Quickie with Cassils

What the butt is this?
Documentation of my piece ‘Becoming an Image’ that I do once annually, where I beat a giant block of clay in a pitch-black room. I just got back from performing it in Hamburg for this all-trans performance festival called ‘Liminalities’. It’s a physical work that embodies hope and rage in an aging trans body, which in itself is a statement, because so many of us aren’t allowed to age. It’s crazy to do it now––I’m almost 50.
You look amazing. I mean, you’re a bodybuilder as well as an artist, right? How often do you work out?
Usually, six days a week.
Were you training before you became an artist or has it always been part of your life?
When I was a kid, I was chronically ill. I ended up having multiple surgeries and almost dying on the table when I was 14. When I recovered, I was like, ‘Fuck this. I’m not gonna put my health and wellbeing in the hands of doctors.’ So training became a way of having agency over my body. I don’t think I had the words for it then, but I also was trying to keep puberty at bay by getting a more masculine body. At that point, if you were trans, you were expected to get surgery and take hormones. There was nothing else…
Are you attracted to bodybuilders?
Yeah. One of my first Bibles was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book on bar bodybuilding, which has one small section that says, ‘Bodybuilding for women: it’s the same protocol.’ (laughs) I really appreciated that.
What gets you off?
Hot femme energy, in any form. Radical presence. And deep physical embodiment.
Okay. If you could be anyone for seven minutes, who would it be?
Tony Ward. He’s so hot. I’ve always fantasized what it would be like to be in his body, fucking someone.
Mhm. How quickly do you fall in love?
Too quickly. (laughs)
The last time we saw each other you were collecting piss. How did that turn out?
Gosh, that was 2017. I was collecting thousands of gallons of urine in a response to the anti-trans bathroom bills in the US. I thought the work had had its moment, and now more states are passing the same laws. But the biggest challenge was figuring out the hazmat situation, because collecting that much urine is a massive biohazard.
How did you collect it? That sounds logistically complicated.
Especially when you live in a one bedroom! (laughs) I was literally buying fridges off Craigslist and parking them in friends’ garages. I had something like 12 fridges scattered across Los Angeles. I’d load up my tiny, shitty Honda Fit and drive the urine over. At first it was all mine, except when I had tour schedules and couldn’t bring my urine across international lines, so I had friends piss in my stead. For my show in Texas I started a drive, like a Kickstarter for piss. Hundreds of people donated.
Love it. We’re almost out of time…What’s next?
I’m working on a live performance called ‘Incontrovertible Being’. I’ll be performing with a 130-pound pane of glass over my body. Highly focused beams of light that will bend and refract through it on a group of performers in a pitch-black room. So every time that beam bounces it sort of dissipates the power of the light, but also shares it. And then I’m working on a diptych that will accompany it that’s about how you can use glass and light to create a concentration of power and literally start a fire.
Hot.