Studio, Fayerweather Hall, University of Virginia, 2000
Provided by the Aunspaugh Fifth Year Fellowship

An interview of Brian David Kauppi conducted by Tan Lin on March 3, 2000

You seem to be harking back to the spiritual heroism of the abstract expressionists in your latest paintings.

I've always had a certain personal affinity with the aesthetics of the expressionists, the fact that it is oil painting and that in such a "movement" a group of artists can be so individual. I always wondered how someone could group together the paintings of Pollock and Barnett Newman, Rothko and Willem DeKooning. But all painters are related by the stillness and silence of painting. It seems to me that especially DeKooning, the father of action painting, or the drips of Pollock suspended in mid fling are presented as silent museum relics, dead and still. I prefer Rothko to Newman and Pollock to DeKooning for their inherent anti-gravity suspension. I've always been uncomfortable in front of a Pollock drip painting for the way none of the drips drip down like on an easel painting. I like being attracted and repelled by art. I seek paradise in paint, but I am intrigued, naturally by war.

What do you know about war?

Very little. Basically whatever narratives I've picked up from the movies, books, and the history channel. There is no real knowledge though, and it seems my generation is generally isolated from that reality. About the closest I've come is second hand accounts from veterans. Those seem the most tangible.

Tell me about the war paintings.

I am interested in the unknown and the unknowable of war. Its historical and social presence looms like an abyss into which we individually collage an unspecific narrative, not unlike spirituality. It is taboo, it is heroic, it is life and death, it is family and tradition, and naturally, throughout history, most wars have been acted out in the name of religion or opposing ideologies. That is how it is exclusively human, differing from other animal acts of violence. It is our nature to contemplate and to maintain an order to the chaos of the unknown. Atheism is a nonprofit (prophet) organization, and there is no denying the history of war. Ultimately and ideally one reaches a genuine embrace, faith in the unknown: A Love Supreme. Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm.