By Aubrey F. Burghardt
Well, I can now say that I’ve witnessed what an art installation of 200 gallons of swirling piss looks like. The epic, birthday-suited, gender-nonconforming, mid-career artist behind the installation, Cassils, is a modern-day Midas, transforming this once-ordinary vessel into a golden glory that cannot be missed.
If you’re equally intrigued to watch this urine-filled urn glimmer alongside other large-scale works, you must go visit the eponymously titled Cassils: SOLUTIONS at Houston’s Station Museum of Contemporary Art. This solo exhibition eclipses all other attempts to bring the demand for transgender equality to the forefront of the art world. Through a multi-sensory review and reinstallation of prior live performances, the viewer is left to interpret the artist’s methods of traditional photography, courtroom audio, cinematic video, and large-scale sculpture that exemplify the perpetuity of transgender experience. Cassils even uses their own meticulously chiseled, god-like body in their works as a social commentary on feminism, queerness, and political upheaval, as well as a nod to Surrealist technique.
Cassils, “PISSED”, 2017, Sculpture, 200 gallons of urine, 18,000 grams of boric acid, plexiglass.
Upon entry into the exhibition space (which is fashioned after the Greek Temple of Athena), one is locked in a David–and–Goliath standoff with Pissed, the aforementioned sculpture containing 200 gallons of preserved human urine. The piece’s original rendition was filled with a collection of all the liquid excreted by Cassils in the 200 days following the Trump administration’s 2017 rollback of an Obama-era executive order allowing transgender students to use the bathroom matching their true gender identities. The current version on display, however, is filled with the urine of local volunteers who generally donated their fluids during the Houston Piss Drive in protest of Trump’s transphobia. The orange, hazardous urine containers from Cassils’ original work contour the wall adjacent to Pissed with systematic precision. While I am not sure whether the piece was intentionally placed next to the Museum’s bathroom or if it was a curious curatorial preference, this choice only enhances the work’s command of the room and its message of defiance.
The exhibition’s title stems from the artist’s opening night performance, Solution, a sequel to the mythologically inspired performance Tiresias. Both performances feature ice, the human body, and implications of gender, expectations, and existence. Solution premiered as a live collaboration of artists Cassils, Rafa Esparza, Fanaa, and Keijaun Thomas on November 3, 2018, and sought to reexamine the current administration’s abuse of civil rights through the artists’ continued interaction with an ice sculpture medium. Although Solution cannot be repeated, for the remainder of the exhibition, the performance will be remounted as four films, installed to formally reference the classical sculptures of divine figures found in temples of worship.
A section of Cassils’ larger exhibition contains the series Alchemic, which depicts Cassils’ bodybuilder physique coated in metallic paint. In an alternative form of alchemy, Cassils uses their body as a social sculpture to transform ordinary matter into metal; by coating their trans body in metallic paint and sheen, they are elevated to a monumental, dignified, and godly level—demanding respect and idolization from a traditionally transphobic and heteronormative society. The detailed, hyper-focused body photographs are also cased under acrylic and clipped into oval and square shapes—a geometric binary.
Another row of photographs sits in the following “altar” room. Again, Cassils is pictured in each, shown nude and sweating from rigorously modelling a massive block of clay. The images are perfectly juxtaposed, a dutiful Surrealist technique, with a gargantuan statue of a nude David presented in the background of the photographs—both bodies with their genitals exposed. A physical remnant, left as offering in the middle of the room, is the brass alchemic vestige of Cassils’ once–pummeled earth block, later used in the performance piece Monument Push, a tribute to LGBTQ history.
Cassils, “Alchemic”, photography, 2017.
While journeying through the exhibit, a constant buzz of multi-channeled scores, static voices, and radio samples of sociopolitical conflicts is heard overhead. While noticeably inescapable, the sounds are not anxiety-inducing, but rather test exhibition goers to decipher the modulations. This auditory phenomenon is most prominent in Aline’s Orchard, in which the Barnsdall olive groves are re-created in total darkness as a once and future site of political radicalism and queer cruising that features grass, erotic noises, and pheromones that are filtered into the room. Cassils describes the room as a fête of positive queer interactions, love, and sex—all acts that have historically been safer conducted in the darkness. The message behind Aline’s Orchard is significant—a protest of the Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) law that was passed in 2018 with the intention of protecting human trafficking victims, but that simultaneously restricted the sexual liberation of marginalized communities, including LGBTQ individuals whose sexual expressions often go against the dominant heteronormative paradigm. The sounds of lovemaking in Aline’s Orchard firmly feel less political in nature and more universally human, exemplifying the beauty of connection.
The exhibition comes to completion at the back of the mock temple. Inextinguishable Fire, Encapsulated Breaths, takes up an entire wall of the exhibition space and is a cinematic projection of a 14-second clip (dramatically slowed down to extend for 14 minutes) of the artist being (safely) lit on fire—though the reassurance of “safe” does not take away from the brash absurdity of watching one willingly be set on fire. Again, the artist employs the Surrealist notion of the body being physically attacked through manipulation of the media and subject to represent the current political administration’s attack on trans bodies, or as curator Alex Tu notes, the “systematic dehumanization” that trans bodies endure.
This exhibition is not for the faint of heart; it is emotionally demanding and sacrificial to witness a person submit themselves to extremes out of momentous dedication to their craft and to help further the enlightenment and representation of transgender people. Test your senses. Test your social awareness. Get pissy, make monuments, and find your solutions. It’s on view until March 3, 2019.
What: Cassils: SOLUTIONS
When: Now through March 3, 2019
Where: Station Museum of Contemporary Art (1502 Alabama St, Houston, TX)
Details: stationmuseum.com
