An interview with Cassils, the performance artist who sold cans of their poop as NFTs

Welcome to Small Talk, a series where we catch up with the internet’s favorite Extremely Online individuals offline.

You may have heard of Bitcoin, or Dogecoin, or any of the other dozens of cryptocurrencies. But have you heard of $HT Coin?

Initially launched by an anonymous “White Male Artist,” $HT Coin was eventually revealed to have been created by Cassils — a Guggenheim Award-winning, transgender, Canadian-American performance artist. The project is a complex questioning of how art engages with consumption, and particularly NFTs. In the project, Cassils ate a series of meals based on the diets of the most financially successful white male artists. They then pooped into tin cans and put those cans on display at 432 Park Avenue from July 26 to 30. Over a 24-hour period, from July 29 to July 30, Cassils auctioned off the five cans on the Ethereum blockchain through an online-only auction for Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Cassils themself.

The cans are very much real, but were sold with accompanying NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which are data stored on the blockchain that can represent anything from a photo to a song to, yes, a tin can of shit. The starting bid for each can was set at the weight of gold, roughly $1,800, in reference to Piero Manzoni’s famous piece, Merda D’Artista (Artist’s Shit).

Cassils understands the complex chaos that comes with a new digital form of currency and communicates that in a way no one else could. In an effort to find out how, I called them to chat about their work, the internet, and how that intersects with power and social expectations.

Mashable: Alright, tell me about $HT Coin.

Cassils: So $HT Coin is my first NFT project. I’m a performance artist who was trained as a painter. So I have a long training and history of a visual arts practice, but also these embodied, physical, durational performances. And during the pandemic, like everybody else, I was deeply isolated. And as someone who works in performance and whose day job, I’m also a personal trainer that works with pain management so I help people recover from all sorts of surgeries and intense physical traumas. And so I wasn’t able to do any of that work. And so I found myself really removed from my very bodied practice. And then on top of that, I had suffered a really bad back injury — one that made it such that I couldn’t even really walk.

And so I found myself immobilized in many ways. And during this time, like so many people, I was spending time online and there was kind of proliferation of NFTs that was happening, which was in some ways really exciting because of the promise of things like smart contracts that allow for a direct relationship between the artist and whomever is purchasing — because as we know in the art world, so often artists are really exploited… And so this sort of ledger of the blockchain allowing for transparency was also something that was interesting to me.

The other thing that was intriguing to me, is this idea of artists’ royalties because often this is something that exists in publishing and it exists in film and television, but for visual artists, this does not exist. It’s not that it hasn’t been thought of and actually tried to be implemented in the past, but there’s a direct resistance. And that resistance is because it behooves the collectors and those in power to not centralize an artist’s independence. And so artists are often in this space of being deeply exploited. And so the technology for all of those reasons was intriguing.

Although we have this promise of this new open-ended platform that makes space for everybody, again, we see it instantly being occupied by white male mediocrity and greed and speculation driven by market forces.

And then it’s just such an abstract concept, this idea of creating digital scarcity. When we think of art already, the idea of value is something that is already a little bit abstract. But when we take it onto something where there is actually not even an object, where it becomes almost just about bragging rights around ownership, that also was really abstract and interesting in a way to me.

And then I’d say lastly, the content of the work itself, thinking about value, thinking about the ways in which values are anointed. So often we think of value being linked to merit, but we of course all know that there’s not necessarily the same. This is not necessarily true. And I was hearing a lot of utopic technical discourse around the possibility of NFTs being this anti-hierarchical, horizontal platform, when, in fact, what we were seeing, in February with the sale of something like Beeple’s $69 million sale, from my perspective as an artist who rigorously works on both formal and conceptual and poetics, I found that to be a really banal piece. And so, although we have this promise of this new open-ended platform that makes space for everybody, again, we see it instantly being occupied by white male mediocrity and greed and speculation driven by market forces. So all of that led me to making $HT Coin.

Which diet was most flavorful?

I have a sweet tooth and usually I have this athletic, disciplined practice. So this was like a very strange project to research and find that it was not often surprising that some of these guys died young because their diets were really bad. But, actually, Warhol’s diet was one of my favorite diets because it was such a portrait of his artistic production. The whole idea of if you walk the walk, well he ate what he painted, like he ate industrialized edible product, like he really was, through and through, an example of post-war America. He would eat these sandwiches made of white wonder bread and chocolate bars, which he called cake.

He would also eat, as a sort of almost like performative gesture, a single mushroom or he would eat the bananas he painted, he would eat Kellogg’s corn flakes, he would eat Campbell’s soup. It was really interesting to see how people’s diets really stood in for portraits of that artists’ belief system, class status, economic status, and also cultural proclivities. That was kind of my favorite one.

How do you deal with interacting with the internet as a tool for your art without also feeling used by it as an artist?

I was fortunate enough to grow up before the internet, which feels like an ancient thing to say. But it wasn’t a big part of my life until I was probably mid-twenties. All technologies are tools and it depends on how the tool is wielded. I feel like in many ways it gives us this opportunity to have a direct relationship with a much faster community. And that’s exciting. And I do feel like, for example, as someone who’s trans, who’s gender non-conforming, who grew up without any kinds of representations of artists like myself, it’s a tremendous gift to be able to have a conversation back and forth. The flip side of it, which I find very frustrating, is that people really don’t take time to really think about what it is that they’re looking at.

All technologies are tools and it depends on how the tool is wielded.

And there’s often just this kind of finger-waving snap judgment. And just not a lot of deep thought that goes on and I find that incredibly frustrating. And so I feel like there is this pressure to synopsize complex and challenging ideas into these tiny mouthfuls, which is often in opposition to the greater cause. So I feel like, although the internet offers this tremendous outreach platform, it is also kind of fraught with these conditions of having to deal with a culture that is not really that interested in paying deep attention and is also rife with folks that want to quickly make snap decisions and point fingers. I find that part hard, to be honest.

How do you combat that frustration?

It really depends on the work itself. I think the difference with this work, is that people were hanging upon the visual of the NFT, which is this rotating can of shit that looks very much like a reboot of Manzoni and Manzoni’s cannon. Of course, this work, $HT Coin, is a homage and inspired by and very purposefully taking the ideas of the artist Piero Manzoni who in 1961 made a piece called Merda d’Artista, which is artists’ shit. And he was making a commentary on this notion of greed and speculation in the art world in 1961. Now about 20 years after the second world war, standing in post-fascist Italy, looking across at New York City and Warhol and all of the frenzy and fervor around pop art.

And he was thinking, this is kind of ridiculous. And so he made this work where he canned his own feces and sold 30 grams of his own shit for 30 grams of gold. He has long passed this world, but last year, one of his cans of shit sold for upwards of $300,000. And so his work continues to impact this critical dialogue that’s very playful. And I thought it was really important to take that concept and insert it into the blockchain because it instantly plays with this idea of value, how we ascribe value, which I think is such an important discussion, and talking about NFTS before we rush into the gold rush of it. And also to think about something that was linked to a gold standard like currency, which is no longer linked to the gold standard.

The performative part of my project, which was to go undercover as a crypto bro, and to take on the name White Male Artist [as a] pseudonym was a huge part of the piece.

So even, even our FIAT currency is deeply abstract and reliant upon a trust in a government, right? Which is, to be fair, a little bit more trustworthy than something like cryptocurrency. The problem with the NFT is that the performative part of my project, which was to go undercover as a crypto bro, and to take on the name White Male Artist [as a] pseudonym was a huge part of the piece. And that’s not something that shows up in the visual. And so I felt like people were seeing the visual, not reading about the context, not reading about the performative aspect of how I was literally dropping these on the market every day, and despite not having any kind of provenance or history, being able to sell these works as a White Male Artist.

And then, for me, the real work was what did it mean to then uncover my identity and to see how, in an exercise of behavioral science, how would value be ascribed to my work based on the subjectivity of my identity. So that’s not something that shows up in the visual itself. What shows up in a visual is a can that looks much like Manzoni’s — purposefully so. But the difference as well is that rather than just releasing artists’ shit, I was eating the diets of the top-grossing white male artists. And that commentary came from the fact that, in the midst of the pandemic, having an existential crisis as to why I dedicated 45 years of my life to being an ephemeral performance. I realized that, this is not surprising, but this notion that 98 percent of successful artists in this world today, are cis men. Which begs the question, who are the remaining 2 percent?

Are they just women? You know, what about the rest of us? Where is the room for that kind of inclusion? And so as someone who’s wedged open a steel door to make space for myself in the art world, it’s not luck, it’s not merit, it’s willfulness and strategy, as well as working hard and hoping to contribute work that has merit and talent. That makes sense that only 2 percent exists — it feels that way. And to moonlight was a big part of the work, and that was difficult to translate because of course my identity was hidden. And then to summarize the complexities of all of this — I mean, you can see how long I’m talking.

It’s hard to summarize that into Twitter, or an Instagram post. So I felt like when people would see the can and they’d say, ‘This is a rip off of Manzoni,’ and they freak out. As opposed to understanding all of the thought and care that went into it. The depth of the work, I guess.

What kind of response did you get?

I got mixed responses. It was really interesting. I thought that, in revealing myself, I was hoping for a sort of rush of support. It’s a complicated work that isn’t about modeling a perfect solution. And artists we are often tasked, and it’s a task I greatly take on with honor, is this idea of envisioning a better world. And I have done that in my past works many times. I have envisioned representations that have yet to exist for trans and nonbinary people. With something like In Plain Sight, which was a work where I worked with 80 artists and my amazing co-founder Rafa Esparza and 17 immigrant justice orgs to highlight hidden sites of immigrant detention, to educate the U.S. Population on the Fourth of July, and to give them the information on how to free people via bail funds. That’s a very didactic, direct work that highlights injustice and provides possible solutions and agency for the viewers.

That’s something that can be done, but also in a work like that, which is not contained in the visual of the work, I experienced deep networks of racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and, in that work, we chose not to focus on that, but that’s something that you go through every day as an artist. And so $HT Coin is a work that is complicated because it enacts a sort of Trojan horse embodying of the problem. And then twists it to showcase the reveal. And in that reveal, it offers, ‘Hey, this is who I am, is my work still valuable?’

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Beyond $HT Coin, a lot of your art is deeply physical. You have pressed your body against ice for hours, and set yourself on fire for seconds. I imagine it would be hard not to live in the moment when you’re doing something so physically straining.

The two main consistent things in my life have been athletic training and being an artist and the training part came because, when I was a kid, I was extremely ill, but my illness was diagnosed as being psychosomatic. And I was in fact, and I ended up having to have several surgeries and almost died when I was 14 years old. And that led me to realize at an early age, a few things, which was that mortality is really something that we can’t take for granted. So I think it really gave me a good sense of the possibility of death at an early age. And also that you can’t really trust the medical-industrial complex, which has also led to my decisions around how I choose to transition or not. And thinking very much and wanting very early on to have a sort of sense of agency when it came to my own body became important and that has informed my physical and artistic practice. The physicality for me is this sort of like analog, daily way of having that agency, of making those choices that allow me to have longevity, less pain in my body, maybe be able to flag gender in a way without having to take injectable hormones — not to say that there’s anything wrong with that, but coming from a place where I was so ill and mistreated by the medical-industrial complex, I’m suspicious to sign on to a life of big pharma. I’m suspicious of the rhetoric of embodiment being tied to a corporation.

And these are discussions that we don’t get to have without seeming or quickly being called transphobic, but I actually think that the sort of intersection between capitalism and embodiment is something that needs to be had. And so I feel that art and the physical practice as an intersecting point is a way to explore the sort of peripheries of agency, the peripheries of what aspects of control we have and do not have. And I really see that the body is a node that really exemplifies that.

All of our coping mechanisms were taken away from us during the pandemic, how did you deal?

That’s why I threw myself into this project. This project has a tremendous amount of research. I decided to take on an NFT. The works that I’m inspired by, when it comes to artists who have used technology in the past, there’s an incredible exhibition up right now at SF MoMA, which is a retrospective of Nam June Paik’s work. And I made a pilgrimage to go and see it, not during the pandemic, but just a couple of weeks ago. And there’s this one brilliant piece that has a high-powered magnet on a television set. It’s a work that misuses technology to show its limitations. And I was interested in taking on that challenge of how can I perform this invisible web of power that is not spoken to, or easily visualized when it comes to the culture of NFTs. And so in the height of the pandemic, I do what I always do when I feel like the walls are crushing in, which is to make art, because that is the thing that allows me to feel free. Yes, I felt all of that paralysis and loneliness and isolation that everybody else did, but in July, 2020, that was when I was in the midst — and that was like early days in the pandemic when it was really bad, it was also like the height of uprisings here in Los Angeles and across the nation — and it was in the midst of that I mounted In Plain Sight, which was the sky typing campaign. And this piece that was using the sky as a canvas so that even when you were in your house, you could look out the window and see this artwork. And it was really thinking like, yeah, my situation sucks, but how much more would it suck to be in a box for profit when you’ve come here seeking asylum because you’re queer. The other way that I maintain that sanity is to really think about the perspective of things and to understand that I’m actually in a position of tremendous privilege, even though it is difficult. So it’s not to undermine that difficulty, but it’s also to keep things in perspective and to constantly remind myself as to how we can leverage our individuality to have more of collective freedom. And that is very important.

Is there anything else that you wish I had asked?

I feel like it’s really important, when these larger systems fail us, when artists are not given long-term support… I know that artists are often in precarious situations, and so to place the burden upon us to lift each other up and say, well, why are institutions doing that? Or why aren’t there artists unions, or why aren’t there more labor laws? Why aren’t these systems in place to empower artists and why is it so inequitable? Why is there 90 percent cis men in the market? And so few people who do not fit that definition?

And I really think that, if all of us were to think about how we could model and change that, that change would be possible. My hope with, obviously in terms of making $HT Coin, it’s a larger project, but that the ethos is that, are there ways, in these imperfect systems, that we can think about ways to free each other and not be so cynical? Yes, it’s difficult. And? And what can we do? I would just hope that if there are other artists or other folks out there who want to see that change, reach out to me because I’m down to organize.