Huffington Magazine Issue 5 | Page 23

Enter STYLIST IMOGENE BARRON; NIKKI PROVIDENCE FOR DAVINES HAIR CARE H Q&A HUFFINGTON 07.15.12 EATHER CASSILS is a performance artist and body builder who uses her body to investigate issues related to gender, mass consumption and the industrial production of images. Her conceptual pieces, which have been performed in museums and galleries around the world, also highlight transgender or “genderqueer” themes. For “Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture,” she spent 23 weeks documenting herself building her body to its maximum capacity by following a strict weightlifting regime, consuming the caloric intake of a 190-pound male athlete and taking mild steroids. —Noah Michelson Huffington: People often think performance art is inaccessible, a joke or not “real art.” Why is it so easily dismissed? HC: Sometimes art is positioned as something that’s just for the rich or the elite, but it’s also often the first thing to go when cuts are made in public education, so that’s a big reason. Performance art can be so abstract. People often don’t see it as a justified medium like painting, but similar arguments were made about photography not that long ago. How did the use of your body become central to your work? I was actually trained as a painter, but I became frustrated with the fact that not that many people could see my work. I think a lot of concepts that exist outside of us — art-related concepts — when you bring them to the body there’s a kind of ownership and it creates that kind of immediacy. Everybody has a body so, maybe you can’t paint that painting but you do have a body. Cassils took four photos of her body each day as she transformed it over 23 weeks.