Victoria Cantons - an idea of womanhood

What if the feminine energy expresses herself in multiple ways.
What if it hasn’t yet been captured in words.
What if a cis woman (that is, born with a vagina) is but one expression of this grand energy.

An energy which is also much less serious than we depict it and for which there is no right body or only body.

My encounter with the wonderful Victoria Cantons happened unexpectedly and unplanned. Walking down the street, on my way to Shoreditch, I called a friend who told me he was at a beautiful exhibition that I should visit. 3 minutes after the call I stumbled upon him exiting the gallery, he said, ”Come I have a few minutes, I need to show you something”. We entered the gallery, he guided me to a small room where a 4 minute video was playing in loops and those few minutes initiated a cascade of reflections and questions.

Sometimes art can touch us, rarely does it change us. Whether that was or not Victoria’s intention, she did change my understanding of women up to this point in my life and in doing so she changed me. Artists have a gift for challenging societies’ beliefs and expanding our view… this genius is to be celebrated, for now I realise what a threat that is to any regime.

Tanya Gervasi: I would love to know what question is the most pressing for you right now in your life?

Victoria Cantons: How do I fit in, I guess. How do I make sense of every single day? How do we all make sense of it, because, not to sound too grim, the world is crap. The world is full of so much rubbish these days, whether you are talking about climate change or you’re talking about wars all over the place, and you know the media is very focused obviously, and for good reason, on the war in Ukraine. But there’s so many other wars, no one's talking about the issues in Afghanistan, in Yemen, and not to mention the gender war, the me too movement, the gender equality. It’s left, right and centre. At the moment humanity is so at war with itself, thanks to the Trump presidency, Brexit, the left and the right politically are at greater loggerheads than they've ever been. The West which is, how does one put it delicately: predominantly Christian in its outlook versus the Islamic world; the resistance in certain parts of the world to liberalism and to acceptance of same sex marriage, lgbt; the advancement of America.
I love America and recently, there was an acceptance speech given by Bono of U2 because he’s won an award in the States for his humanitarian work and part of his speech he talks about, and I’m paraphrasing, “the great song that is America” metaphorically in some sort of conceptual way, but there is tremendous resistance to that. That great song that he talks about is so loud that it ends up entering into spaces where the people not necessarily want it to be, a bit like a person with their boombox too loudly in the next garden at a barbecue and it’s coming over to your garden and quite frankly you don’t want it in your garden. And so there’s just conflict everywhere and it bugs me because so much of it affects me, how can it not?

It affects my liberty, my freedom of movement. And if it affects my liberty and freedom of movement then it affects other people too. So how do we make sense of all of that?

With the progression of my own issues, there’s still stuff that I’m trying to process, still trying to come to terms with. The fact that I am a woman, but I am a woman that, and not everyone agrees with me that I’m a woman, was born with a male body. I can’t deny that fact, the maleness of my body is basically part of the DNA of it: the body I was born with is not like a cis woman body and even though there has been medical interventions in order to, as the doctors and as I see it, correct that body, nonetheless my body is still not like a cis woman body. And that is something that I have to somehow find a way to be ok with. Ultimately I missed on growing up like a cis woman did, or like a cis girl even, and now that I’ve had the medical treatment I still don’t get to really experience life like a cis woman. I experience life like a woman that happens to be transgender.

It’s interesting you say this because when I sat down to watch your 4-minute video at the Flowers Gallery, I was certain I was looking at a woman.I was confused when I read the title of your show TRANSGENDER WOMAN because in fact I felt the adjective describing the type of woman was irrelevant. I’ve never questioned how I identify myself but it’s been two years since the topic of gender came to my attention and now sitting here with you I wonder: what is the difference between you and I. Is it just about the body? So after watching your video I had a feeling that women, or womanhood, share certain experiences (which are for the most part very hurtful). And that doesn’t mean that we all go through the same things but I believe a woman has a different way of perceiving life. I just assumed you went through some of them and thus there is a common understanding between us that makes us equal or at least relatable.
And you know the other thought I had? My grandma had two children, in her third pregnancy something didn’t go right and she was rushed into the hospital in life-threatening condition. Basically she had an extra-uterine pregnancy so to save her and without her consent, the doctors operated her and removed her uterus altogether because either way she already had two kids - nevermind the pain she felt for not being able to bear anymore since she deeply desired lots of children! So my point here is, she lived the rest of her life without a uterus: was she not a woman anymore? 

My mother had a similar experience, after she had me when I was five she became pregnant again. My parents had wanted lots of kids, they didn’t plan on having one single child so she became pregnant again. Things didn’t go smoothly and, very near full term, when she was 8 months pregnant at that point so the baby in effect was going to be born premature but they performed a cesarean and at the same time they also performed a full hysterectomy, because they said it was a life or death situation. On top of that the baby died shortly after the operation, it wasn’t even fully developed, the baby’s lungs weren’t fully developed so it couldn’t breathe and died within a couple of hours after the cesarean. My mother couldn’t have more children. Obviously I was very blind to all of this as a five year old but there’s the whole issue of, because it’s come up in newspaper articles, what makes a woman a woman: a woman can bear children. Well my mother was 39, she couldn’t bear anymore children, does that mean she was no longer a woman? Her mother, who lived with us the entire time from when I was born until she died when I was in my mid 20s… my grandmother had grown up in Spain and already had two children when the Civil War broke out, she was running a cafe in the centre of Madrid during the Civil War, before that she had grown up on a farm. Her mother died giving birth to her so she lost her mother at the point that she was born, she had five older brothers and she was a complete tomboy! You know, she was raised by men, she was surrounded by males, she rode horses, she could shoot a rifle, there was nothing girlish about her. Does that mean she is less of a woman because of that?

I have a friend who has breast cancer and who had her breasts removed. Is she now no longer a woman? You know, where is the definition? 

I feel the label woman has not only a different meaning from person to person, but every country and society has its definition of it which veeeeeery slowly changes in time (and always to accommodate men). If you had to distance yourself from the commonly known notions of what woman is, what is woman for you?

I hate to say it but it seems like a very difficult question to answer. I think, maybe and this is in no way a planned out answer, you know you put me on the spot… maybe womanhood is just simply an idea. Maybe womanhood and manhood are ideas. I mean the only thing we know for certain is that there is, commonly on a majority level, a body that produces eggs and can grow a new body inside of itself. And we have another body that produces sperm that fertilises the eggs when they connect through sex, and conversely in the human form cannot grow a child inside of them. Beyond that everything else is just, maybe, just big ideas about what is man and what is woman.

And what would be your most beautiful and freeing idea of a woman?

Again, a very very difficult question to answer. I think it’s more that one just wants to feel free to be oneself, to not get held up in labels because labels can end up causing hurt and pain. As soon as there’s a label there’s a discussion about whether you are or you aren’t.It doesn’t matter what that label is, it simply creates the notion of either being connected to that label through some sort of agreement or being disconnected because there’s no match. 

And yet, how does society function otherwise? And how do these labels, these ideas, have evolved over tens of thousands of years? Whether we’re talking about the hunter gatherers and role play in small communities at the outset of man’s existence, all the way through how it developed through the millennia. The Greeks had certain ideas, the Romans evolved that further and you can follow the line and trajectory of it through the centuries, through the millennia. We made every new level of society that blooms through and come up with its tiny refinement on the roles of man and woman in inverted commas. 

Goodness this perhaps gives us another couple of thousand years, if the planet is still here with life on it then perhaps it will be something like imagined at the end of Spielberg’s movie AI, where you’ve got these beings who’ve got a semblance of human form but they’re not humans anymore. Maybe the body will completely dissolve away so that we become a completely cerebral creature.

God no! I’m just not starting to get more out of my head and more into my body and rediscovering how good life feels.

On one level I absolutely love my body, on another level I still feel, in spite of everything I’ve been through, in conflict with my body and at war with it.

Well there you go, a shared woman’s experience. I am yet to meet a woman who is not, or has never been, in conflict with her body. It’s almost like an inheritance: whether you are born a woman or become a woman, you are handed the “must feel at war with your body” script (or programming). It’s crazy to think about it.

Simon De Beauvoir said something like “a woman is not born, she is made.” Judith Butler speaks a lot about the construction of womanhood and the female identity. I mean, on one level we know there is a physicality to man and woman but at the same time there is a complete social construct as well. 

I feel this social construct holds more weight on the scale. I’ve been a model for many years and up until recently I believed that a woman should not have muscles. It was such a fixation and at the same time a fascination to observe all these women who have a six pack and wonder are you less womanly than me? And if so why exactly?

I mean maybe it’s all just a sliding scale this, much as the colour spectrums in the science lab you can break down blue in ultraviolet and gamma and x-rays and everything is just this spectrum of whatever, so also we’ve been talking for a while generally about the spectrum of identity and not just in terms of man, woman, trans, non-binary, queer and so on, and also sexuality you can look at it in different ways.I remember I had a close friend whose son was autistic and when social services would talk about him, one of the things that would come up in conversation was how through him being autistic there was almost like an extreme maleness that was referred to through the autism. His behaviours would be talked about as being male-centric but in the extreme. If you read religious texts like the New Testament or the Old Testament, sometimes at certain points things get spoken about in very black and white terms. However, it seems to me now that the more one spends staring at it the less black and white it is.
There seems to be a lot of grey out there.

How and when did you decide to be an artist by profession?

It’s funny cuz at the moment I’m reading a biography of Willem de Kooning and one of the things that gets talked about in the hundred or so pages is issues of him trying to find balance, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, between working a day job and earning money to cover whatever bills and at the same time spending time in the studio and painting. It was something that he, for a time, was conflicted about and then eventually just beat the bullet and to cut a long story short he said: no this is it, I’m going to be an artist, I’m committing. 

For years I’ve called myself an artist if people asked, no that’s a lie, it shifted actually. Sometimes I would call myself an artist, sometimes I would say I make art, I was doing some other job so I would say: whenever I’m not doing “this”, whatever that job was, I make art or I paint. Then, I suppose in some ways the issue of committing myself wholeheartedly, come what may, irrespective of whatever hell might be going on around me that art was it… it was the be all and end all of everything, that came in 2013. A whole bunch of personal issues had come to a head and in their own way resolved themselves - some by me resolving them others by default, not everything gets resolved in a kind of intentional manner but it still gets resolved. At that point I was like, Ok I am now going to give myself entirely to art, I’ve got no dependence, I’ve got no responsibility anymore, and so now I’m going to do the thing I had had so many people around me and close to me say that I was not permitted to do because they would not support it. 

Art has never been supported by the people closest to me. Art was something to be done as a hobby on the side, not something to be wholly committed to in a professional way. So I said, ‘’Ok all those barriers have stopped so now I’m gonna do those things everyone has said “no you’re not allowed to do” or “it’s not ok for you to do” and in order to do that I’m gonna go to art school. I knew ever since my teenage years that art school had existed so now I’m simply gonna go do a foundation and start at the beginning, then kind of move through that line”. 

In a way that issue, philosophically speaking, of committing to something makes it a whole more plausible, solid, tangible. You know there’s an American philosopher called Ernest Holmes, early 20th century, and he likens the idea of the Christian Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit redefining it as Thought, Word and Action. In case someone is religion-aversive, then think of it in this new way: thought, word, action.
Think it. Say it. Act it.
And with each of those stages, so whatever it is that one is placing their intention on, you make it more tangible and more solid. Once you do that, everything else falls away.

What showed up?

I suppose I found a foundation course. From a foundation course I effectively created a portfolio that allowed me in turn to apply to BA courses. Again, from that, that was the stepping stone to the MA all the while evolving as an artist at the same time. It’s like dominos. But in a way it’s also a bit like that film Sliding Doors. Coming back to philosophy again, Neale Donald Walsch says, and this is kind of connected a bit to one of the ideas I suppose it’s at the core of my philosophical thinking as an individual and also everything feeds into the art anyway, it cannot not… So Walsch talks about this idea that the lowest common denominator every given second of our lives can be broken down to the fact that we are doing one of two things: love or fear. But one can interpret love or fear as yes or no. It’s kind of like a flow chart: are you saying yes or are you saying no, and that’s all you’re doing every single second. Right now you are listening to me so you chose yes, if you stopped listening you’d effectively say no. So then what happens?

In Neale Donald Walsch version of it, love accepts, acknowledges, opens its arms and moves towards; fear rejects, closes the doors, turns away, starts running. That’s all we’re ever doing. Yes I love that, even more than I like that, yes yes yes. Or that induces fear, no no no.

When you start saying yes to things, when you start being open with love, I believe good things happen. Positiveness brings positive. 

When I interviewed Sudevi, all I could read in her story was: opportunities were being presented to her and she was simply saying yes. It made me look at my life and openly admit that it’s more the times I say no to life because I’m afraid I don’t know where that opportunity is going to take me.

I don’t say yes often enough. 
I forget to say yes.

(We laugh) I should tattoo it on my arm.

Exactly a giant Y E S on the side of my arm.Actually on the front and back of my hands. Across my knuckles.

I know you said you chose to live as the artist that you are, not in disguise while daydreaming about being an artist some day. What is art to you? Why do you create?

That can be answered in a number of different ways, why does a kid play in a sandbox? It’s fun! Making art it’s some of the greatest fun I know. I can sometimes get frustrated, there are moments when I might be kind of trying to tear my hair out because I can’t figure out a problem but ultimately it’s huge fun. It really is the thing I wanted all the time. 

I remember having a conversation with a friend at the pub several years ago, we were talking about our respective approaches to painting. And my friend was talking about the act of painting being a bit for them like trying to push through a glass door: they can see through the door what’s on the other side but they need to find a way to push through and push open that glass door to go to that side. Whereas, I said at the time and I still think it is this way, for me making art is a bit like: I’ve been in the back  garden, I’ve had a metal detector and I run it around the grass, it goes bip bip bip so I’ve gone back indoors and grabbed a little trowel, I go back to the pit  where it went bip bip bip and start scraping away the soil, I know there’s something there but I don’t know what it is exactly. I had an idea that there should be something there so now I’m going to start digging to find it but I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a big metal box or a little penny coin, and so it’s a thing of scraping away and trying to find it. 

Making art it’s a bit like the process of discovery. It’s kind of a known search but it’s an unknown result. You don’t know what you’re looking for but then when you found it you know you found it. 

But at the same time painting or making artwork… I know I’m changing tangents here again going back to a conversation I had with other friends when I was in college, and I don’t remember what the question was but we ended up having an argument anyway because I argued that everything stemmed from painting. We were participating in a group show and my friend made video work, even though we were both doing a painting degree but they made videos solely so they said they didn’t want this group show to be anything written about or put in the title that alluded to painting. And I said, that’s ridiculous, everything comes from painting anyway. Painting is where it all starts, even your video work. You go back to ancient Greek myth of the idea where painting begins, you know the one about the couple sharing the last night before he goes off to war and they’re having a rendez-vous around this fire that’s throwing shadows onto the wall, in the story the woman picks up a bit of charcoal from the fire and draws an outline on the wall of his shadow, and then says to him “I still can remember you after you’ve gone”. This is the myth of the beginning of painting, how painting began so it’s a painting, it’s a drawing, it’s an idea, it’s a keepsake, it’s a memento, it’s a portrait, it’s provocative.

What is photography? It’s a Greek word meaning paint with light. For me everything begins with painting so I don’t even know where I’m going anymore with all of this. (we laugh)

So what is art? How do you make sense of it? How do you classify it? How do you rationalise it? Why do it? What is the role of the artist? What is the role of art? 

Does it have to have one?

Well on one level, no. And I realise I’m constantly throwing out analogies and references but it’s like the character says in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, at the very end of the film: It means nothing. It means everything. 

And so to end it, going back to the beginning of our conversation when you asked yourself: how do I fit in. Well if you didn’t have to fit in, what would be one answer to the many questions you have?

Love. Love is the answer. Love is the only answer, it doesn’t matter what the question is.

Love is all there is.

Love is the greatest thing in the world…

It has to be only love. It can’t be anything else.