By Colleen Dougher
Martin Casuso, a Miami Beach artist who spent around 15 years working in the antique business, says his appreciation of objects and their untold tales began as a child when he and his brother would go to the seawall in their Coconut Grove neighborhood and build forts from treasures they found there.
Their finds included rusty copper, sun-bleached detergent bottles and abandoned boats, which they would use until someone took them away. “I remember as a kid just being fascinated by these objects,” Casuso says. “I knew what they were, but in this environment they gained a sense of drama and mystery, because how did they get here and whose were they?”
The multimedia artist, who earned his master in fine arts from University of Miami last year, brings a similar sense of wonder to the afghans he fondly refers to as “scary grandmother quilts.” Fourteen years ago, he began searching them out in thrift stores, where he’d buy as many as 50 at a time for about 50 cents each.
The abundance, price and unknown history of the lovingly made and eventually tossed aside textiles, appeal to Casuso, who cuts and sometimes unravels them, using the yarn in works such as Mile Long Socks, a fiber sculpture that includes 1,000 feet of knitted tubular shapes around foam tubing, and Knit Dicks (fancy), a silent video of sequined knit phallic creatures who frolic in a way that belies their difficult birth.
Casuso painstakingly cranked the budding knit video stars out on a less-than-efficient 1970s Mattel crafting toy called Knit Magic. They’re among hundreds that he made, but the fancy ones, who are sequin-studded and live in a world of stitchery, are special.
The artist continues deconstructing textiles, and has recently finished an installation of textile-wrapped boards and round mirrors. Accompanying the works is a trippy non-narrative video that takes viewers inside a rainbow-colored piece as its being cranked out of the knitting machine that produced much of the work in the show.
This month, Colleen Dougher, who operates the South Florida art blog Arterpillar, spoke with Casuso by phone about his exhibition that opens today at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, and the works he currently has on exhibit at Young at Art Museum in Davie.
Colleen Dougher: I was happy to see Steer on Stilts at Young at Art Museum. Seeing it in the window with the spotlights on it, it struck me that on some level, it’s the epitome of your work ― a steer made from afghans you once described as scary grandmother quilts. Can you tell me about the steer?
Martin Casuso: The steer has a long history in my life. I bought it years and years ago, when I was first living on the beach, from a friend who had a shop that dealt in antiques or vintage objects. I immediately recognized what it was, which was an old Westward Ho! sort of steakhouse restaurant mascot … which was a chain that I remember as a kid, and every restaurant had a long pole that would stick up with this sort of steer rotating on it. Kids always look at things like that as pets. But I didn’t really think about it as just a reference to the fact that they sold steaks inside.
For me, it was a found sculptural object. It had a lot of personality without even doing anything to it so it’s been my mascot through two or three different places of living. It’s been outside, it’s been inside, it’s been a coffee table, but I always thought I would like to do something with it that made it more my own.
So when I was in my last semester at the University of Miami, I felt like I had the freedom to play with materials for a little bit because my thesis show was pretty well-developed, I had it all mapped out. So I decided to use some of these textiles I had been collecting and deconstructing and wrapped them around the steer to sort of give it my own personality.
I first showed it in just some critique without any extra height at all, just sitting on the floor, but it seemed sad to me, so when 1310 Gallery’s Lisa Rockford asked me to be in [Appropriated Gender] they had such nice high ceilings so I built 8-foot stilts for it out of scrap wood from the university, and I liked the balance it had. It has a sweet spot where it sits and it doesn’t want to go anywhere but until you find that, it just does not want to stand. It will collapse. So there’s a quality to that balance that I find very enticing. It makes me think about life in general, how there’s a delicate balance when you are happy or when you feel satisfied about your life. It’s a little stretch but I just like things that have that tension, they’re looking for that one little spot where they feel comfortable. …
So when the Young at Art people wanted it to go into one of their windows at their space, I felt like first it wouldn’t fit in its original stilted form so I decided to cut a number of different legs for it and experiment with it there. It could have been a bit higher, but I like the fact that in a place that’s predominantly visited by kids, it still has a quality of height and exaggeration with its 3-foot stilts … and because it was sitting in a window it felt like it was penned in and that seemed oddly appropriate for an animal, in our society at least. …
C: You’ve described yourself as “a gay man of a certain generation.” Can you talk a little about that generation and the role it plays in you work?
M: I’m 50 years old this year and everybody develops their idea of what they are and their sexual identity differently depending on where they grew up and their family and their own sense of self. I was a very shy child and I think that kept me from exploring my budding orientation … Instead I would just intuitively be pulled toward characters on television or movies that were sort of off-center ― the unmarried uncle or the matronly aunt ― because they had a quality of being sort of not tolerated. That sounds awful ― but of not quite fitting in, and that’s how I felt. That was the very basic sense of what I had as a child was just not feeling like I was thinking correctly and when nobody is telling you that it’s not wrong, you think you’re wrong.
But I remember television ― I was a child of the ’70s and television was a big deal ― and the characters on TV and films that I saw were always these tomboy girls like Jodie Foster or Helen Hunt, and they were lovely and sort of these attractive girls, but they wore pants and played sports and I would sort of identify with them but then looked for my version of that, which was not the effeminate boy but the boy who wasn’t necessarily all about sports or picking up girls or being a ruffian, and that didn’t really exist. The adult roles that dealt with unmarried men and women, they were always kind of comic characters like Uncle Arthur on Bewitched, or they were dowdy and kind of sad like the unmarried sisters on every kind of show. …
C: Your artwork blends traditionally male and traditionally female materials and objects. I understand this represents the pull you’ve felt in two directions.
M: The material I would be pulled towards I could never give over entirely to some sort of feminine palate, which is kind of a difficult term to use because what is a feminine palate? I’m talking in suburban sort of sociological terms [about] what average people would think as feminine materials, like knit textiles and processes like knitting or needlepoint or anything that isn’t involving heavy-duty tools and flames. But then I can’t give up entirely, l get enticed by hard materials. I like using power tools and things.
So everything I do, especially recently, usually combines some sort of traditionally masculine technique or material with one that’s feminine and they have kind of a … not a battle but like the boards I have up at Nova in the show coming up, the knit is sort of stretched over these wood pieces until it tears, and that’s an obvious kind of conflict there. But all through my adult art-making career there’s always been a sort of a slant towards materials that are not traditional in general in art making. …
C: Some of your works [in the No. 1 exhibition at Young at Art and at Nova] were made with the help of the ’70s Mattel toy Knit Magic. Can you tell me where you found your first Knit Magic?
M: It’s funny. I thought about that and I can’t remember … Probably at a thrift store in its original box and I was probably more enticed by the box than by the object itself … The Mattel version I bought originally had an image of what I know to be a TV actress at the time ― Anissa Jones, who was in a horrible show called Family Affair, which sort of epitomizes saccharine sort of ’70s family comedy dramas where all these serious subjects were kind of dealt with. The whole concept of that show is that these kids’ parents were killed in an auto accident and some bachelor uncle has to take them in. I mean, that’s not a lightweight subject yet it’s all a comedy and all their specific little comedies each week were always dealt with in neat little half-an-hour episodes.
I think that was always something I found super-enticing about TV, because my own family life was a little difficult. My parents weren’t always getting along and my own sort of budding sort of sexual preferences were causing issues with my father at least with me, and not in a way that was open, so these little dramas and comedies that looked so neat and clean and happy on television were always interesting.
So when I found this box that had this image of Anissa Jones sort of knitting this object on the outside, of course I noticed it and then I started to realize that there was sort of an awkwardness to what was being made with this machine. In fact, what she was sort of cranking out of it looked to me immediately like kind of a knit condom and that’s what a lot of the works I have done later on using the machine looked like ― stuffed knit condoms or they look phallic. I knitted about 700 of them … They have been in little installations under staircases and I have sewed them onto knit skullcaps to make my little dickhead hats.
To me they represented a strange very American sort of subliminal strangeness in that the object, this Mattel pink machine … shows a little girl knitting a condom on the outside and it’s sort of like, “Is that really what we were teaching our little girls is how to make some sort of male sexual part?” Is that consciously created or is it just somehow happenstance?
C: That’s the only shape it makes and everything must come from this shape?
M: Right, it makes tubes and you’re supposed to be able to cut armholes in it and make dresses for Barbies but they look like sackcloth ― like no self-respecting Barbie would wear one ― or they make these little funny hats … You can make balls with them too, like if you pull each end of the knit tube it makes a little sphere. I’m like, “Great, so you can make a condom and you can make ball-shaped things. I guess they could be little prepubescent boobies if you made them like that, too, but there’s something sort of corporeal about them, like everything that came out of it had kind of a quality of like a body part …
That’s just an ingrained problem with trying to make a simple machine that is supposed to teach something. If it was complicated you could make something different out of it, but it’s meant to be cheap and easy and fast, and that was a quality of the machine in general that I rather liked. I know how to knit, I know how to do needlepoint and cross stitch and all those sort of things but I love the idea of a machine that’s like a cheat, because that seems typical of my generation, which is always trying to get something faster, and quicker and easier …
C: It’s interesting how you take some of these things to extremes, as in Mile Long Socks [currently at Young at Art].
M: I’m a little disappointed. I shouldn’t call it Mile Long Socks because in reality I think I did measure them all. I mean the original installation which was part of my thesis show last June, had about 10 lengths of them and altogether I think it’s about 1,000 feet … but a mile is something far more than that. It was very disappointing because it took me weeks of eight hours a day knitting these things standing up … I wanted to show a sense of time and effort, too, and kind of a quality of rumination even, this sort of lacerating effect of knitting continuously as sort of hellish. As much as these machines are designed to be speedy and easy to use, they have built-in flaws.
I did shift from the Mattel machine, [on] which I made all the condom-shaped objects I used in the videos, to one that’s more aggressively crafty, like it’s designed for adults but it’s still the same machine. It just has slightly better plastic parts … But by the fifth week it was squealing like a banshee and I would take it apart and oil it but it’s plastic … there are no metal gears, so there’s a limit to how much you can use in lubrication in this thing. It was torturous to use after awhile because it would just squeal, but I needed to get a certain amount done and I found that sort of a strangely enticing kind of side note, that this thing was screaming at me by the end, like “Stop!”
C: How many hours do you put into something like Mile Long Socks?
M: I think I did it mostly over a winter break, which [is] about three weeks, but then I went three weeks into the final semester still knitting … It would be me standing at a machine for about eight hours a day on average with bathroom breaks and food. It sounds very factory-like, very sort of 19th-century kind of child labor kind of thing. I would see the light shift in the day and it was like an everyday-in-a-day kind of thing. I knew what I was doing every day for a certain period … It was a different day and a different piece of knit but was the same every day.
C: When you put so many hours and that much of yourself into a work, how does it feel to finish it and look at it?
M: What I find kind of funny about it is that whenever I mention to anyone that I used a hand-cranked machine, they kind of sort of think, “Oh, so, well, you didn’t really make it or you didn’t really knit it.” You don’t stand at a machine for eight hours a day for four weeks and not own that thing.
There’s a weird quality of contradiction in making craft things with machines, even if they’re hand-cranked machines, and when I look at it I see that sort of contradiction myself, like yeah, it’s hundreds of feet of this material, but I can just hear that machine cranking away and then at the end screaming. That’s what I see with it.
C: Your Nova show was inspired in part by the 1930s series of short films Unusual Occupations?
M: I think everything that I do will always be somehow relatable to that series because of the people it highlighted ― the series was one that was played in between feature length films in theaters when kids would go to the theater all day and see like a triple-feature or a double feature ― they would always put little shorts in between but they would highlight these odd characters. The series ran for a long time. …
C: I looked it up. It was like 1937 to 1948.
M: Yeah, it was after the Depression but just before the war started, and the economy shifted and the Dust Bowl wasn’t the Dust Bowl anymore, but the people pictured were these off-center characters that were making funny objects, usually for sale, or as a kind of tourist attraction. I remember a couple that stood out was a woman who caught fleas, killed them and then painted their bodies and put them in little dresses and sold them. … There were people who made dioramas of desert scenes but with spiderwebs that were painted in fluorescent colors, so there a big overlap in using materials that were common and available and non-traditional in artmaking and kind of a weird off-center aesthetic. …
As I’ve said about television and the people I would identify with as a kid, anybody off center was always somebody that was attractive, and I don’t mean this always in a maudlin way. When I was growing up, my mother, who was from the Netherlands and had lived in a number of places around the world including ― before she moved to Miami ― Cuba, always sort of felt a little on the outside because she was a foreigner in these countries. So I was brought up with an idea that that was OK, that in fact it was something to be sort of appreciated.
She would point out mothers of my friends wearing pedal pushers or little Capri pants and the typical little hairdos and she’d say “She’s adorable, she’s pretty, but look at that woman over there with the aquiline nose and the Geiger suit and the gold coin bracelet … Now, that’s a woman you will remember. She’s not as pretty but you’ll remember her.”
That sense of looking for beauty outside of the norm was something I found positive but was also something that I identified with … I always had friends, I always had people around me and I didn’t live a sad, sad life, but I never felt completely connected to what everybody else was. So you either kill yourself without it or you start to think about it as a positive, and that’s when I look at these Unusual Occupation series. They’re kind of sad people on a whole, but then you’re like “God love ’em, they’re not bending to what was just a standard idea of what was lovely or pretty or possible.” That’s very American, creating something that you want to because you’re allowed and you’re free to do it.
Casuso is exhibiting in No. 1, a group exhibition that runs through Feb. 7 at Young at Art Museum in Davie. His solo exhibition will open from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. today and run through March 1 in Gallery 217, which is located in Don Taft University Center at Nova Southeastern University, 3301 College Ave., Davie. Gallery hours are 4-6 p.m. Tuesday, 1-6 p.m. Wednesday and noon to 4 p.m. Friday. Admission is free. Call 954-262-7620 or visit Fcas.nova.edu/arts.