By Jen Handley
“I consider my body the result of a long creative process,” says the disarmingly frank Nina Arsenault, a transgendered artist and the star of I was Barbie, which begins its SummerWorks run on Thursday. “I’ve made a lot of design choices about by body. I made choices to make it look not at all like a body anymore. I sort of pushed the female form to a level of abstraction.”
Arsenault, whose transformation involved over sixty plastic surgeries, is gorgeous, but unmistakably larger than life. Her impossibly tall and slender frame, high cheekbones, even skin, and perfectly sculpted blonde hairdo, each look a like a pointed exaggeration of a feminine ideal: she looks very much like a human Barbie.
“I think at first I just wanted to be a woman,” says Arsenault. “But because of the way my body looked already, as a male, I couldn’t just look like a normal female. I could either look like a transgendered woman and still have male features, or I could push the surgical procedures in such a way as to eliminate the male features, but that would make me look plastic. And that’s what I chose.”
Her show, which she describes as “a spiritual portrait of a plastic world,” that is, Toronto fashion week on Barbie’s 50th birthday, where Arsenault represented the doll, attempts to sort out “real” from “fake” in contemporary culture. While Arsenault glibly describes herself as “a transsexual cyborg,” she points out that most people aren’t as real as they might think they are.
“I would say that everyone living in modern culture pretty much is a cyborg,” says Arsenault, adding with a laugh, “it may not be completely obvious yet.”
“All of us are exposed to social conditioning through technology. Social conditioning in the media, on TV, in the newspaper, informs our desire. It tells us who we want to be… we all have images of success, fake images that we’re trying to fulfill. And that’s what I call a cyborg.”
And as a fake image we try to fulfill, no one has taken more feminist flack over the years than Barbie. “I have very deep respect for Barbie as an icon, but I have very conflicted feelings about her,” says Arsenault. “I loved Barbie as a child, and, you know, wanted to be her. I was little girl inside a little boy’s body, and she was the perfect beauty.” But Arsenault also experienced some of Barbie’s trademark infliction of feelings of inadequacy. “I was a guy, my body was so radically different from hers.”
After experimenting with many styles since its first run last year, Arsenault, director Brendan Healy and dramaturge Judith Rudakoff have found an approach for the show that addresses the complex relationship Barbie has with her admirers. “I wanted it to be stylish and slick, but also self-deprecating, and reference some of the suffering that Barbie brings upon people, but also laugh at that, too.”
Arsenault’s interest in the difference between real and fake extends to her creative approach. She starts with an exciting experience, not a political thesis. “I don’t create art, from the beginning, to make the world a better place. I think [my work] is political, and it does create discussion. That is important. But the starting point is much more visceral.”
“I sometimes feel like people create art because they want to create social change… and it’s so one-noted, it’s so obvious, that I don’t really believe it, I’m like, ‘the world is far more complex than that.’ Or I’ll go to see a play and the theme of the play is, like, ‘The Internet and Facebooking are bad.’ And everyone claps at the end, and everyone leaves the theatre, and no one believes it. But I think if you start from all of the stuff that you’re obsessed with, and then you start structuring it later, you get a much more complicated picture of humanity. To me that’s real art.”
Click here for more MONDO coverage of Nina Arsenault’s work.
Interesting. Nice article.