This is an excerpt from a talk by J. Paul Halferty Identification, Embodiment and Being that took place on June 10 2011 at The National Gallery of Canada. Halferty’s talk was the second part of a two part lecture called Beauty, Art and the Female Form. The talk was organized in conjunction with The Magnetic North theatre Festival where my one woman play The Silicone Diaries was playing.
It should be stated that Transformation was created in 2006 by a process I call ‘collaborative self-portraiture’ -creating an image of myself with other artists. Bruce LaBruce took the actual photo. I came in with the idea of photographing my body at the time through his iconography. Creating the specifics of the image was a negotiation between us. He took the photograph and it’s his iconography.
The lecture excerpt (below) was accompanied by a slide image of Transformation. (2006)
Identification, Embodiment and Being – Nina Arsenault’s ‘Self-portraits’ (excerpt)
“Transformation appeals to the Classical images of Aphrodite/Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. According to Greek mythology, Chronos cut off the genitals of his father, Uranus, and cast them into the sea. Once in the water, sea foam arose around Uranus’ bloody member and testicles, and they were instantly transformed into the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite/Venus.
Transformation‘s composition, which has Arsenault’s body sitting on a chair in a pool of blood, visually references Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which depicts Venus on a shell, emerging from the sea. The portrait thus links the Classical images of violence, conflict, castration, and blood, which gave birth to the goddess of love and beauty, to the surgical procedures and traumas that gave birth to Arsenault’s beautiful feminine form.
In Transformation, Arsenault’s penis is also visible, denoting that she was born into a male body. The presence of the penis signals that Arsenault’s feminine form, like the Greek myth, Classical/ Renaissance sculpture and painting, as well as the other forms of femininity that she has emulated, is the creation of a “man” within patriarchy.
Transformation powerfully suggests that Arsenault’s embodiment of feminine ideals cannot be divided from her experience of being born with a male body, nor the trauma she underwent to achieve them. Rather, its tense and bloody beauty ironically posits violence, hatred and pain as inseparable from tenderness, love and pleasure.”
– J. Paul Halferty
(reprinted with permission of the author)
From Dada and the Futurists to Forced Entertainment today, the manifesto has served as a vehicle of choice for theatre artists to rail against the status quo in passionate and robust terms, define a counter-vision of what the theatre should be and should mean to society, and proclaim how the artist ought to proceed. For their 150th anniversary issue the Canadian Theatre Review is commissioning Canadian theatre artists to write their manifesto and make public their visions and vituperations.
For the issue I am composing a Manifesto of Self-portraiture that will straddle my thoughts on creating my one person shows, performance photography and video self-portraiture.
The 150th issue comes out Spring 2012.
(from their website:)
Canadian Theatre Review is the major magazine of record for Canadian theatre. It is committed to excellence in the critical analysis and innovative coverage of current developments in Canadian theatre, to advocating new issues and artists, and to publishing at least one significant new playscript per issue. The editorial board is committed to CTR’s practice of theme issues that present multi-faceted and in-depth examinations of the emerging issues of the day and to expanding the practice of criticism in Canadian theatre and to the development of new voices.
Editor: Laura Levin
Associate Editors: Catherine Graham, Reid Gilbert
Views and Review Editors: Natalie Alvarez, Jenn Stephenson, Andrew Houston
check out their website at
http://www.utpjournals.com/ctr/ctr.html
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- an old issue of the Canadian Theatre Review ( but I find the cover compelling)
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- poster for my one woman show 'The Silicone Diaries' (directed by Brendan Healy)
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- my other one woman show 'I Was Barbie' (directed by Brendan Healy)
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- from a video work called 'Dryad' (made in collaboration with Jordan Tannahil)
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- photograph from the 'Transformation' session (in collaboration with Bruce Labruce)
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- photograph from the 'Liminoid' series (in collaboration with inkedKenny)
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- 'Fey' (photograph in collaboration with Michael Chambers)
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- photograph from the 'Unstoppable' series (in collaboration with Tony Fong)
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- Automaton Surrealiste (photograph in collaboration with Neil Mota)
More images in my continuing practise of collaborative self-portraiture. ’Collaborative self-portraiture’ is the term I use to describe the process of working with other artists to explore images of myself.
These photos were made in conjunction with the poster for Mitchel Raphael’s club night Sodom at Goodhandy’s, 120 Church Street — 3rd Saturday of every month. Each night at Sodom has a theme. This theme was Hollywood Zombie and took place on May 21 of this year. (Search under ‘night life’ in the Categories section to the right to see the actual poster.)
I’ve always liked to use my nightclub life as an opportunity for my art practice and vice versa.
concept: Nina Arsenault, Mitchel Raphael, Myles Sexton
photography: Mitchel Raphael
make-up: Myles Sexton
created May, 2011
(CLICK ON THE THUMBNAILS TO SEE THE PHOTOS)
(search under photographic projects in the Categories column to the right to see other works)
Thanks to director Brendan Healy for putting this beautiful text into my consciousness.
“When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see …the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gleaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly resolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to… feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to 
create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.”
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: a Memoir of Disintegration
included photographic self-portraits also by Wojnarowicz
Still Life Serving (in-progress)
by Nina Arsenault
2011
two 455 cc silicone gel implants (one ruptured, both from the artist’s body 2001-2006) injected with blood (by the artist)
syringe
stainless steel serving tray
carnation
purple amethyst
3 pieces of quartz crystal
Ms. Arsenault assisted by Nicholas Flood during the procedure-ritual
NEXT WEEK I’LL TAKE MORE BLOOD TO DRAW THE PENTAGRAM IN THE RUPTURED IMPLANT (RIGHT) AND DO SOME MORE INJECTIONS INTO THE CONTAINED SILICONE IMPLANT (LEFT). WITH NICHOLAS’ ASSISTANCE I’M ALSO VIDEOING THE RITUAL THROUGH WHICH THE MAGIC OBJECT/ AESTHETIC SCULPTURE IS CREATED. TO INJECT THE SILICONE IMPLANTS WITH BLOOD I AM USING SOMETHING SIMILIAR TO THE “TUNNELING” INJECTION TECHNIQUE. WE’RE JUST SO EXCITED ABOUT HOW THE SILICONE IS HOLDING THE BLOOD (EXACTLY LIKE I HOPED) WE HAD TO SHOW SOMETHING. (SORRY ABOUT THE POOR PHOTO QUALITY.)
THIS IS IN PROCESS.
“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does… The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph… Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”
–Andre Breton, Nadja (1928)
photographed by Neil Mota, Dec 2010
Part of my continuing practise of photographing my body with photographers I love, this image was captured by Neil Mota in Montreal the day I finished a run of eighteen consecutive performances of my one woman play The Silicone Diaries.
The hard copy of the image (1.5 x 3 feet) is signifigantly less glamourous and more revealing than the image on the computer screen made of light.
(below: excerpts from the French artist ORLAN’s Manifesto of Carnal Art, a document that has informed her famous cosmetic surgery performances)
DEFINITION
Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realised through the possibility of technology. It swings between defiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age…
ATHEISM
Carnal Art transforms the body into language, reversing the biblical idea of the word made flesh ; the flesh is made word. Only the voice of Orlan remains unchanged. The artist works on representation.
PERCEPTION
I can observe my own body cut open without suffering !….I can see myself all the way down to my viscera, a new stage of gaze. “I can see to the heart of my lover and it’s splendid design has nothing to do with symbolics mannered usually drawn. Darling, I love your spleen, I love your liver, I adore your pancreas and the line of your femur excites me.
FREEDOM
Carnal Art asserts the individual independence of the artist. In that sense it resists givens and dictats. This is why it has engaged the social, the media, (where it disrupts received ideas and cause scandal)…
STYLE
Carnal Art loves parody and the baroque, the grotesque and the extreme.
Carnal Art opposes the conventions that exercise constraint on the human body and the work of art.
Macleans’ columnist and former Fab magazine editor Mitchel Raphael also throws a queer club night called Sodom at Goodhandy’s (120 Church Street, Toronto). It’s a monthly themed masquerade party (outfits encouraged but optional).
Dressing up and masquerade has always been a part of what I do, especially when I was working as a nightclub hostess. Not necessarily wearing a costume to do a stage performance (although I do that, too) but as an expression of the Self for its own sake.
I see the impulse to masquerade in relation to self-portraiture as well as autobiography and transformation. My experiences in nightlife have always fed me with ideas that I take into my more formalized art practise.
And, it’s a lot of fun to see what people come dressed up as. For more info on Sodom go to www.sodom.ca
Click on the thumbnails to see more pics from the parties.
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- at the Gods and Goddesses party
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- the Enchanted Forest party
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- Sodom: The Bible Edition
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- The Witches of Sodom
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- Sodom: Titans and Togas
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- with the glorious Myles Sexton at Witches of Sodom
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- the corpse bride at Sodom: Monster's Ball
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- Joan of Arc at Sodom: Bible Edition
(The below excerpt is from my artist talk Self-portraiture: Identity, Transformation and Performance. It is from the section that accompanies the above portrait I worked on with photographer Michael Chambers.)
I was reading about faeries because I started getting interested in them when I was working on an autobiographical play called I was Barbie. It’s a storytelling performance about when I was asked to be Barbie at Mattel’s 50th birthday party for the doll. I didn’t know why I was interested in faeries other than to say the story reminded me of a fairy tale.
J. Paul Halferty, a friend and an academic who was writing about my work was talking to me one night. He was saying that old Irish folklore tells of a ritual –to place a hot poker above a baby’s bed to keep the faeries from touching the child. The faeries would be attracted to touch the poker and be burned. It was very interesting to me.
I started doing some research into the folklore and found out that a faery was simply a child who was touched at a young age.
This parable could obviously suggest something about molestation, but for me that is not how I took it. I was never molested. I also think I’d be oversimplifying the metaphor if I found only this suggestion in it.
I know that because I came into the world in a biologically male body I was born with a spiritual wound. I don’t know what to name that wound, but I believe that out of this wound springs many things –ideas, images, masquerades, fashion, self-portraits, stories I want to tell, performances I want to do. Being in this body has done something to my spirit. Spun it. Vibrated it in a certain way. Excited it in a certain way.
Faeries have magic.
I could be a good faery or a bad faery.
And I began to believe I was a faery.
It was a good identity. I didn’t really wear gossamer wings into public.
I thought it was a much better identity to be a faery than to be a male-to-female transsexual. That identity was created by doctors who were dealing with a pathologized group of people they were studying. That never felt that good to me. It sounds so medical to me, knowing that the words and the identity boundaries were created in a medical context by a group of outside male authorities. The word ‘transgendered,’ on the other hand, I associate with theorists who were actively creating a more inclusive word that would and could identify anyone who challenged society’s gender norms. That places my gender and its challenge to society at the heart of my identity. Do I want to carry that around with me all the time? Furthermore, why should my identity have to be so theoretical?
It’s lighter to be a faery. I don’t think that it’s the final word on my identity, but thousands of years of folklore, myth and esoteric –lost, forgotten– wisdom, has to be on to something.
(the accompanying image -above, right -in this blog entry is Morgan le Fay, by Anthony Frederick Sandys, 1864, Birmingham Art Gallery)
