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Cassils: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2019 01:30:10 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Body, Conceptual Art, Gender, Interview, LGBTQ, Performance, Social Justice, State, The, Surveillance, Transgender, VDB Interviews, Visiting Artists Program

Description

In conversation with David Getsy — an art historian focusing on queer and transgender methodologies in sculpture theory and performance history — Cassils discusses their monumental performance artworks and inspirations.

"Cassils’s works are protests. They are based in anger and defiance, and they struggle with the realities of the ways in which transgender people are surveilled and controlled. Cassils insists on recognition but refuses to be objectified. The seeming divergences of the works’ visual strategies — from spectacular body performance to cerebral abstraction — are required to address today’s political realities, when transgender lives are commodified, instrumentalized, and policed for others’ comfort."

— David Getsy, Artforum, February 2018

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

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