(I delivered the following speech, Metaphysical Object, at IdeaCity on July 16th, 2010. IdeaCity is an inspirational conference that brings together innovative minds in the arts, science, culture and many areas of achievement. As I spoke a slide show of my photographic images played behind and at the sides of me.)
I heard a bit of a chuckle when they brought out my faery furniture.
Sometimes I like to think of myself as a good faery who has messed around with black magic.
I am going to do something very un-ladylike. I am going to sit and talk to you today with my legs spread because this helps me feel the most receptive to you, and I want to be receptive to you. This position also helps me feel the most penetrative, and I also want to penetrate you. Your mind.
I think stories of transformation and empowerment are sacred. But, our culture is obsessed with transformation and empowerment. That’s what sells. That’s what people tune in for. Stories of transformation and empowerment are conceptualized, marketed, pre-packaged, commercialized for mass audiences, edited into stories of transformation and empowerment. I know because its been done to me, I’ve done it, both in scripted television and reality tv where they edit you into a storyline of transformation and empowerment, produced shows, applauded, praised, emulated. Transformation and empowerment have been so pervasive I find it suffocating.
My name is Nina Arsenault. I am very grateful to be able to share a few of my ideas with you today. They are the ideas that I currently am working with.
As you can see some of my photographic work will be playing on the screen behind as I speak. I know that in 2010 our minds can absorb multiple simultaneous streams of information at any one time even if the streams of ideas are new to us, provocative, and sexual, so I know you will be able to keep up.
I am an artist who has had 60 cosmetic surgeries and procedures. The redesign of my body took 8 years and was an arduous and thrilling creative project full of both suffering and ecstasy for me. I have created autobiographical writing about these experiences in the National Post and Fab Magazine, two live theatre performances based on my real life experiences, The Silicone Diaries and I was Barbie, art videos, and I make photography of myself. I also make appearances on TV, in other media and at nightlife events I’ve impersonated Jessica Rabbit and I was hired to represent Barbie, the much loved plastic doll at Mattel’s official 50th birthday party in Toronto and the opening night of L’Oreal Fashion Week. I consider these appearances as part of my art practise. I also consider my facebook and youtube pages as part of my art practise. As a member of a sexual minority who is discriminated against, although I am sometimes revered and treated as sacred, but as a sexual minority who is discriminated against, and as an artist who considers herself radical, the democratization of social media has been invaluable for me to create, exhibit and disseminate my work and my ideas.
My work explores culturally constructed ideas of maleness and femaleness as well as notions of “realness” and “fakeness.” I see myself exploring femininity as an artistic form, a body that can be inhabited and performed. And most of all I explore my body as an object, an art object.
By the way, I usually do not believe in responding to my critics, but I want you to hear my truth today, the truth of my life the way I see it, with an open heart and an open mind. So I want to say very briefly that I know there are people in culture who think they know the truth of my life better than I do –certain medical authorities, gender theorists, psychologists and even certain feminist academics who think they have more objective vision and years of research which they must defend to maintain their positions of power.
I know that my ideas of objectification or the idea of treating a woman’s body as an object are not new ideas and they are not even my ideas.
I’ve objectified my body in many ways. I took the idea that I had a soul and put it on a shelf and looked at my body in terms of line, mass, form and structure. Then, I made it into an object again when I began its redesign. Then I put an animate substance inside me, silicone, so there are parts are me that are literally object. Then I took photography and video of my objectified body.
All of my ideas existed in culture already. It’s everywhere –on every television station, on every magazine rack, in every historical era of art objects have been made of women’s bodies –realistic and imagined, in movies, magazines, online and in pornography. You are probably already inundated with the objectification of women’s bodies. They are everywhere. I guess if there is anything original about what I have done I have allowed the ideas into my body, and I am allowing my body to be a channel, a medium to explore the ideas. But, that isn’t even original because lots of women are doing that. If there is a single thing I do that’s even remotely original it’s that there’s not a man doing it to me and profiting off it. It’s just me. Well, lots of women are profiting off of it. If there is one things I do that is original and blasphemous it is that I have spoken about the objectification of my body without shame and without a tone that says “I’m just being superficial.”
After all, if it is happening everywhere shouldn’t someone be giving it serious artistic and intellectual thought? When I read most intellectual writing about beauty and the objectification of women, it is a call to arms. We must stop objectifying women. We need to learn that everything and everyone is beautiful.
It’s a beautiful politic.
(pause)
I would like to be so bold as to admit that I am obsessed by beauty. I find it mesmerizing.
I invite you to admit the same thing to yourself if it’s true and be okay with that.
(pause)
When I take photographs of my surgically altered body or do theatrical performances I understand that in the gaze of the viewer my body can be an object of beauty, eroticism, critique, satire, destabilization, subversion, provocation, a sign o’ the times, blasphemy, grotesque-ness. Sometimes all at once, sometimes providing a moment by moment experience of shifting of perspectives in the viewer. This is what I mean in the most profound sense when I say I think of my body as an art object.
I understand that stylistically the images of my body can be viewed as realistic, as fantasies, as comedy, triumph, tragic and ironic, all at once.
And, I take my understanding of irony from Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. In she articulates irony not simply as the idea that an image can contain an implied and literal meaning. Harraway’s deep understanding of irony is that a single image or body can contain a cascading web-like structure of seemingly contradictory yet dependent meanings that can not even be pulled apart. To do so would be to deny the truth of the greater whole.
It’s a beautiful definition of irony.
Dialectics dissolve into one another. Male into female into real into fake into beauty into abomination, worshipfulness and self-annihilation. Cascading into one another.
I began objectifying myself at a young age, probably three or four, because I knew that I had the spirit of a girl and the body of a boy. I suspect, I do not know for sure because I do not go around asking people, but I suspect that most people believe that they are their bodies. This is my hand. It’s me. I do things with it. I bang my finger, It hurts. That’s real. This is the real me in a cause and effect way. Because of the disconnect I experienced between my boy body and girl spirit I always believed that my body was a vessel that contained my spirit.
From about five years old I was fascinated by ancient Egyptian art. The Nefertiti bust, goddess figures that were the columns of temples and hieroglyphics. These are ritually abstracted representations of the female body. An attempt to create order of out nature’s forms by chiselling into the rock. This was the creation of art.
Someone might argue with me and say, “Those aren’t real women. Those are artifacts of women, artifacts created by men, by a male gaze.”
I would agree with you.
(pause)
In the past literary agents have asked me, “Why don’t you stop being so complicated and write an empowering story of yourself, your transformation. It would be an empowering representation for women and transsexuals everywhere? It could be a best seller.”
I am not a politician trying to win votes and approval. I am an artist.
I believe that if you begin with politics and make art to communicate your theories you bleed the complexities out of the human experience and you create an essay, an essay in paint, in sculpture, in whatever. I like the delicate interweaving of eroticism, power, sadomasochism, suffering and joy in my life and will not erase it in favour of a clear message the audience can go home with. Feeling good that they now understand a truth in the world. But because that truth is simplistic, when they wake, the art experience will have lost all its resonance.
Instead, I create art from obsession. Sometimes I create because it is painful not to create. It is painful to not express my ideas and experiences. Painful to not be witnessed.
When I make art, I write on the page or let thoughts go through my mind or I think of imagery I might use, and as I visualize I check in with the sensations of my body. If I listen my body will respond. Inside the core of me, in my genitals, in my perineum, on the pelvic floor and in my anal sphincter, I ask myself what sensations and how much sensation each of these thoughts brings me? The words, thoughts and images that I make art from are the ones which have aroused in my deepest parts the greatest feelings.
My work is not created from an attempt to make the world a better place. My work is not created in an attempt to ease the pain or suffering of other women. My work is not a call for social reform.
In many ways my work complicates the world.
But, I have found that some people, only some, want to experience the complications of life.
Empowerment interwoven with disempowerment, suffering with ecstasy, superficiality with spirituality, and in my best moments, my body interwoven with my spirit.
I know that if I continue to breathe into the deepest parts of myself, and if I continue to create, the pieces of work will eventually form a narrative, a complex storyline of my desires, a mapping of the expansion of my spirit as I age. In this lifetime I have powerful lessons to learn about inner and outer beauty, about what it means to be real and what it means to be fake. About how these things are ironically connected at all times. I am not attempting to manufacture a journey of empowerment. Instead, I will allow myself to move through the shadow of my obsessions and into the great white light of my obsessions. That is what will take my path into unexpected uncharted territory. That is what will make the storyline sublimely truthful, and that is what will make it beautiful.