange between the fleshy, skin and clay, bodies. The clay must stick to Cassils' nude body, marking it with traces of grey.

Becoming an Image, the title makes plain, is a performance "designed for the camera." During the performance a camera person circles Cassils, who circles the clay sculpture. The flash of the camera is always disruptive, but sometimes a comfort. Without the light of the flash we cannot see. For the participants, the performance is of straining to see. The stroboscopic light creates an afterimage: a dense, shadow like cloud that forms and shape shifts before our eyes. It is a flicker and pulsation of bright light lingering between flashes of the camera, and it sears the image of Cassils like a stop-motion animation in our retinal field. The image is always a flicker, and the performance feels like a composite of physiological and emotional reactions. Cassils incites a productive disorientation in us, slowing down the sensory perceptive and cognitive reflexives of sight and sound we rely on. Becoming an Image undoes, in order to reassemble, how we make sense of and experience our environment.

Drawing on the multiple forms out of which Cassils addresses the body as a sculptural object, the exhibition Melt/Carve/Forge also presents works of film, photography, and sound alongside sculpture. Cassils' sculptural investigation of physical form is anchored in their aesthetic and political exploration of "queering nutrition," an intensive process of manipulating their musculature and physical form through body building and food therapy. As scholar E. Hella Tscaconas writes of the performance Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, a performative re-enactment of feminist artist Eleanor Antin's Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) forcing Cassils to gain twenty-three pounds in twenty three-weeks, "the bounded, durational process of building a body destabilizes the hegemony of normative gender by producing the remarkable copresence of a virtuosic masculine musculature manifest on a putatively female body."1

In Cassils artwork, the archive is not cast as a physical site, catalogued and contained. A capacious understanding of the archive as bodily informs Cassils orientation to monument—something we usually think of as formidable, immovable, and weighty...

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