Abstract In this manifesto, multidisciplinary artist Nina Arsenault sets out the working principles, practices, and philosophies that undergird her performance work. In this work she includes the shaping of her body through plastic sur- gery, voice training, and exercise, and the adornment of her body in feminine clothing, makeup, fake hair, as well as all of her more artistic autobiographical representations in her photographic images, her writing, her plays and perfor- mances, her social media posts, and so on—all of which she sees define as self- portraiture. In this manifesto, Arsenault elaborates how she elides the boundary between the quotidian actions of living and disciplinary traditions of self-por- traiture in her life as art practice.
Keywords Gender in Performance: Trans* • Gender performance • Live
art • Self-portraiture • Body art • Media • Performance Analysis and Research Methods: Manifesto • Genre • Live art • Media • Researcher-practitioner
When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image of
the experience out before her and enters into her own image. —Meister Eckhart, German mystic
Switzerland AG 2022 J. P. Halferty, C. Leeney (eds.), Analysing Gender in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85574-1_11 170 N. ARSENAULT
Working Principles and Inspirations
1. I see all of my creative work—documentary photographs, reality TV, autobiographical storytelling, video art, staged photography, literary memoir writings, costumed nightlife appearances, voice/breath/body training, cosmetic surgery, and the daily presentation of my femininity through makeup, fake hair, exercise, and diet—as a continuing practice of living self- portraiture. My life and art are irrevocably entwined. 2. Self-portraiture communicates feelings and ideas, which cannot be sat- isfactorily communicated in fictionalised artistic forms. The viewer is never required to suspend disbelief, creating an immediate and compel- ling connection to the artistic works. 3. Self-portraiture creates the opportunity for cathartic emotional release, revealing aspects of the Self which are mythic in scope—both trium- phant and tragic. Therefore, no emotion, thought, or expression is taboo. The primary feat of self-portraiture is the depth and vitality of the reveal. 4. I’m inspired by the words of actor/writer Steven Wright who declared, ‘I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography’. The self-portrait should always unmask more than the artist knows or intends. 5. However, as in the paintings of Frida Kahlo, every self-portrait also contains mystery and ambiguity. No singular artistic work can reveal everything of the Self. 6. Therefore, what remains unspoken onstage is also an integral part of a performance. What is not within the frame of a photograph also creates the image. 7. I recognise the difference between memoir and autobiography. A mem- oir is a story or series of stories that reveals part of an artist’s life. Autobiography is the overarching narrative of an entire life. 8. One of the principal aims of self-portraiture is to inspire the viewer to ask, ‘How did she know that about me?’ I agree with writer Philip Guedalla who said, ‘Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people’ (Qtd. in Andrews 22). 9. Vanity never needs to be denied. There is great ego in self-portraiture. This should be integrated into the artistic works, but it should not dominate them. 10. The work is narcissistic in that I stare at my reflection and an artistic work blossoms within this gaze. In this way, the Narcissus myth is rewritten as productive and communicative. 11. Self-portraiture is auto-erotic. It brings me great pleasure. I experience this through sensation in my heart, head, gut, mouth, genitals, anus, and throughout my body. Every artist should have a sexual connection to their work. 12. I am inspired to see all other artworks through the frame of self- portraiture. I see the works of Jackson Pollock, Damien Hirst, Marina 11 A MANIFESTO OF LIVING SELF-PORTRAITURE (IDENTITY, TRANSFORMATION… 171
Abramović, Yoko Ono, David Lynch, and Lars Von Trier as self- portraits. I agree with Federico Fellini when he says, ‘All art is autobio- graphical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography’ (Qtd. in Murray 3). 13. Self-portraiture comes with a sacred responsibility to communicate my experience of life. Fictionalising the artistic works would render them spiritually empty, intellectually reductive, and less sensational.
Development of Practice1
Documentation, Artefacts, Aesthetics
At the beginning of my transsexual transition in 1998, to feminise myself through hormones and surgery, I attempted to look at my face and body with a calculating aesthetic gaze that saw in terms of line, form, mass, and design. At this time, I also began to capture my physical and psychological changes through journal writing, video diaries, before and after photos, and raw docu- mentary footage of my cosmetic procedures. I knew that this catalogue of personal ARTEFACTS, signposts of my jour- ney into femininity, would eventually have artistic value as they recorded the construction of my gender and my new body. It would also chronicle my per- sonal yearning for beauty in a society that places great currency in the physical and sexual attributes of women. I understood the aestheticization of the female form and the performance of femininity as among the greatest narratives in the history of art and culture. Perhaps only architecture, as a discipline, has as expansive a lineage. However, the control, abstraction, eroticization, and battle that defines, hierarchizes, and rarefies The Feminine is an aesthetic preoccupation that dominates painting, sculpture, film, hieroglyphs, fashion photography, pop music videos, pornog- raphy, and ubiquitous celebrity culture. As an artist and a transsexual aesthete, it was my intention to augment, to continue, to deconstruct, to celebrate, and to subvert this lineage in the most vibrant and visceral ways I could.
Projecting the Self
I have had approximately sixty cosmetic procedures over the course of eight years, financed through sex work. It should be noted that some of these proce- dures created an external feminine gender to match my own internal sense of being. Other operations, however, were motivated by my continued quest for beauty, a PASSION I devoted myself to completely—body, mind, and spirit. The physical recoveries were often painful, but adjusting socially and psy- chologically to my increasingly feminine and sexualized body (plump lips, breasts, hips) was even more challenging. Because I was personifying new social and sexual roles, people treated me accordingly. This quickly and radically 172 N. ARSENAULT
altered my relationships to others and my environment—power, privilege,
oppression. I was becoming more marginalised but also more rarefied. The ways I navigated every worldly interaction changed, demanding core adjust- ments to my personality. I realised how profoundly my body and my internal sense of Self were intertwined. I continued my documentation; however, in order to survive these massive physical, psychological, and interpersonal shifts, I needed to make sense of them through creative art making. I began staging photo shoots, which visually abstracted and ICONIZED my new life experiences. Journal writing gave way to tightly crafted memoir stories about my simultaneously physical and spiritual transformations, the people who were helping me metamorphosize, and the new sexual personae I was embodying. My body was profoundly changed with every surgical shape-shift. I would have about six operations at a time and, therefore, the transformations book- ended distinct phases of my life. Each new version of my body and the societal meanings that were inscribed upon it were destroyed and reinscribed again and again. With every incarnation, I was compelled to create a HIEROGLYPH of who I was in the Now—each new social role, sexual manifestation, gradation of femininity, shade of beauty, layer of artificiality.2 For eight years, I experienced the revelation of constant and perpetual change in search of my desired being. I began to see my writings and photo- graphs as sacred texts that charted the trajectory of my Self, and which also illuminated my culture. Furthermore, the abstraction of the artistic works (e.g. air-brushed posed photos, the writing of fantasies) began to inspire who I could look like and be next—new imagined aesthetic callings to make real, new hyper-feminine iden- tities to embody. Self-portraiture was not just documenting my transitions. It was shaping them.
Living Metaphor, Living Myth
In 2006, when I finished changing my body surgically I became fascinated with books like Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, Anthony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within, John C. Maxwell’s How To Think Like Successful People, and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Some of these are spiritual manuals. Some of them are business leadership texts. I saw them all as about performance—the perfor- mance of conscious and unconscious thought to manifest dreams; the perfor- mance of the elated spirit to transform our lives into success and enlightenment (maybe they’re the same thing); the performance of personal metaphors to create reality. During my transformations, I used metaphors such as life is a game, a Homeric odyssey, a tapestry, a series of magical spells, an art exhibition, and a hero’s quest. I understood each metaphor as the organising principle of my ongoing autobiography and changed them as I went along, to create a grander 11 A MANIFESTO OF LIVING SELF-PORTRAITURE (IDENTITY, TRANSFORMATION… 173
life story. With each chapter of this autobiography, each phase of my life, it was obvious that I was living a variation of an archetypal story. I had always loved mythology and folklore. In the different phases of my life, I related with the stories of Aphrodite, Artemis, Persephone, and many other goddesses. At other times, I identified with figures like Narcissus and Buddha. I think there is great esoteric wisdom in these traditions. Beholding the self-portraits and reading the memoir stories, I saw that the symbols and themes of these myths were reflected in my work. Clearly, I was embodying personal versions of these archetypal figures. I focused more intently on the images that were streaming through my con- sciousness during daily journal writing, while dreaming, daydreaming, medi- tating, exercising, and while having sex. I researched the myths that these images conjured in me. I read the stories and studied ancient and modern artists’ depictions of the mythological figures. I loved that the storylines of the same myths have been reinterpreted in different time periods, in different cul- tures, and by different artists.3 I enjoyed deciphering how each time I lived an archetypal story I experi- enced my own version of it. I was an active participant in the story. Identifying the myth I was living compelled me to decide how I wanted my variation to unfold. I also challenged myself to embody each GODDESS FIGURE with as much vitality as possible. Working from these myths to make art—monologues, photographs, and videos—revealed the meaning of their place in my larger autobiography. This process galvanised my own sense of life narrative and grounded me for the inevitable next chapter. I was imaging and writing my life. I also noted there was a finite period of time to live each of my personal myths through this ongoing, unfolding practice of self-portraiture. Moreover, I knew that I was interested in capturing the archetype from inside the vitality of its being, not representing it once the time had passed.
The Anti-discipline of Being
In 2008, I began compiling and editing some of my memoir writing to create solo storytelling shows, and I wanted to find more emotional expression in my voice for theatrical performances. I began studying with voice teacher and mezzo soprano Fides Krucker. In our sessions, she was teaching me how to sing. Song elongates words, and the performer is given longer spaces of time to inhabit vocalisation with feeling. There is more time for emotion. I was interested in translating the training into my speaking voice. My understanding of this work is that it is an anti-discipline. The training enabled me to identify and relax holding patterns in my body that habitually constricted breath, voice, and emotion. By “unlearning” these internal block- ages, I was beginning to allow air to move through me in new ways to create contained but unpredictable emotion and vocal resonance. 174 N. ARSENAULT
I attempted to integrate the voice/breath/body work into my life, to live it
all the time. The work progressed in phases, and each stage released another area to sensation, unlocking new ways of breathing, sounding, and of experi- encing the moment. My focus on this training put me back into the rapid stream of constant and perpetual transformation. However, instead of surgical procedures, the chapters of my life seemed defined by the internal bodily changes that I was releasing into. In stages, I was becoming more grounded. My body was learning to take more athletic breaths. Then, I had more sensa- tion—tender and strengthening—in and around my heart, creating deeper empathy and intimacy with others. There were more feelings in my stomach, genitals, on my pelvic floor, and around my anal sphincter. As I continued with this training, my daily life was increasingly invigorated with a heightened emo- tionality and intensified connection to the outer world. Again, the revelatory changes in my body and spirit were intrinsically connected. During a three-year period of studying with Fides, I performed numerous productions of my two solo shows, The Silicone Diaries and I Was Barbie, at theatres across Canada. At each production, the real-life stories I told remained unchanged, but the performance of my Self in the Now underwent many transformations. The first production of The Silicone Diaries at the Saint John Theatre Company in New Brunswick (August 2008) was conversational storytelling, much like a guest on a confessional talk show. Next, I performed I Was Barbie as a stand-up comedian at the queer comedy festival We’re Funny That Way (May 2009). As I found greater breath and voice, the same words could be performed like a fairy tale of tender imagination at PSi 16 (Performance Studies international) (June 2010). During the production of The Silicone Diaries at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto (November 2010), I felt a raw emotional connection to my stories, and I channelled the figure of a maenad to perform the play. Most recently, at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival (June 2011), I imagined myself as a contemporary priestess of love and beauty with a will to bestow the wisdom that everyone’s life is mythological. As I continue to discover the breath and breadth of feeling that the aesthetic imagination of opera developed I am (re) creating my body, my art, and my life with, literally, greater and greater inspiration. This raises a very exciting ques- tion to my practice as a mythmaker. How OPERATIC can living self- portraiture become?
A Line of Flight, a Ray of Light
Postmodern theory suggests that we are a series of coordinates on various dis- cursive maps—class, gender, religious, sexual, ethnic, situational—and that these coordinates are our only identities. We are the breathing aggregate of these power structures. 11 A MANIFESTO OF LIVING SELF-PORTRAITURE (IDENTITY, TRANSFORMATION… 175
In my life, I have been a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, an academic, a drag
queen, a theatre director, a teacher, a reality TV star, a stripper, a whore, a col- umnist, a nightlife hostess, a mistress, a storyteller, an aesthete, an art object, a cyborg, an icon, Barbie, an actress, a faery, a witch, and an ascetic. I have also noted that often it is the identities that society despises and degrades that give me the most pleasure and excite my sexuality—the phallic woman, the transsexual, the whore, the woman as object, the woman as prop- erty, the woman as art. Moreover, the practice of revisiting past theatrical works in new productions means I have combined prior experiences of being with themes and identities in the Now to forge new and fantastical hybrids: transsexual drag queen, human mannequin, disfigured beauty, cyborg Barbie, virtual object, faery construc- tion, and plastic monastic. A video project in development explores the identity fusions of anorexic/ascetic and Ophelia/machine. In this way, my artistic practice has revealed my identities to be discontinu- ous and self-aware yet fluid, episodic, and cumulative. The works have also recorded the temporality of my body exposing that I was not in any permanent way a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, a child, an adult, natural, artificial, sexy, thin, healthy, beautiful, or virtual. I am not my bodies, which are constantly disappearing. The greatest reveal of living self-portraiture is to illuminate that one is A LINE OF FLIGHT through the manifestations of physical forms, through the coordinates of cultural understandings, and through the integrations of per- sonal archetypes. My next phase artistically is to create compelling self-portraits of being.
Conclusions Self-portraiture is a means of resisting death through images and stories that inscribe, ‘I live through this; I am transformed; I experience revelation.’ The works iconize the constant and perpetual process of TRANSFIGURATION. They are an active way of writing my life and of ordering my reality—the creation and recreation of the Self understood and presented without shame, through my own eyes, heart, mind, and body—not through the minimising gaze of a society that is transphobic, sexist, misogynist, class obsessed, ageist; a society that is afraid of nudity, scars, trauma, sex, the body, and difference; a society that attempts to convince marginalised people that they are weak, sick, freaks, victims, unworthy; a secular society that has become ashamed of spiri- tual passion; a society that erases personal narratives with the aggressive, perva- sive overwriting of who we are, how to act, how to work, how to worship, how to fuck, and even habituates in us HOW TO BREATHE. Living self-portraiture is, therefore, the REDEMPTIVE POWER TO SIGNIFY. It is to see, create, and vivify a rich personal mythology through the 176 N. ARSENAULT
potentialities of life and culture. It is THE PRESENCE OF BEING at the
nexus point of imagination and reality.
All things are changing; nothing dies. The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases … For that which once existed is no more, and that which was not has come to be…Only the bodies, of which this eternal, imperishable, incomprehensible Self is the indweller, are said to have an end. (Ovid xv, 165–167, 184–185)
Notes 1. I would like to thank J. Paul Halferty who helped me to write about the develop- ment of my art form in this manifesto. 2. I also started to work with other artists on these projects—a process I call col- laborative self-portraiture. 3. I learned a similar practice of working, inspired by the tutoring and dramaturgy of Judith Rudakoff, during my MFA Playwriting thesis at York University, 1998–9. I am grateful for this mentoring.
Bibliography Andrews, Robert. (1987) The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (London: Routledge). Murray, Edward. (1976) Fellini the Artist. (New York: F. Ungar). Ovid. Metamorphoses. (1933) Trans. Frank Justus Miller. (London: W. Heinmann).
