During my senior year at the Kansas City Art Institute, I had the privilege of interviewing Carl Kurtz, Professor in the School of the Foundation Year, for the school newsmagazine Ampersand.
Psalm 42:11, graphite on paper, 2009
Reciprocal Altruism, graphite on paper, 2010
Excerpted from the Ampersand interview, February 2010
Knowing that you have a design background, what is it about teaching Foundations that you like so much?
Foundation, its people, program and place are multi-faceted and complex. Here are a few of the things about Foundation that hold my attention:
To Teach Is To Serve
I think that teaching and being a (graphic) designer have a number of things in common. The most important are these: they are both oriented toward serving something other than the self; each is based upon order and discipline; and, they both offer direction. In addition to the sheer pleasure of it, I also indulge the belief that teaching has made a better student of me.
The Fountain of Youth
The Foundation building: Here the perennial age is ever the same, it varies little from year to year. Working with talented and dedicated beginning art students, is exactly where I belong.
Individuation
Because our program practices a high degree of individualized teaching there are a lot of unknowns involved in the educational process. A teaching/learning strategy or technique that helps one student does not necessarily work for another. New and relevant ways of connecting must always be sought and identified. I enjoy the search and working within this mystery.
Autonomy
I have a considerable amount of control over the design and implementation of my own curriculum (within a mutually agreed upon set of core visual issues, of course). I can adjust both the pace and, to some extent, the course content according to the character of each class. Having to follow some external guidelines or lesson plan for teaching would be anathema to me and inappropriate.
Unity Not Conformity
The Foundation program, in its diversity, is more organic than mechanical. It is a living, breathing thing that forges a path largely of its own making. Our program makes connections that deal more with the relatedness of things than with the separateness of things, integrating subject matter rather than isolating it.
Atmosphere
Stimulating, challenging and unpredictable.
Rhythm
The topics in our curriculum are various. The classes change regularly and fairly rapidly, every five weeks or so. Although this is sometimes abrupt, in general it suits my temperament. I like the changes. Additionally, there is an implicit urgency and importance this rhythm imparts to each subject.
Collegiality
One of the characteristics that I most enjoy in my colleagues is their insatiable desire to talk shop. It is a kind of verbal tinkering whose purpose, based on questioning, is always to make something just a little bit better, to replace something that is not working well or to invent some new way of teaching a lesson.
Pride
Although I do not believe that any individual has the right to take pride in another’s accomplishments, yet, after seeing so many of our students succeed in their ambitions and in their life, I find that I am also guilty of this, the most egregious sin of all.
Can you give us an overview of what it was like to be a student here?
I was a student of the graphic designer/teacher Rob Roy Kelly for the two academic years that I attended KCAI (1964-65 and 1965-66). Kelly’s educational objectives were very specific and large in their scope, consequently, he was a demanding teacher; he knew precisely what he was creating/building in the Graphic Design program at the Kansas City Art Institute and he set the expectation level for student achievement very high. To quote Kelly, “An effective educational program in Graphic Design is focused and intense.” There was absolutely nothing part-time about this teacher. At times his own intensity made for uncomfortable critiques, especially when our work did not arrive at his preferred destination. As students, we sometimes felt that we were overworked and under appreciated. We were expected to be in the studio at all times and were rebuked when we were not. Rob Roy Kelly was instrumental in initiating the Foundation program at this school. It was not until I entered the Foundation program as a teacher, many years later, that I more fully comprehended Rob’s lessons and the value of his pedagogy.
Although in most ways there seems to me little difference between yesterday’s student and the student of today, still there are some differences. America was at war then, and we are at war now. However, in the mid-1960’s, our country was polarizing making everything appear to be in relative stages of conflict. A state of general social unrest plus an unpopular war in Vietnam being fed by a draft captured the attention of nervous college students. Like an insatiable fire requiring ever more oxygen, anxiety was all consuming. Even though America is currently engaged in two foreign wars, and many, many people are injured and dying fighting in them, there does not seem to be much concern expressed about that fact by today’s students. Whereas the subject of war entered, if not dominated, a lot of our conversations during the 1960’s, today the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly ever mentioned.
What kind of work are you doing now?
“Calligraphy: Disciplined freedom is the Essence of it [as of any other just form of government].” This quote by the calligrapher Ray DaBoll summarizes my approach to the forms of both calligraphy and teaching. While freedom (in expression) is the desirable end, freedom lies on the far side of discipline in this statement. It seems to me that all true discipline-based activities share this rule in common. Duke Ellington composed a wonderful little song that unites a concrete structure of the blues with an abstract idea of visual translucency that he titled, “Transblucency” (a kind of blue fog, as it has been described). It is a very short and tight composition but no matter how many times I listen to this melody, its magic never diminishes but is heightened with each hearing. (One critic commented about this song that it was so good an entire career could be built on it.) Instructive to me is his integral unification of seeming opposites: the structure is responsible for the spontaneity.
Words are both intellectual and visual subject matter for me, just as the natural landscape is the subject matter for the plein-aire painter, and the human body is subject matter for the figurative artist. When selecting which words to use, and for what purpose, I begin by making drawings of the words. Sometimes these drawings will be at considerable expense to the legibility of the words because of some form of physical manipulation and/or distortion exerted upon them. Though the work starts from something concrete, its final appearance may be a visual abstraction. The image dominates and the words are subordinate. I appreciate Hans Joachin-Burgert’s definition of calligraphy as “…a language of two dimensional form.”
What made you come back to KCAI to teach? What is it about the school that keeps you here?
In the spring of 1973, I was a participant in a photography show at the school’s exhibition space (“Second Annual KCAI Photography Invitational,” Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery). Following that exhibition, the Chairman of the Foundation Department, Steve Whitacre, and the Chairman of the Photography/Film Department, Lloyd Schnell, encouraged me to apply for a teaching position that was available in Foundation. I did apply, was eventually invited to fill the position, and began teaching in the fall of that same year.
The single factor most responsible for my being at the Art Institute is the belief in the critical importance of a strong educational experience at the first-year level; this is a shared belief and one which best defines the purpose of the School of the Foundation Year.
