Interview with Michael Caskenette
This is an edited transcript of an interview I conducted with Michael Caskenette on December 7, 1997, as research for my student video documentary Michael Caskenette: The Art of Trash.
What kinds of things do you collect?
Michael Caskenette: I collect items that for some reason or other strike me, appeal to me. There's really no given reason why I take anything. Something feels right, I go "Oh, I gotta have that," and collect it. It sort of evolved into suddenly I realized I was picking up lots of lamps and stuff. Lamps, toasters, old coffee pots, anything with chrome on it, anything that transmits a feel to me. [...] Frames of course, frames is what started this whole madness, actually.
Tell me about that.
MC: I was starting this career really late in life. I just wanted to sell these photographic prints that I do and I started to look for frames to put work in and I started walking around to [thrift] stores finding frames, spending time in stores and realized I gee, maybe I should be looking for other things as well since I'm here.
[...]
What was the impetus for [Trash Art]?
MC: Trash Art goes back to when I started to buy frames. Because it's far easier to store a frame without the work in it, whatever work was in it, I would take and either give back to the people at Goodwill, or if somebody wanted it, fine. I never gave them much notice.
[...]
I never became an artist 'til really late in life, 'til I was almost forty, probably a little after that. I truly became an artist when I moved into this studio, chucked my job, and said I'm either going to do this or nothing. That's four years ago this past November, when all this stuff really started to blossom, when I really started picking up frames. Suddenly I started to realize that while the work inside these things, while sometimes poor (but that's subjective), always, in a lot of instances, you could see that there was incredible effort put into the work. No matter what came out, to what might be an educated viewer, if you couldn't see the effort in it, you were failing as an observer. I started looking at them and going, "who worked this hard on this painting, who did this?" So I started to save the work too, and it started to grow on me more and more. I started to see a little something in every piece. Again, it's just like buying everything else at Goodwill: I would look at a hundred pictures before I'd actually see one that spoke that much to me that I had to buy it for the picture, for what was done. Virtually all the things in Trash Art were flat wall paintings, all originals, some watercolors, oils, acrylics, what have you. There were no sculptural works at all.
I suppose it's pretty easy for you to tell the difference between something an amateur artist would have done as opposed to something that was churned out of a factory for the living room market.
MC: Oh yeah. Mexican paintings, that kind of stuff, they're so easy to discredit. Real art has a part of the artist in it. It's a very easy formula -- real art has a piece of the artist inside it. All that other stuff, there's absolutely nothing of the people. Sometimes they're made by four or five different people, one guy does the mountains, one guy does the trees, one guy puts the stream in, then they buy a frame, throw it in, it's on for $9.99 frame included. That kind of stuff is so easy to see and totally not consider. You disregard it immediately. It doesn't even imprint on my mind when I look at it. The other stuff, as I say, there's something of the artist in it. And there's lots of stuff where there's something of the artist in it but there's not enough there artistically, it's like somebody that's sat down for an afternoon and thrown something together. However, every now and then, there's a piece that really says something. It might be naive, it might be poorly color balanced, it might be anything.
I'm an untrained artist, I learned everything just by being out there in the big wide world. I don't have any schooling whatsoever in any of the artistic disciplines that I use, other than whatever I've taught myself, which has good and bad points. One of the good points is you don't come with preconceived notions, you're not looking at a photograph and going "oh the balance must be thirty-thirty-thirty, oh the top third of my photo is out of whack, it should be an inch lower." That's all such horseshit I can't believe it. I never, never include it. I just look at work and see what it does to me.
In the course of three or four years, I found I had fifty pieces of this stuff, some of them beautiful [...] In the course of looking at them all, I started to really wonder about the people who did them, and wonder what was driving them, and at what point they stopped being art to someone and got consigned to the garbage, because I found a lot of this work in the garbages as well, just by cruising up and down alleys. And people also knew I was into it so they would let me know when there were other pieces somewhere that I might be interested in.
The long and the short of it is I started gathering these pieces all up and distributing them to people involved in the arts around town; people involved in politics, people involved in everyday life. My dry cleaner did a piece [critique] for me, my son's teacher did a piece for me, a minister I know. I'd send a piece of work, large, small whatever, and would not let people choose the work they critiqued. I simply sent them a piece, said live with it for awhile, see what it does to you.
The majority of people I sent them to -- I believe in Trash Art we had 42 pieces altogether that were critiqued -- I'd say half of them went to artists. The critiques that came back from them were from absolutely marvelous to one sentence, "I don't really care about this project." I was quite amazed however, how deeply most of the artists were touched by what they were working on, how it changed their entire opinion of their own attitude toward art. The other people, the people not so involved in art, but people involved in community, I had probably three or four, radio and TV (I hate to use the word personalities, but that's what they were) they came, did pieces. Some of them really bit into them. I had people do four page reviews. I had one woman who's an artist in town, Isla Burns, quite a well know sculptor. Isla created an entire history for the woman that painted the piece, simply to explain the piece. It was the most beautiful thing, Afterwards she came and told me how deeply she'd been touched by being part of the Trash Art show, which for me, for all the work I did to get the show together, that one little comment from Isla made it worthwhile to me. If you can touch one person... pardon me, I didn't even touch Isla personally; what happened was Isla got in touch with herself once again, through the experience of Trash Art, and for me that was absolutely marvelous. And it occurred apparently with a number of people. I got so many comments myself back from people, and them thanking me for being in the show, rather than me thanking them. I was stunned by the reception the show got.
Has the show changed the way you think about art?
MC: No, all it did was crystallized the way I though about art. I give credence to everybody who puts effort into the work they do. All I care about is effort. I don't care if it comes out looking good, bad or indifferent to a given person. As I said before, this is subjective. Nobody makes bad art except to another person's eyes
Is there an element of identification with these anonymous artists?
MC: For me? That's a good question. Because I'm not that introspective, I haven't really thought of it. I can't really say yes or no to it because I haven't given it any thought. I'm sure there probably is, though. While I'm not a painter and never sat down at an easel and painted, the way I go about creating my art might be the same. I work hard at my art and there's a lot of effort involved in it so I see that in my own work, so perhaps that's why I see such value in everybody else's work, whether it's something that would ever sell or not. It can be totally primitive, it could be stick people, but if it was painted by somebody with absolutely no ability and you can see how painstakingly they worked to create that little stick man, then I believe that would jump off the canvas to me. A lot of them for me are like looking at cave drawings, almost. Somebody doing the absolute best they can with the materials they have.
Another thing about Trash Art that I found rather interesting is that a lot of the pieces are by people without a lot of talent per se, without a lot of training, maybe without a lot of color sense, maybe without anything, but whatever they are, a lot of this work is these people at the peak of their artistic prowess. That's as good a piece as they're ever going to do. I found it enjoyable to sit and realize that somebody had worked that hard to get to that point, they're never going to be famous painters, but you can just see that they sat there for hours agonizing over this color or that color or that touch.
Others in the Trash Art show were so indicative of the personalities of the people that painted them that they're great psychological treatises. You look at them and you go "Wow! Bad day buddy?" and it jumps out at you. As I say, this work all speaks incredibly well of the people who did it.
The funny thing about going Goodwill shopping is that when you're looking at art you find literally hundreds of old paint-by-numbers that people have framed beautifully. There is no art there, so I don't collect them, but it just kills me that people will do it and consider that they have created something of great beauty to the point that they will then go out and spend 150 bucks on a frame for it. This is just a little side joke, but, man it's funny to see.
Is some of the attraction of Trash Art that the artists are mostly anonymous? Would it ruin it for you to know the artists?
MC: No. During the trash art show, I gave one of the pieces to a local singer and she did a story on "Who is S. Lillian Locan?" who was the woman who had painted this piece of Trash Art. It was a beautiful piece, actually. Throughout the course of the show, one of the things we did, I mounted the artwork with the reviews that had been done. They were mounted on the wall -- there were pens and paper by all the pieces so that other people could write their own, both of that piece, or critique the critique, or anything else they wanted. By the end of the show the walls were just covered with yellow stick 'em notes by people writing them. One person came in, the question "Who is S. Lillian Locan?" which was the start of this girl's treatise on the painting, and a question she wanted answered -- who was this woman who painted this -- someone came and answered it. Somebody knew who this woman was. She turned out to have been the wife of one of the professors at the Camrose Lutheran College 35-40 years ago. A girl came in and said, "I know who this is" -- wrote down the answer for us. That type of interaction was what Trash Art was all about.
So there's an artistic process happening there. The show itself is a work of art.
MC: The opening of the show was deviously crafted by myself to be a huge piece of performance art and turned into exactly that. A lot of the people, especially my artist friends, noticed. They came in and said "we see what you're doing here." The whole idea was to create one giant piece of kinetic art with all of us as the pieces that were moving around being kinetic, bouncing off each other. It worked great. And all the interaction of the other people who came during the run of the show. Two strangers suddenly talking to each other in the middle of the gallery, this doesn't happen at many galleries. People got relaxed, got loose, got drunk. I think art should be enjoyed.
Is Trash Art a slap in the face of "official" art and art galleries?
MC: More than a slap in the face, I'd say it's a kick in the ass. [...] Too many galleries take themselves seriously. One of my favourite things I ever did as an artist was at a show once, they insisted that I create an artist's statement. so I said, well, who gives a fuck what I've got to say. Look at the stuff; that's what it's all about. So I typed the word "blah" out about 7,500 times, "blah blah blah blah blah, here's my story, blah blah blah blah blah," signed it at the end and said there's my artist's statement; look at the damned work. We all take ourselves far too seriously. Trash art -- one of the major benefits of it -- was pointing that out to artists.
One of the artists in Trash Art told me that they had been so caught up in the last few years in the commercialism of what they were doing that, while they were still creating beautiful pieces, they realized that there wasn't a whole lot of themselves going into it -- they were just fulfilling commitments. When you start taking commissions (and there's nothing wrong with commissioning art) the second you take one, you're in a business transaction, and that's part and parcel of the artistic transaction. And hopefully trash art allowed a few people to learn to separate the one from the other: "Yes I'm being paid for this but why should it be any less a piece of art?" The money should be separate, it should be an arm's length thing to the art. In a lot of cases it ends up not being so, and to me it becomes pretty apparent when you look at what some people do. There's almost a purity to what these other people do. They know they're never going to sell this painting, no one's ever going to be interested in showing it , there's never going to be a display of their work. They just sit and paint and try to create something whether it makes them feel good while they're doing it -- some of them feel bad, I'm sure -- but they sit and create, with no other desire than to create. They're as close to those cave people doing cave drawings and as close to pure art as it gets sometimes. That's the value I see in it.
Is "trash" a pejorative term?
MC: Yes, of course it is.
Are you trying to change that connotation?
MC: [...] Sure I am. You throw it out, it doesn't particularly mean it has no value, it just has no value to you. And that speaks of whoever it is that's throwing it out.
Is there pure trash? Trash that has no value to anyone at any time?
MC: There's a good question. Probably, you know, used... although [sculptor] Blair Brennan, he collects used tea bags and stuff like that.
