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Gallery Exhibitions  Narratives / Blogs |
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Toxic Titties | London, New York, and Los Angeles The Toxic Titties is a collaborative group that was formed five years ago by three graduate students at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, CA. Heather Cassils, Clover Leary and Julia Steinmetz, now living in London, Los Angeles, and New York respectively, have developed a body of work focused on exploring issues of sexuality and gender through a collaboration of genderqueer, feminist artists. Collaboration is an important aspect of the work, used to undermine an art system that places market value on individualism and ego. Conceptually, the Toxic Titties focus on maintaining indeterminate representation of their collaborative identity by continuously modifying the roles that they enact within the context of the work. Primarily, the work has taken the form of context specific performances that allow them to strategically develop a persona, thus actively play with the construction of “lesbian identity” and “gender identity” as it causes friction within the politics of identity. The method is multidisciplinary and crosses a spectrum of performance, film, drawing, video, photography, installation, graphics and event planning. Employing the performative strategies used by Fluxus artists to integrate art and life, as well as the guerilla tactics of previous feminists groups, the Toxic Titties transform spaces into sites of resistance. On the CSULB campus and at the Advocate Gallery in Los Angeles, the Toxic Titties posted ambiguous propaganda in correlation with the exhibition, EnGendered Species. The hyper-graphic posters are visual documentation of a 2003 performance titled LATT, an intentionally campy spoof on the LAPD, and Toxic Troopers. Toxic Troopers draws upon Hollywood media representations of the US Military to physically embody a fantasy of power and gender absent from current political reality. Clad in pink and black uniforms, this performance presents a fantastical vision of an unlikely feminist future and thus, provoked critique by demonstrating the terrifying effects of militarism applied to any ideology and, most poignantly, gender. The performance itself was held in Mexico City where the Toxic Titties recruited local artists, uniformed them and marched from the US Embassy to the Ex Teresa Arte Actual museum in the historic downtown area of the city. The march formation evoked both the image of a military exercise and a protest, transforming the location into a site of resistance. As made evident in Toxic Troopers, central to the work is the interrogation of systems of control and overarching power structures, whether found in the military or the art world. Two years ago Heather Cassils and Clover Leary were hired to perform in Vanessa Beecroft’s VB46 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills and used the opportunity to launch a parasitical performance, VB46-TT (Beecroft Intervention). Undermining power structures of identity, class, feminism and art commerce, the Toxic Titties hijacked Beecroft’s piece by subverting the female performers who were hired to stand motionless in the gallery space while wearing only high heels. The Toxic Titties engaged the performers, who had been homogenized and objectified, in critical dialogue. Their influence unionized the group and forced an increase in the cost of their labor. The performance has been documented through an essay inserted into Beecroft monographs currently circulating bookstores and through the 2006 edition of Signs Magazine. On site at the EnGendered Species exhibition, the Toxic Titties have left evidence of the Beecroft Invention through the journal, Signs, and illustrations from the text. - by Kristen Raizada Full text of the article, Behind Enemy Lines: Toxic Titties Infiltrate Vanessa Beecroft, in Signs, 2006.  Toxic Titties Toxic Titties, VB46-TT (Beecroft Intervention), 2006 Text and Illustrations |