These are two of the 100 photos that make up the latest iteration of “Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture”, a work from Heather Cassils’s solo show at Ronald Feldman gallery in New York. It is, of course, a kind of remake of the documentation from Eleanor Antin’s 1972 piece called “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture”, a 45-day diet that let Antin carve herself into a feminine form that came closer to our culture’s longstanding (and confining) ideal. In Cassils’s riff, the artist became a bodybuilder, gaining 23 pounds in 23 weeks to achieve a more powerful, masculine idea of perfection. “Opposing the notion that in order to be officially transgendered one has to have surgery or take hormones, Cassils performs Trans not as a crossing from one sex to another, but rather as a continual process,” reads the show’s press release. In other words, we are all trans, one way or another, as we try to build our picture of which gender we belong to.
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