Do you know Kurt Kauper?

Last week, we sat down with our spring instructor, Kurt Kauper, and asked some questions about his studio practice...

Do you have any rituals in your practice?  Whether that’s a studio routine, clearing your space after a body of work, meditating, etc?  What is the significance of “ritual” to you (if any)?

KK:

 I don’t think anything I do could really be called a ritual. When I get to my studio, I replace the solvent, take the saran wrap off my paints, and put out any paint I’m going to need. I plug in my computer and decide what I’ll listen to, if anything. Often, I’ll sit and do nothing for 20 or 30 minutes. Somehow, I often need that downtime. If I’m sleepy, I’ll take a 20 minute nap before starting to work. But are any of these things rituals, as in being meaningful in some way beyond the act and its intended effect? I never think of them that way.

Your painting “Bus Stop” Is an adaptation of Sassetta’s 1444 “Saint Ranieri Frees the Poor from Jail.” Your version has no liberated poor; the saint looks more hungover than holy; the fear and hope of the original have been stripped away, leaving only the unsettling dreamscape. What in the world is going on here?

KK:

I don’t know. When I started that painting, I had just installed my show called “Women” at Almine Rech Gallery. As the title suggests, the paintings were of women, all confronting the viewer, staring straight out of the panels. That was my fifth solo show in a row that depicted standing figures, icon-like in their presentation. They were all either well -known people such as Cary Grant, Maria Callas, or Bobby Orr, or archetypes, such as fictional opera divas and fictional women. I had grown tired of that format and the implication that works of art should be understood as having a primary, symbolic meaning. The fact that I was using famous figures, or naked women prompted such a response, and it all usually came back to desire, sexuality, and gender, which people are trained to think about nowadays. I wanted to make paintings that didn’t prompt determinate meaning, because that’s never where I begin. So I cast about a bit, trying to decide on a way to start a painting that wouldn’t evolve into an image that seemed to demand fixed interpretation. Starting with the Sassetta was almost arbitrary, although I had been obsessed with that painting since seeing it many years ago at the Louvre. I always found the figure of Rainieri very funny in his anachronistic jet plume, flying through the air. And while I know that the painting depicts the poor being freed from a jail, I initially couldn’t tell what was going on. The composition’s ambiguity—the buildings made up of large, abstract gray planes, the figure emerging from a hole in the wall yet seeming to grow out of it—was deeply puzzling. It was that strangeness that drew me in. I figured Sassetta was as good a place as any to begin a new painting, so I took the figure and built from there.

Yes, I can see that my figure looks hungover. Others have said that he looks half-asleep. But I didn’t intend that. I guess viewers can make of that what they will. After working on that painting I myself started thinking of them as embodying what it felt like to be a single-father. But that’s just one of the ways I thought about it while making it, not what it means.

In your paintings, men perform masculinity through external grooming rituals—styling hair, shaving, adjusting a collar—alongside multiple depictions of a nude Cary Grant. This off-kilter representation of a popular actor seems to connect your grooming men with the levitating Bus Stop saint. Do you see this plunge into the bizarre as a continuum in your work? Are these paintings exploring masculinity from multiple entry points, or do they feel separate?

KK:

Are we using “bizarre” as a synonym of “strange”?  While I love Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “estrangement”—I find it to be a profound explanation of the importance of art--I never deliberately make my paintings bizarre, although I realize that they end up seeming so. Yes, I think I am interested in—to use a theory word—“constructions” of masculinity. In the mid-1990s, when I was in grad school, discussions about gender were very common, partly due to the recent publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. 

While I had never really thought of it before then, those discourses did make me consider the ways boys are instructed to be men, at least in the working class Irish catholic town and culture in which I was raised. Nevertheless, my family, though always struggling financially, wasn’t exactly working-class: my mother was an artist, and my father was a German immigrant born in 1911--so from pre-WWI, Imperial Germany, in effect a product of the 19th century. He had a cultivated, anachronistic, international manner about him. He was always very well-groomed and impeccably dressed. I also had a formative relationship with my uncle and his boyfriend, who lived on the upper west side, and whom I would visit in the 1970’s and 80’s. They would bring me to the museums in New York City. My uncle was an almost performatively masculine but at the same time very elegantly dressed gay man, and his boyfriend Keith Adams was a fashion designer. So while I was usually surrounded by working-class hockey culture,  I spent a good deal of time with my 19th century father and two men who had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and designed women's wear. All that made me think quite a bit about variations on masculinity and gender expectations, and probably informs my paintings. I would never say that’s what they “mean,” but it hovers in the background of my thought.    

Do you see your studio practice and teaching pedagogy as distinct from one another?  Is there an overlap?  If so, how much?

KK:

I first started reading many of my heroes—Immanuel Kant, Viktor Shklovsky, Roland Barthes—because I was preparing for courses. And there are artists I first encountered in the same way. I’ve also had many great students who are brilliant artists whose work influences me. So there’s a very important overlap.

During coffee breaks at the Sicily Artists Retreats studio, we talk to one another about our studio practices. The desire to create "meaningful" works of art comes up often.  Where do you personally find meaning?

KK:

Very difficult question to answer. I’m guessing that by “meaningful”, you’re not trying to get at determinate meaning? The Philosopher Susanne Langer would use the word “import” to describe the way works of art matter to human beings, deliberately avoiding the word “meaning” because of its relationship to logical, discursive communication. Kant also thought that aesthetic judgments weren’t discursive. That makes sense to me. Langer wrote about how works of art don’t make meaning through denotation and connotation, like language, but instead present complex, layered, emotive, often ineffable content. And that ineffable content comes through an engagement with form, or content as form. While that idea—that art expresses or embodies the ineffable—isn’t highly valued in today’s art world, I am much more interested in that aspect of the art experience than I am in the so-called “meaning” of a work of art. I’m generally not interested in receiving information from an artist. When I am moved by a work of art, it is not because the work of art tells me something determinate about a state of affairs in the world, no matter how subtly the artist has analyzed it. And if we aren’t moved by works of art, then why are we bothering? There are better modes of conveying information than unruly images and objects. There have been times when I’ve constructed a linguistic interpretation of a work of art--for example I remember thinking that way about Andy Warhol’s “Close Cover Before Striking.” But I only bothered because I was first strangely moved in an emotional way by the painting. That experience came first. The linguistic explication was really nothing more than a drawn-out attempt to ask myself why I was so moved by it.

For me, getting away from “meaning”, and engaging with form has a political imperative. We’ve been brought to a dangerous point in our political culture because we’ve been throwing competing meanings around without regard for their truth, without mitigating points of view, and without being reflective about their content. We’ve neglected the form of thinking and the form of morality. We’ve only thought about ends and the information—true or false—that’s going to expedite their realization. I think we would do well to think more about the forms of our thinking and the forms of our morality, instead of the content of either. Formal expression in works of art reflects those ways of thinking. I can’t think of anything of greater import right now.

We can't wait to host Kurt for Painting the Human Figure: Volume and Space from June 11th - 17th, 2025 - have you signed up yet?