(The following excerpts are from Self-portraiture, Transformation, Identity and Performance, a talk I gave at York University’s Visual Arts Department’s The Body: from Liminal to Virtual, an eight part speaker’s series of Canadian artists. This series was curated by Jon Batin. My talk included a visual presentation of over forty documentary and staged self-portraiture photographs. I gave the talk on February 9th, 2011. I also used some excerpts at an artist’s talk at Brock University on February 15th, 2011. This talk was curated by J. Paul Halferty.)

* * * * *

The aestheticization of the female form and the performance of femininity is in my opinion the grandest narrative in the history of art and culture. Maybe architecture has a vaster lineage.

But the control, abstraction, eroticization and battle that defines, hierarchicalizes and rarifies The Feminine is an aesthetic narrative that includes but is not limited to art objects like paintings, sculpture, film, hieroglyphs, fashion photography, pop music videos, pornography and ubiquitous celebrity culture.

As an aesthete it is my intention to contribute to, to continue, to subvert, to deconstruct and to celebrate this lineage in the most interesting ways I can.

Because my work begins from a visceral impulse I used to think it wasn’t political. I was mistaken to think that politics was something that was abstracted out of the life of a transsexual aesthete who was primarily interested in the body, representation and transformation.

I now understand this work as radically political.

* * * * *

At each phase of my life I created a new self-portraiture and a new shape-shift, a “new me”, a new social role, a new fantasy I wanted to be, a new fantasy I had become, a new aesthetic calling, to make real, a siren call to follow. They are all me.

Sometimes it felt like the only way to survive certain transformations was to document them, to create an art object.

Other times it was not being able to rest until I had iconized a hieroglyph of who I was in The Now. Not just a representation of my embodiment, but also a kind of energetic signature of what obsessed me, where I wanted to go in life, who I would be to make life “livable.”

A power image.

* * * * *

I’m also really into reading performance manuals like The Secret, Anthony Robbin’s Ultimate Power and Awaken the Giant Within, How To Think Like Successful People, and The Power of Now. Some of these are spiritual books. Some of them are business leadership manuals. But they are all about performance to me, the performance of conscious thought, the performance of personal metaphors, the performance of thought to create reality, the performance of the elated spirit which can lead us to “success” or “enlightenment” or maybe they’re the same thing.

I do not know.

The books are fascinating to me though.

* * * * *

I understand that in many people’s opinion I do not have an authentic body.

Some people do not consider me an authentic woman.

Other’s say that my femininity can’t be authentic.

Others do not consider self-portraiture to be authentic work.

Even my theatre training as a performer is teaching me to speak and breathe in a more authentic way.

* * * * *

The role of the muse is greatly underestimated in our misogynistic culture.

The Guerilla Girls famously pointed out that only 5% percent of the artists in New York city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were women, but 85% of nudes were female. Undoubtedly, this was their call for the museum to (rightfully) include more female artists.

But I also believe that women’s role as muse has not been taken seriously enough.

Salvador Dali’s wife Gala, for instance, inspired dozens of his paintings, and before him she was muse to Andre Breton as well as several other Surrealists. Her body, her presence, her history, her personae –whatever it was, she inspired these men to make art about her. Art objects begin to radiate off her body. But the power of this intangible creativity is not acknowledged in any kind of authorship or ownership over the objects.

The same could be said of Marilyn Monroe who inspired many photographic portraits with her body, her emotions, her history, and her social status as a symbol. She did not own them, and these objects went on to radiate into a powerful cultural iconography that has survived and inspired for decades.

This work, the creation of these objects –most often inspired by women, beautiful women, feminine women– however, is not considered a legitimate authentic art practice.

Musing is incorrectly conflated with modelling.

Silicone transsexual Amanda Lepore is another example. Her image and body have inspired famed American photographer David Lachapelle to create many of his signature works. Her body has alsobeen used to create fashion photography. Her face has appeared on a Swatch watch and on designer purses.

Like Marilyn she is contributing to a historical narrative of femininity. She is an international muse at the zenith of her contemporaries in many ways. Also like Marilyn she shares a reputation for being more of “a personality” than an artist.

For me, growing up, Madonna was the woman who leaped the divide between artist and muse. Madonna, one of the most photographed and filmed women in history, by many of the most esteemed image makers of her time. To me, she seemed assured that the reinvention, documentation and objectification of her Self was her own on-going masterpiece.

* * * * *

I work with my voice teacher to find my authentic voice. My voice teacher is mezzo soprano Fides Krucker. I knew her for performing avante gard composer R. Murray Schaffer’s postmodern operas in Canada.

Personally, I do not find that my work with her is giving me a more authentic voice. The training enables me to find a way of speaking where I can relax and release certain structures in my body to let air move through me while I am sounding to instigate a certain contained unpredictability of emotion and resonance. It’s not more authentic. It’s more theatrical. Not theatrical in the sense of being more fake, or more over-the-top. It is more theatrical in that it is more compelling to observe.

The aesthetic imagination of opera has discovered a greater way of breathing. There is more room for breath in my body. This makes more room for voice. More breath inside my body also makes greater incarnations of myself as I continue to move through the phases of my life, each new me has greater inspiration (literally) than if I hadn’t had the training.

It also creates more tragic versions of myself. Not tragic in the colloquial sense. Not in the “that’s so sad” sense.

Tragic like in opera. Big emotions.

Because I think that everyone’s life is tragic. We all die. Most of us will get sick. We watch people we love grow old and die. Life includes much suffering.

So I think we need to embrace the Tragic. The bigness of life for what it is. To deny it is to let it crush us.

I have found that the performance of more compelling breathing very simply creates greater self-identities.

* * * * *

Self-portraiture is the dominant form of self-expression in our culture. This cultural moment will be in part defined by it. It’s as prevalent as hip hop.

Facebook and Myspace have turned millions of people into self-portrait artists. Not to mention our pervasive interconnected performances of The Self.

Occasionally, while thumbing through people’s profile pictures –which are since the inception of facebook becoming noticaebly more sophisticated technically, formally and in their use of personal semiotics — occasionally, I come across what I consider a masterpiece of self-portraiture.

A generation of youth worldwide is growing up for the first time with self-representation and self-portraiture as part of their coming of age. It’s essential for them to be connected and interconnected to the way our world operates.

* * * * *

(The following is a response to a question during the Q and A session following my talk.)

Q: Do you find the way you have looked has influenced the way you behave? Have your different bodies created new interior “you’s” when you recreated yourself? And, do you take cues from the way you look in order to determine how you should behave?

A: The first thing that comes to my mind is that when I first got my breasts done I became hypersexual. What most people would call promiscuous. I had never had attention from straight men like that before, and when I got my hips done I felt that for the first time my body wasn’t made up of external prosthetics that would be unwieldy when getting undressed during a one night stand. Also, my confidence increased from each beautifying procedure, but only for a little while. It was a momentary high. Then when I had my breasts done a second time I felt a lot less sexual because there were complications and I lost sensation in my left breast. Now I understand that the amount of makeup I wear, big hair and exposed cleavage can symbolize that I am sexually available, on “the look-out.” But this is not the case. These cultural signifiers have lost most of their sexual implications to me now, and they represent an aesthetic puzzle I assemble daily. This body, although I am aging, is primarily an image I built years ago. It does not speak to the interior “fantasy woman” I want to be currently. Thus, the ongoing project of maintaining my image is as aesthetic as it is sexual. My extra-daily embodiment and representation inside art objects and art experiences is more interesting and vital to me now than what most people would consider day to day real life.