Tiresias is a durational performance in which I melt a neoclassical Greek male ice sculpture with pure body heat.
The mythological figure of Tiresias, known as the blind prophet of Thebes, was transformed from a man into a woman for seven years. Here I recast the myth of Tiresias as a story of endurance and transformation, performing the resolve required to persist at the point of contact between masculine and feminine.
“As with most of Cassils’s performances, Tiresias is about endurance and transformation, but it is also about physical process’s intersection with the disjunctures from the visual and vision itself”
At the South Bank Center Marina Abramovic Take Over, Cassils premiered a three-day expanded version of Tiresias by melting three different sculptures inspired by sculptural busts found in the Victoria & Albert Museum as advised by trans curator Zorian Clatyon.
Literally dissolving the canon, they melted the Mestrovic torso on the first day and the Legros Torso on the second day. On the third day they melted with a block of ice, letting the negative shape of my body create a new form. The ancient Greek concept of beauty was based on a pleasing balance and proportion of form. My work counters traditional modernist and homogeneous ideals around beauty and value, which have been housed and rarified in museum collections for centuries. In this context my performance ruptures the past while demonstrating the inherent instability of both the body and identity. We are embracing fluidity and no longer can be fixed in marble.
Cassils
Tiresias, Video Clip
(Performance for Camera), 2013
video: Cassils with Alison Kelly
Courtesy of the artist
Cassils
Tiresias, Video Still No. 4
(Performance for Camera), 2013
photo: Cassils with Clover Leary
Courtesy of the artist
Cassils
Tiresias, Video Still No. 6
(Performance for Camera), 2013
photo: Cassils with Clover Leary
Courtesy of the artist
Cassils
Tiresias, Trailer
(Gutted, LACE Winter Benefit, Los Angeles), 2010Camera : Mark Steger Sound Kadet KuhneCourtesy of the artist
Cassils
Tiresias, Video Still No. 7
(Performance for Camera), 2013
photo: Cassils with Clover Leary
Courtesy of the artist
Cassils
Tiresias, Performance Still No. 3
(ANTI Festival, Kupio, Finland), 2012
photo: Cassils with Pekka Mekinen
Courtesy of the artist
Cassils
Tiresias, Video Still No. 3
(Performance for Camera), 2013
photo: Cassils with Clover Leary
Courtesy of the artist
Cassils
Tiresias, Video Installation
(Body of Work, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York), 2013
photo: Cassils with Megan Paetzhold
Courtesy of the artist
