Advertisement: homage to benglis.

2011.

1 photograph : chromogenic color print ; print 101.6 x 76.2 cm, frame 103.5 x 78.1 cm

[State 3].

Portrait of Cassils taken at the end of Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture (2010), their six month performance piece funded by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), as an example of transgender embodiment.

"On the one hundred sixtieth day of Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, Cassils collaborated with photographer and makeup artist Robin Black to create Advertisement: Homage to Benglis. In this photograph, Cassils stages an homage to Linda Benglis’s historic feminist artwork Advertisement (1974), in which Benglis poses with a double-ended phallus in an advertisement in Art Forum. Cassils’s ripped, transmasculine physique substitutes for Benglis’s phallus. Cassils and Black disseminated these self-empowered images of trans representation through personal connections in print and digital gay, fashion, and art publications. Placing Advertisement: Homage to Benglis within the context of gay, art, and fashion publications signals a shift in American cultural landscape, while also highlighting the role of feminist artists like Benglis in bringing about those changes."--Quote from artist.

"Cassils gained 23 pounds of muscle in 23 weeks for their performance Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture . In their words, the title “showcases the cut of musculature as opposed to the cut of the surgeon". The work references feminist artist Eleanor Antin’s crash-dieting performance Carving, and Lynda Benglis’s sexually-explicit Advertisement. Like Benglis, Cassils distributed this self-empowered trans pin-up image in magazines and online"--From Being Human exhibition caption.

[3rd state titled Cashomage]

Exhibited in 'Being Human' at Wellcome Collection, London, 5 September 2019 - 19 September 2021.

Exhibited in “Cassils: Human Measure” at HOME, Manchester, 2 October - 12 December 2021

Exhibited in ‘The Cult of Beauty’ at Wellcome Collection, London, 26 October 2023 – 28 April 2024

Wellcome Collection 3162357i