LDM: Casey, you’ve called Berlin your home for a decade... what brought you to Germany’s capital in the first place? How did you personally experience the city’s rather drastic changes over the last few years? And were they the reason that made you return to the US?
CM: I first moved to Berlin as a reaction to my dissatisfaction with living in the US. I had felt uncomfortable with America’s politics and consumer society for a while already and the deciding factor for me to move was the launch of the Iraq War. When I made that decision, the destination was less important than the act of leaving. I initially considered Madrid, but the director of the Phoenix Art Museum knew Berlin and convinced me that it would be a good place to move to. This was before Berlin was being hyped as ‘the place to be’ and I didn’t know much about it. Based on his recommendations, I decided to give it a try and fell in love with the city immediately upon my arrival. This was in 2003, when Berlin still felt somewhat raw and open to any possibilities.
Ten years and countless new shopping malls later, Berlin had become a very different city. I had a live/work studio in Wedding in an area that was very quickly becoming trendy.
I would be stopped by tourists who were trying to find the bar that I lived next to, for example, and would be awoken at four in the morning as they drunkenly argued with each other under my window. I felt it was time for a change again. At this time, I had reconnected with a friend who I knew from Phoenix, where I am originally from, who was living near Denver, Colorado. I decided to move back to The States to date her and to give the US another try. We were married in Colorado, but we both decided that the US was also not a place where we wanted to stay. In 2014, I found myself even less able to deal with America after being away for a decade. After a little less than a year in Colorado, we decided to move to Shanghai. My wife already spoke Chinese, after having studied it in University, so we were ready for a new adventure and challenge. Shanghai was indeed a challenge, and we learned after a few months of living there that it also was not where we wanted to settle. After a little over a year in China, and two years after leaving Berlin, we moved back.
We now live on the edge of Berlin, in Spandau, where there are no drunken tourists or trendy neighbors, but lots of gardens and forests.
LDM: You combine photography with (oil) painting... since you first have to work on the photographs, I was wondering if the final series is already elaborately sketched out - or is there still room for chance and accidents?
CM: While it is true that the photography requires a lot of pre-planning and preparation, there is still a lot of room for the process to evolve from conception to completion. I have to have a pretty good idea of what I want to do in order to set up the photographs, from choosing the locations and putting together costumes when necessary. During the shoot, however, I allow for spontaneity so that new things come out of the process that I had not anticipated.
Then while I’m editing the images, I make selections that will complement the series as a whole. Finally, during the painting process, which ends up being the most time-intensive part, there is again a lot of room for things to happen which I had not planned on. The initial idea gives me a blueprint to work on, but the end result is wherever the process leads and is only roughly planned out.
LDM: I was actually wondering if you’d call yourself a photographer first?
CM: I went back and forth for many years with regards to whether I am a photographer or painter, sometimes calling myself one or the other. Now I have come to the point where I don’t feel that it matters what I am called. I make works that utilize photography and painting. I say that I am a photographer and painter, or a painter and photographer. I spend the majority of my time painting, and I also make paintings that are not combined with photography. But my primary works begin as photographs.
LDM: The very majority of your work doesn’t shy away from social/ political commentary... were you always this outspoken or did your art become a kind of catalyst for releasing the pressure?
CM: I have always been very outspoken about society and politics and my work is a way of communicating and investigating those tendencies.
LDM: Would you say that your work isn’t necessarily specifically political but more an observation on misguided testosterone?
CM: I like that term, ‘misguided testosterone’. That is closer to the mark. My work involves some politics as it is integrated into society. I am typically trying to take a wider view, looking at systems, particularly in relation to power and the abuses that come with it. In my series ‘Everything Must Go!’, for example, I portray the lifecycle of consumer goods. I flew to Shanghai in 2007 and photographed workers in a garment factory. Then I went to the US and photographed people shopping, mostly in Walmart (the shopping photos were not staged and had to be stealthily shot). Then, also in the US, I went to a trash recycling center and photographed workers sorting the trash. In each of the three stages, I saw people being exploited and resources being wasted. Which is why I am often coming back to men in business suits, who are behind such processes, with their ‘misguided testosterone’ on full display.
LDM: So, since you’re back in Berlin, I was wondering if this relocation had an impact on your work as well?
CM: At the moment, I am painting a continuation, part 2, of my most recent series titled ‘The Machine Stops’, which is a series about a solitary figure wearing a space suit in a foreign environment. The environment appears to be an alien planet, but could also be a post-civilization Earth. The series is about becoming dislodged from the machine, which could be defined as pop culture, consumerism, corporatism, or society in general. The titles that I chose for the works have to do with being alienated from the machine as well as from experiencing life via the internet, which is often quite absurd and subversive. It is a metaphor for the experiences many people have in our current society. Despite being more connected to one another than ever before, (through the internet and social media) people, particularly in the ‘developed’ world, are also more alienated than they have ever been. We live in technologically advanced societies, and we are isolated within our high-tech cocoons. I read the novella “The Machine Stops“ by E.M. Forster when I was nearly complete with the series and felt that it connected very well to what I was aiming for. The story was written in 1909 and it predicted a global internet with people who are physically isolated, connecting to one another only through social media. In this story, everyone lives underground after the surface of the planet has become inhospitable. Many of the people begin to worship the machine, which provides for all aspects of their lives, as a deity. The protagonist rebels against the system and escapes to the surface. For part two of the series, the figure is a woman and the environment is abandoned with ruined city infrastructure. Not coincidentally, this year my wife and I are in the process of buying an old industrial building outside of Berlin, in Sachsen-Anhalt, where we plan to build our studio and home. I think we have had enough of cities for now.
