Every Artist Must Have an Anchor: with Julius Thissen
A conversation on the poetics of masculinity and how to question systemic paradigms through an approach that is playful and imaginative.
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The first time I met Julius Thissen I connected on Zoom from a choppy beach in the Costa Brava. I loved the fact that he didn’t care that my hair was wet, the wind was blowing, and dogs were barking in the background, it immediately felt natural.
Julius is incredibly sensitive and sweet, just as he is firm and grounded, something that is rarely seen combined in one individual. We talked about his work on masculinity, and he shared a bit about his story as a trans artist. I was in awe of his wisdom and asked if he could run a talk in one of my workshops, the rest is history.
Julius is a multi-media artist based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, his art explores the poetics of masculinity and questions systemic paradigms through an approach that is playful and incredibly imaginative. There is no pigeonholing his style.
Every artist must have an anchor, especially when the work is deeply intertwined with our own story, and with it the trauma, political consciousness, and everything that comes with life. For Julius, strength training and yoga, therapy, and bell hooks have been some of the most constant ways of finding centre. “My emotions and personal life play a conceptual role in the work, but more than anything I use them as vessels to make work. In periods where I'm very hurt, delicate, or vulnerable, I'm also most in tune with my intuitive side, which I very much use in the works” he says.
Julius tells me that when he enters a period of making more emotionally charged works it takes everything over. He spends nights and days thinking of the concept. In a society that doesn’t facilitate being an artist, personal introspection and art must go hand in hand. Artists work at the edges of what is considered a “normal job” and therefore grounding and integrity of spirit become important if the work is to be authentic.
“And our existence, whether we want it or not, is inherently political. To be positioned in a certain way means that our privilege, status, and how we grew up will always inevitably find its way back to the work.”
“I make work also about mental health and masculinity. And I think the two are super connected. bell hooks writes about the aspect of labour and masculinity a lot in her book The Will To Change” says Julius. In one of our first encounters, we dissected hooks masterpiece together and both expressed how much we felt it had impacted our lives. “We live in a hyper-capitalist society that will always keep you tired, and will always stretch you more to perform, to give. I think it's very important to be able to come back to your grounding and act from that place, and not from a place of having to constantly and impulsively make decisions to get through life.”
Through art and these grounding practices, “I get to choose when I can use very intense emotions, intense responses that my body or my nervous system produce and to put that back into the work or to use that to embody a specific state of being.”
When I look at Julius’ work I feel a political weight to it that never feels heavy, in fact a lot of his work is inspired by fantasy and is quite playful and ironic. We start speaking about the intersection of art and politics, and the thousand-dollar question: Can you separate art from the artist? “Politics can be separated from art, art can be non-political. Those are all things that I don't personally believe in because I think that art is such a personal thing”, says Julius. “And our existence, whether we want it or not, is inherently political. To be positioned in a certain way means that our privilege, status, and how we grew up will always inevitably find its way back to the work.”
A lot of Julius’ work has to do with the exploration of the masculine. I bring up The Flowering Wand, where Sophie Strand argues that masculine stories have become calcified, stuck. “This is also a term that gives a lot of opportunities to perceive it not only from a feminist theoretical perspective but also just from a biological, bodily perspective, like what does it mean if you have for instance, calcified bones or parts in your body?” Julius asks.
We talked about my project Rerooted, a space to revisit and rewild masculine narratives, where he presented his work. “ If we see rewilding in the sense of deconstructing or reconstructing I think something very important is to reach back to the theory of hooks, or to connect it also to this term, calcified or calcification. To live is to move, but if you're stuck in one place, in one very rigid harness, then there's no space to live.” As someone who is currently hosting a course on water, this idea has come up time and time again. How can we keep on moving?
In 2022, Julius created a work where he appears with his back to the camera, wearing a business suit. “For this piece, I conducted extensive historical research on bespoke suits. To me, the suit symbolizes how masculinity can act as a harness, especially in neoliberal and hyper-capitalist times, it represents a very narrow path that men are encouraged to follow, portraying success as becoming a hyper-individual, self-made man,” says Julius“However, when you look at places where these suits are commonly worn, often by people who hold significant power, you notice that they all look the same. So while men are sold the idea that they are unique and self-made, in reality, they are conforming to a role prescribed by a patriarchal, neoliberal, hyper-capitalist society. Essentially, they are cosplaying this role rather than truly embodying individuality.”
Redefining masculinity involves men, especially cisgender men, stepping outside these rigid expectations. “Cis men can benefit from learning skills typically associated with a feminine social upbringing, such as being in touch with their emotions and being aware of the space they occupy in the world,” he adds.
Redefining masculinity involves men, especially cisgender men, stepping outside these rigid expectations.
His social upbringing, he tells me, provided him with access to emotional skills that many cis men don't typically get. Referring back to bell hooks, cis men are often limited to a narrow set of traits, “so if young men show emotions or imply they desire or require intimacy, they can be violently punished, narrowing their emotional spectrum to mostly anger.” I remember reading this part of hook’s book and being able to refer this behaviour to so many cis-men in my life. Of course, Julius says, this is not to generalize that all cis-men are evil and trans men are angels, but it is to observe patterns and access to the emotional spectrum.
I come in with my feminist killjoy and recall a moment in the workshop where one of the men present said that much of the emotional things he had learned he had taken from women who he often hurt, and also that he envied this capacity of women to get together. This was a deeply triggering moment for many of the women attending the workshop, who said that our capacity to gather came out of necessity, out of a will to survive.
I tell Julius that this same necessity doesn’t exist in cis-men, and this is why a group of friends I had helped get together never truly followed through. And Julius softens my anger by saying “I do think there's a necessity but I do think also there's just such a deep lack of access to those. It's basically telling a person that has never knitted in their life to knit a scarf,” he continues “ I do really believe in men having to do that labor themselves. But I also think that they need a little bit of a startup and a little bit of a push to hear other people also talk about their emotions and see how emotions are expressed in the body.”
“That also cycles back to the aspect of labor and working. That's why I was so interested for years in, in the business man, because that's where that all comes together. You're being tricked into thinking that working hard, earning money buying that suit bespoke etc. is what will make you a self-made individual man”
His work Watch It Collapse: Old Money Never Dies touches on exactly these topics, telling a story on trans visibility in relation to capitalist models. The truth is that in my life I am also witnessing old men unable to let go of their work completely, as it is such a huge part of their identity, and also noticing how much some of them soften after they have stopped working and finally surrendered to being retired.
I ask Julius how he balances the nuance of living as an artist in a capitalist and patriarchal society. “Being aware of a system and knowing how to trick a system is inevitable for us to survive. I see it as an evolutionary kind of thing. That we, as artists, adapt to the standards and conditions and systems that we live in, take from it what we need in order to survive”.
After this beautiful conversation, I am left with a thought: I don't want my art to provide answers. I want my art to provide questions so that people can water their lives with it. Answers remind me of closures, and questions are the root of possibility, of dismantling, and of openness.
Below, find some writing prompts inspired from the interview. These are an excercise to understand how your job is affecting your life, and how you can balance that with awareness and making certain different decisions.
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