Interview: Jesse Boardman Kauppila

Image from Inside Out Printer Improvised Explosive Devise (I.O.P.I.E.D.).

Jesse Boardman Kauppila is an artist whose work includes a series of prints that replicate the beautiful weave and simplicity of Italian tartan, a series of circular copper prints made while listening to the Anthology of American Folk Music (the finished pieces can be both printed and played on a record player), and most recently, a gorgeous series of images made by exploding printer toner cartridges onto glass plates. As you might guess, Kauppila is at once a skilled craftsman, a technophile, and a conceptual artist. His images and his process are captivating.

You grew up in rural Vermont. And you write that your work explores the way that this place, and in particular, your family--values, aesthetics, and way of life--impacted you. Can you talk a bit more about how you grew up, and how your work probes into the influence of environment?

I grew up in a town of 1,500 people. In many ways it was quite idyllic. My Mom was and is an elementary and middle school art teacher. My Dad is a county agriculture agent. My Mom was interested in figuring out how different artistic technologies (felting, plaster casting, weaving, pottery, etc) worked so that she could teach her students.  In general there were a lot of crafts people around; people that made stuff and did real things.  Most of the jobs had you understood immediately what they did: welder, truck driver, teacher, logger, farmer, etc... Being a lawyer seemed pretty abstract to me as a kid... and kinda weird. 

It was also a very puritan community.  We lived across from the manse and the minister definitely got looks when she bought beer. The fact that the minister was female was a whole other issue.  There was a local production of "Our Town" which seemed to nail our community.  Also, as a kid, I always assumed that Lake Woebegone was in Vermont.

So, at one hand there was this rural sort of conservativeness that had a religious tinge, not that people were very religious though there were some quite religious families around, even some cults, but that didn't enter into daily life.  This conservativeness sort of eked into an aesthetic sensibility, which I currently think of as a sort of all-American minimalism. The clapboard house just always made sense to me as the way a house should be.  

I guess the gist of it is that growing up in this environment, which was very homogenous, meant that there were always generally shared assumptions that went unexamined. Leaving Vermont made me realize that there are always assumptions about things like aesthetics, culture, technology, etc. that people don't really examine. 

Print from Kauppila's piece Remastering the Anthology of American Folk Music. From his website: "I listened to Harry Smith's influential "Anthology" while engraving a circular copper plate. These [copper] records could both be printed on a press and played on a turntable." 

 Was there something you liked to draw/make as a child? Was art something you always did?

Since my Mom was an art teacher we always were doing all sorts of projects.  I would really get in to stuff and make a huge mess doing a big project.  I remember wrapping presents so they looked like stuff that wasn't inside of them.  Like a book to look like a battle axe or something like that.  Also, writing my name so you could only read it from an angle. Papier mache was big. My Mom would go to art schools and thrift stores and recycling places so there was really never a shortage of materials or tools. I don't think I bought any art supplies until college. 

You use technology a lot in your at. How did your fascination with technology develop?

As a kid I liked science museums, but I really liked technology that I could understand and play with.  I sort of took a weird turn in high school because of some bad experiences with science and good experiences with art, that being said I did do some really weird science projects which were great fun.  I remember creating a maze to figure out if fruitflies were left or right handed.  Totally ridiculous…I also got really into water rockets, building launchers and two stage rockets and all sorts of stuff, basically out of trash.  There's some great stuff online.  I loved doing it and playing around with it, but I didn't really get the physics of it.  I think I would have been an engineer if they didn't emphasize the abstract part in school but the making part.  Also, there was an academic and a vocational tract in school and the two types of students didn't really mix, which I now think is a real shame, but that's a different story. 

Installation of Remastering the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Where do you draw inspiration from these days? What type of things do you tend to keep near you to inspire your work?

I like to read a lot.  Some of my projects have been inspired by novels and non-fiction; for some reason the ideas in novels often resonate with me more than visual art.  I guess it's the story. If there's a story it kinda hooks me.  I'm a sucker for narrative and narrative structures.  But I like good, clever ideas. Probably one of my favorite books is Goerge Perec's "Life: A User's Manual." It's one of the greatest books with the worst possible name. Perec's a french guy whose famous for writing a book with no "e" in it.  He was part of the Oulipo group which would create conceptual games/rules for making their work.  What I like about Perec's book is that the conceptual rigor is there, but it's very readable, it’s extremely engaging. I like that. 

I recently listened to a Bryan Eno interview.   He talks about how Steve Reich's work started by playing conceptual games with interesting material, but gradually that interesting material left and his work became just conceptual.  I think that's a problem. I like ideas and I like playing with ideas, but I think artwork should also be engaging, even beautiful.

Where do you find aesthetic inspiration?

Aesthetically, I really love the work of Hiroshi Sujimoto, Vija Celmins, and Gerhard Richter.  I am particularly interested in the way that Gerhard Richter's work goes back and forth between abstract and representational as part of the same project. I kind of think of that work in the same way I think about Werner Herzog, who often makes the same or a similar film twice, once as a documentary and once as fiction. This is the case with "Little Dieter Wants to Fly" which was remade as "Rescue Dawn" and "Encounters at the End of the World" which was remade as "The Wild Blue Yonder."   

I had an aesthetic epiphany in front of Barnet Newman's "Vir Hiroicus Sublimus." I am currently interested in exploring the sublime, which was Barnet Newman's project. I am interested in how we can understand the sublime today. That's an aesthetic project, but I want to try to get at it from different directions in the way that Herzog and Richter pursue projects tangentially, from different angles.

Copper plates from Remastering the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Can you tell me a little bit about your process? 

Process is very important to me. I think about it all the time.  I am always trying to find the most elegant and meaningful way to make work. For a while I made rules for making work and would try to follow these rules, and I was meticulous in an almost scientific way.  I still think of my work as experiments and write about my work in lab reports.  This means that before making something I have figured out a pretty exact set of parameters for making the work, I then make the work. 

I see the process of making as performative and I've made work specifically as a performance.  I'm starting to get more interested in process as a story, a narrative that helps the viewer and myself understand the meaning of my work. 

The parameters I have created are generally loose enough that I'm flexible once I start making work, I know that things never go as planned. I have also realized that the parameters I have created, the restraints are often what makes the work interesting.  The process of creating the parameters and developing the process for making a piece are a whole separate process which often involves a lot of materials research, reading, and experimentation.  Also a lot of thinking.  I think about projects and sketch things out, and talk about ideas with friends, for a long time.

Did the concept of the Inside Out Printer Improvised Explosive Devise ( I.O.P.I.E.D.) piece, which involved exploding printer toner onto glass plates, change a lot over the course of sketching/ conversations?

Yeah, absolutely.  It originally started as an examination of the representation of violence. I was interested in the process of abstracting a violent event (the explosion) with the representation of that violence (the final photographs). 

Image from Inside Out Printer Improvised Explosive Devise (I.O.P.I.E.D.).

Now, I am really interested in how this process rematerializes digital technology. Usually digital photographs are used to capture the real physical world.  Here I am am taking a product of the digital world (printer toner) and using it to create something in the analog world (the darkroom).  I am reversing a process that often goes in one direction. I am interested in further problematizing this path, the direction from analog to digital and the mixing of these categories. 

I've also become more interested in the formal aspects of my final prints and how they look like stars exploding and how they perhaps approach a contemporary notion of the sublime. I'm interested in playing with that and exploring that, but it can get pretty heavy handed especially with the recent cross formations of explosion captured in three dimensions.

What were the most memorable times that things didn’t go as planned on a project?

I am trying to get better at accepting the mistakes that happen in my projects.  Often I have very tightly controlled parameters in which uncontrolled, random accidents happen.  If things don't happen within those parameters or they go outside of those parameters, I'm disappointed. So, I'm trying to allow the development of projects and my experimentation and, yes, the accidents that happen suggest a change in parameters. 

When using the color printer toner, it wasn't blowing up out of the tube I use onto the glass plates. Instead it started to blow out the sides, out of the bottom of the tube. So, I started putting plates underneath the tube. The results were extraordinary.  When I ignited the powder there were boils of fire that ejected the toner and burned it onto the plates I used in truly extraordinary ways. 

Inside Out Printer Improvised Explosive Devise (I.O.P.I.E.D.).

Were there any unexpected explosions?

The boils of fire were unexpected.  There were also times when the explosion was way more powerful than I expected. Usually, though, I don't get an explosion when I want an explosion. The most extraordinary one happened after a day of no explosions and then all of a sudden getting a big explosion and literally getting burned. I wasn't burned badly, but my shirt was on fire.  I have a funny video of that.  

Image from Inside Out Printer Improvised Explosive Devise (I.O.P.I.E.D.).

I’m really intrigued by the move you’ve made from traditional craft toward conceptual art. What do you think motivated this move?

Yeah, I definitely have a craft background.  Basically, in high school two professors were really devoted to traditional craftsmanship in the form of intaglio printmaking and oil painting.  They would grind their own paints and protested the restoration of the Sistine Chapel.  I went to an Italian atelier for a year after high school where I learned traditional printmaking techniques. Then I went to Reed College, which is quite conceptually driven across the board.  After graduating I became interested in how to mesh my interest in making and devotion to craftsmanship with conceptual reasoning. That's been the project for a while now. 

  

Do you feel that that a strong concept is important for a piece to have enough heft? Is it ever enough for a piece to be simply well executed and beautiful?

I love conceptual art, but recently I was looking at some early conceptual work and it just seemed illustrative of his ideas. Yeah, you could have an interesting conversation about the piece, but the conversation was more interesting than the piece.  I think that often you can have very simple ideas and if you're able to pull the work off aesthetically, than they work. I think saying something is "just beautiful" doesn't often work for me.  There has to be something that sort of problematizes or explores our notion of beauty aesthetically. In a way this is aesthetically exploring ideas, the idea of beauty. My thinking regarding formalism is however currently kind of limited. 

Print from Kauppila's Italian Tartan series.

You spent time in Italy studying printmaking, and did a beautiful series of prints based on Italian cloth. I wonder, do you feel that any part of your experience in Italy still plays out in your art?

Thanks, yeah, that project was my first successful project after college. It was a breakthrough for me. I was able to combine my interest in craft and concept in a way that resulted in a beautiful series of prints. 

I think that my experience in Italy has informed my entire approach to making art. Being in such a concentrated realm of craftsmanship has made me really think about how to make things. I think it's also important to move beyond craft and tradition, which is something I really try to do. I'm not in favor of throwing out the baby with the bath water, however. I think that there's a lot to be learned from tradition.  In Italy they're really slaves to tradition still. On the other hand, there's a lot of digital work out there that isn't grounded in anything like a human experience and it’s just about the technology for its own sake.  That work will die.   There's this amazing Bob Dylan quote about traditional music that this makes me think of: 

Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles,

plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s

going to kill traditional music. All those songs about roses growing out of people’s

brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels -

they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s

going to come and take away their toilet paper - they’re going to die. Songs like

’Which Side Are You On?’ and ’I Love You Porgy’- they’re not folk - music

songs; they’re political songs. They’re already dead.

Obviously, death is not very universally accepted. I mean, you’d think that the

traditional-music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a

traditional fact . . . traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn’t need to be

protected. Nobody’s going to hurt it. In that music is the only true, valid death

you can feel today off a record player.