Casey Spooner on Life as an Artist Between Modes, Geographies, and Ideas.
CASEY SPOONER is like a cat with nine lives – except he seems to live them all simultaneously. Moving fluidly across disciplines, personas, geographies and emotional states, Spooner has spent decades shifting between music, performance, fashion, theatre and political commentary without ever fully settling into one form. What might initially appear erratic instead reveals itself as a deliberate mode of engagement – one that invites chance, collaboration, community and life itself into the process of making art. Our conversation meanders much like Spooner’s own practice – weaving together spectacle and performance, New York in the nineties and the formation of FischerSpooner, personas and mutability, desire and the body, intuition and collaboration, politics and Spooner2020, before ultimately arriving in Berlin, with reinvention and the possibility of becoming someone else entirely.
NISHA MERIT On the way here, you were thinking about your relationship to spectacle, why?
CASEY SPOONER Spectacle has probably been the central thing I’ve always been dealing with or working through. I was thinking about it because we’re preparing to release the FischerSpooner catalogue – twenty years of work – and I found myself reconsidering some of the old imagery and asking why certain things age and others don’t. If you’re an American artist, you’re always responding to spectacle in some way – either wanting to participate in it, critique it, or resist being seduced by it. And over the past twenty years, the art world has also become completely absorbed by spectacle. Performance art is more popular than ever, especially in Berlin. But I’ve also fallen a little out of love with spectacle. It’s become predictable. And honestly, I think the collapse of American politics is deeply connected to spectacle – entertainment merging with politics and news until democracy itself becomes performance. What’s strange is that I’m simultaneously preparing a major museum performance at the Beyeler Foundation. So I’m asking myself again: what does spectacle mean to me now? I almost moved to Berlin already in the summer of 2000. I came during Love Parade and it was that incredible moment of Berlin club culture – philosophical, laid-back, politically conscious. Americans can be incredibly detached from history, whereas Berlin always felt grounded in historical awareness.
NM What did New York in the nineties feel like, and what were you reacting to with FischerSpooner?
CS New York in the nineties felt enormous and mysterious. There was no FOMO because the world still felt local. If you found your people and your scene, it genuinely felt like you were at the centre of the world. FischerSpooner happened almost accidentally. Warren Fischer and I initially started collaborating because I was worried about his drug use. We began making music together in a tiny Chinatown apartment. The breakthrough was a performance we did in a Starbucks in 1998. After years of dense, intellectual performance work, suddenly doing something humorous, glamorous and synthetic inside a corporate public space felt liberating. And that really became the thesis: I’d rather make something that feels good, looks good and sounds good. FischerSpooner was never just Warren and me. It was a much larger collective energy – rehearsals, fittings, photo shoots, performances.
NM Your work constantly moves between Casey Spooner and constructed personas. How do you navigate?
CS Often the most transformative moments happen when you stop feeling like yourself. About a decade ago I went through a complete collapse. I lost my relationship, my home, my sense of identity. And weirdly, once every- thing disappeared, I suddenly felt liberated. I realised I could become anybody. I think queerness also prepares you for that. Queer people are often already existing partially outside systems, performing or passing in different ways depending on the situation. That’s why I’m interested in personas. Not because they’re fake, but because they allow access to different emotional or psychological truths. We’re living through the height of illusion now – social media has turned identity itself into continuous projection. The challenge is not becoming trapped inside the illusion.
NM You play with ideas around desire, sexuality and the body in your work. How do you navigate this?
CS My body has always been my primary subject matter, which is both a blessing and a curse. Growing up gay in the American South during the AIDS crisis meant growing up with enormous repression. Desire and longing became tangled together very early because desire often couldn’t actually be acted upon. So desire itself became fascinating to me. But now I’m in a strange place because I think desire has become boring culturally. Being hot used to feel unusual or transgressive. I’m a little post-hot at this point. I still care deeply about beauty and physicality. The body remains one of the most universal languages we have. But desire itself has shifted. At the same time, we’re living through political collapse while everyone is busy aestheticising themselves online. It’s grotesque. That’s why the major theme in my work now is Eros and Thanatos – sex and death, creation and decay. I’ve stopped thinking so much about medium and started thinking more about themes and characters. I used to obsess over categorisation – am I a musician, performer, actor, painter? But ultimately those categories are capitalist structures designed to make people legible and marketable.
Often the most transformative moments happen when you stop feeling like yourself. (…) I lost my relationship, my home, my sense of identity. And weirdly, once everything disappeared, I suddenly felt liberated. I realised I could become anybody.
Casey
NM Spooner2020 blurred politics, performance and satire. Where did that project come from?
CS Trump winning in 2016 completely repulsed me. I was genuinely ready to leave America immediately. What fascinated me most was how aesthetically terrible political culture had become. I saw one campaign advert that looked so cheap and grotesque I genuinely thought it was parody. And I started thinking: I could make a better commercial. Then: I could make a better campaign. And eventually: honestly, I could probably make a better president. Not because I’m uniquely qualified, but because at least I have imagination and humanity. So Spooner2020 became this fantasy of a stylish, sexual, international president – the complete opposite of repression and nationalist conservatism. The real idea was to build a reality television persona and use entertainment itself as a populist political tool. But underneath the satire there was a genuine question: why can’t power also be glamorous, generous, erotic, intelligent? And what does it mean that contemporary politics now operates almost entirely through image construction?
NM What does Berlin represent to you now and what comes next?
CS Berlin changed my life very quickly. I came for three days in 2023 and ended up falling in love. Now I’m married, I’m a stepfather, I have an atelier here. It’s honestly the least expected chapter of my life. I’ve always had commitment issues. I like movement, reinvention, seasonal living. I love Berlin in summer, Paris in autumn, Rio in winter, New York in spring. But Berlin still offers artists something incredibly rare now: space. Space to think, to experiment, to fail, to collaborate. Right now I’m continuing the themes of Eros and Thanatos. Most of my projects evolve across multiple forms simultaneously – music, performance, publishing, fashion, imagery. For the first time, I’m writing music for a choir. And that feels significant because I’m interested now in scale, ritual, collectivity and transformation. I think that’s where the work is moving.
As featured in SLEEK #89 – PLAY
Words by NISHA MERIT
Photography by OSKAR OTT
Creative Production HANNES AECHTER, JOHANNA ERDL
Styling ANA-MARIJA KNEZEVIC @LIGANORD
Styling Assistants JUSTINE ARNAL, LISA KIESLICH
Photo Assistant MATTHEW GERGES
Hair & Makeup SYDNEY RAAB
Hair & Makeup Assistant LARA WILMSEN
Set Design HANNAH CUMMINS
Set Assistants NINA MARIA DAHMS, AMINA ZEROUROU