Cassils

Tiresias (2011)

As in Hard Times, the central figure that Cassils references in this four to five hour performance is Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes who was transformed from male to female for seven years. Tiresias was clairvoyant and interpreted bird songs to predict the future. In the performance, Cassils presses their nude body against the back of a block of ice carved into the form of a neoclassical Greek male torso while lit by a single beam of white light from above. As the performance progresses, Cassils' body heat melts the block. Visitors are welcome to walk around the plexiglass platform on which Cassils and the ice sculpture stand, and to take in the performance from all angles.

Tiresias was also captured as a single channel video installation that condenses the performance into a fifteen-minute loop, shown in two different shots: one which shows Cassils from the waist up, and the other showing close-ups of the subtle transformations taking place, such as the formation of water droplets, and the reddening of Cassils' skin. This video is rear-projected onto floating plexiglass, and accompanied by an ambient soundtrack which combines bird songs, the sound of melting ice, and a vocal performance of Fran Schubert's Winterreise (Winter Journey). This vocal was performed by Cassils' brother Matthew Cassils, a classically-trained opera singer who collaborated on the sound design for Tiresias with designer Kadet Khuhne. As theatre professor Maurya Wickstrom notes, "The Shubert [sic] songs of the score tune broken-hearted human suffering to the cruel, icy elements of winter, the world of ice and human feeling bound together. But these are joined by the sounds of birds and melting ice, which cannot help but sound like spring, the moment of creation."

By melting the sculpture with their body heat, Cassils calls attention to the instability of the body, and in particular, the impermanence of the desirable human physique. As performance researcher Megan Hoetger writes, "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". Moreover, unlike Tiresias' transformation, Cassils offers the audience a trans body that is not, as they explain, "about a crossing from one sex to another, but [...] a continual becoming, a process-oriented way of being that works in a space of indeterminacy, spasm, and slipperiness." This demonstrates to the audience "the resolve required to persist at the point of contact between masculine and feminine".

Wickstrom asserts that the piece, like much of the recent work in queer studies, deals with the notion of temporality. As she writes about the performance, "time in this room was marked by the primordial substance - water - dripping, each drop by slow drop magnified as if by the echo chamber of a cave, although actually by electronic amplification [...] I felt the desire to stay with Cassils, or simply to stay with. This was, I think, a response to an extraordinary innovation in time that Cassils created, and my desire to stay with that time. This particular kind of time, and the desire to stay with, has to do with what we may desire without perhaps knowing that we do: a temporality dislodged from those temporalities that bind people within the various apparatuses of hypertrophic capitalism. The piece created a temporal sanctuary from those times variously described as 'chrononormative time', 'homogeneous, empty time', 'chronological duration', or 'the pure and simple repetition of the worst', all of which construct time without the possibility of innovation, revolt, or the illuminated present."