Interview with Russell Maltz
By Matthew Deleget

The following interview took place in January 2017 and was published in the retrospective monograph Russell Maltz, Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany, 2017.

Matthew Deleget: I'd like to begin our conversation with Brooklyn. Today Brooklyn is known the world over as a hotbed for contemporary art, which is quite different than when you grew up here during the 1950s-1960s. How did the art enter the picture?

Russell Maltz: For me, it all started at home. We lived on Christopher Avenue and New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn when I was born. When my brother Ron was born, we moved to Canarsie where we lived until the mid-1960s. After WWII my father went to Parsons to study graphic art and theater design on the G.I. Bill. He also spent some time at the Art Students League where he studied drawing and painting. My mother was the intuitive one and mostly self-taught.  She had an eye for design and became involved with interior design. Her sense of form, color and texture was amazing. She could step into a room, have a look around and just put it all together in her head and my father would put it down on paper. His first job was at Warner Brothers where he worked as an illustrator. He subsequently opened his own advertising agency with a group of people he met at Parsons, who were also working at Warner Brothers at the time. We always had art materials at home and while my brother and I often played around with them and made paintings and all kinds of projects, the real treat was going to the advertising studio in Manhattan. Whenever I walked into that studio, it made me so happy and I thought, how cool is this?

MD: So painting, drawing, and design were a given for you from the very beginning.  You grew up in the middle of it and were undoubtedly encouraged at home. When did it occur to you that you wanted to be an artist? That you could do this as a profession? Was it all of a sudden or did the idea set in more gradually?

RM: Things sort of happened very gradually. I had a lot of interests growing up.  Science, poetry, music. And seeing a Pollock painting at the Museum of Modern Art gave me some hope about art, so I began looking. I was about 14 or 15 at the time. I wasn't thinking "profession" until much later. I just knew that in the 2nd year of undergraduate school I wanted to paint and make things more and more.

MD: So where did you go to college? Did you major in art? I know later you completed your MFA at C.W. Post, Long Island University. What are your most vivid memories about this time?

RM: Part of my undergraduate work was done at C.W. Post. I started out as an English major, but I ended up majoring in Art. It was there that I studied with Robert Yasuda and Jerome Zimmerman. Later in graduate school, I met and studied with Julius Tobias. He introduced me to Ted Stamm and we started the POOL project together. My best and most vivid memories were being introduced to so many artists and their work because of the POOL project. 

MD: Terrific! I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to present both Robert Yasuda and Ted Stamm’s work at MINUS SPACE in the past. I’m glad you brought up your POOL project, which later culminated into a survey show and accompanying catalog at Artists Space here in NYC. So what exactly was the POOL project? How did it get started and who was involved with it?

RM: In 1976, I was starting to seriously experiment with work that was moving away from painting and sculpture as we traditionally know it. There were many different ideas floating around and gaining traction during this time. The two events that got me engaged was learning about the work of Robert Smithson and seeing the Rooms exhibition at P.S.1 that was curated by Alana Heiss.  

My studio at the time was an 8 x 8 foot room located on the C.W. Post campus with barely enough space to listen to music. It was late in October and I was walking up towards the painting studios to teach a class and there it was: an empty swimming pool.  I jumped in and walked the space and made this my new studio. I made two installation works from the fall of 1976 to the spring of 1977, the first a walk-in drawing installation and the second a situational division of space using a constructed wall. 

Ted Stamm came to teach at Post in the winter of 1977 and we became fast friends.  Experimentation and innovation was at the forefront of both of our teaching practices.  He was very excited about the pool and what could be done there. Stamm basically said, "I want to do something Russell,” and I said OK. So we started an invitational exhibition program using the empty pool space. Artists were invited to come out to the pool and install a site-specific work. Each work in some way related to the architecture or presence of the site, and would remain on view for 4 to 6 weeks at a time. During this time, students were encouraged to view the works and engage with the artists. It was essentially a rotating visiting artist program – really great – and it became known as the Pool project. 

While there were many artists who made work and supported the project, Ted Stamm was the one, along with Don Hazlitt, Don Leicht, and Tony King, who really made it all happen.  Each artist would invite another artist who they thought would be right for the space. Stamm invited Peter Downsbrough and Roberta Allen.  We received proposals from Julius Tobias, Judith Murray, and Robert Yasuda, as well as installations and happenings by Kevin Clarke, John Feckner, Ruth Hardinger, Lucio Pozzi, John Mastracchio, Suzanne Mahlmeister, and Nancy Burson, to name a few. By the spring of 1980, we had published a complete catalogue of each work and convinced Artists Space in New York to mount a documentary exhibition of proposals, drawings, photographs, and films. 

MD: I really love the catalog you produced to accompany the show at Artists Space. I have it at the gallery and visitors love looking through it – a surprising and innovative project to this day. How was the show at Artist Space received?

RM: I remember the show being very well received. Most of the artists were present at the opening and we also exhibited the proposal works of the artists that did not create a project. I believe that April Kingsley may have reviewed the show for the Village Voice. Yes, in fact, she did.

MD: How did organizing the Pool project, in what you described as your new studio, and collaborating with so many different artists impact your work and thinking at the time? Were there new possibilities?

RM: The short answer is that it was the beginning of being able to make work everywhere and anywhere. The new possibilities seemed pretty much endless.

MD: What an ideal situation as an artist!  So when did you move back to NYC? Where did you live and work? What issues did you begin investigating?

RM: I returned to NYC in the spring of 1976 where I shared a loft space at 36 Cooper Square. I had a space there from 1973 sort of off and on, and shared a studio with Kevin Clarke and Jeff Plate. The 1976 studio was a bigger space where I rented a small area to live and work. I soon left there in 1978 and moved over to Crosby Street where I live and work today.

Back in the late 1970s, I was concerned with, and still am, the investigation surrounding what a painting can be. This is not merely limited to the creation of a painting and how it looks, but extends into all aspects of how a painting may be perceived and how the vocabulary and its constraints that surround and define painting can be explored and expanded. For many of us, installation art was a great and ongoing influence at that time. Artists such as John Cage and Allan Kaprow had already started asking more questions in formulating the basis of their work. Painting seemed to be on hold somehow.

The only painters I knew of exploring these "questions" were Bob Ryman, Ted Stamm, and Robert Yasuda. Each one of these artists had a way of presenting and installing their work, which moved our attention to installation as an equal and primary element.  This informed the content and intent of their work. It gave me the way in. I recall helping Yasuda on several occasions build his leaning wall works. We would build these metal stud frameworks covered in drywall and in some cases lightweight plywood panel surfaces. He would skim the surfaces and apply the painted surface, which was all good and looking just like a big painting. It was large scale and very impressive. But then he would cantilever the entire structure forward into the room and twist the hell out it. It became about otherness and transcendent. The vibration of the works was ethereal. I never saw a painting do that and still be called a painting. Like I said, it was my way in and I was very inspired about what was happening around me. 

MD: I find it really intriguing how you describe painting at this time as moving into an expanded field of investigation. How were you examining and applying these ideas in your studio at the time? What did you make during the late 1970s?

RM: I had an affinity towards the found object at the time and I still do. The first works that deviated from the traditional paint on primed canvas approach were a series of oil and graphite works that were done on printing blocks. I found a few boxes of these old typesetting blocks in a loft on Greene Street and brought them back to my studio on Cooper Square. The blocks were small – about 7 x 5 inches each. I covered the surface of each block with a graphite varnish mix and other blocks carried titanium white oil paint. I began to experiment with arranging the blocks top/bottom and side by side. The completed works were never larger than 10 x 7 inches. These were the first works in which I began to think about the idea of material presence, both in the structure or support and the paint itself. So it became clear to me that paint is a material that is applied to another material. It also was clear that these works were not hung on the wall, but rather installed on the wall.

MD: So with this very first body of work, you established many of the painting concerns you’re still investigating until today. I'm thinking specifically here about recognizing and utilizing found materials, looking at paint as a material on par with any other material, and thinking about painting as installation.  Let’s first talk a moment about materials, specifically your use of found typesetting blocks and later plywood, lumber, glass, and other substrates. They’re at once industrial and usually cast off. What is their appeal?

RM: The appeal is pure gut reaction. The intellectual and reason all come later – you know the histories of materials? Well sometimes it’s interesting, but most of the time it just gets in the way of what can be brought forward. So I am not concerned with that part it. Another take would be that making work can be like alchemy. You see something – grab onto it and it haunts you. And you may ask yourself, how can I explain this? And what is the reason for this having use or any of this being a reason for doing what I do? And the beauty is that there is no particular reason or even phenomena that can be captured. The parts come together or not through a process of exploration and doing. 

MD: Gravity is also a central protagonist here. It's the invisible element guiding much of your work from the early 1980s onward in which you start to suspend, lean, stack, or install materials in various configurations. Tell me about your first works to occupy physical space? And how has your thinking about evolved over the years?

RM: When I first began to regard physical space, the idea of “site specific” was a term being used to define certain ideas and to create a construct for place, a place where the art experience would be presented to the viewer. It seemed very constrained to me, the idea of space being specific as we move through it and experience it. So I began and continue to explore the temporal aspects of presence rather than the static construct of the specific physical properties of a site. I wanted the experience to be non-site specific so as to open the possibilities that relate to the wider more unpredictable dialogue of the quotidian.

Gravity sounds very heavy, very physical, and yet for me it is more a catalyst or a function. Light gravity, fat gravity, thick gravity, clear gravity, yes gravity, grey gravity, day gravity, night gravity, no gravity. And so if I think about how gravity and I have evolved, let me put it this way. When we were first introduced back in the late 1960s, gravity sat on my shoulder with its hands on my head. Now after a long and very nurturing relationship, it comes by once in awhile to tap me on the shoulder and lift me off my feet. 

MD: Another persistent element in your work over years has been color, which in my reading bends towards the industrial rather than the natural. And you’re a really striking colorist, beginning first with the colors of the raw materials you use, such as glass, plywood, cinderblock, and then into the color or colors you apply to them, including DayGlo yellow or orange, metallic silver, saturated blues, reds, greens, etc. Discreet works are often monochromatic, but larger multipart installations can sometimes be multicolor. How do you approach color in your work? What are you specifically looking for?

RM: Color is the unifier. It is the aspect of the work that makes transformation of materials possible. My connection to color and the reason I choose a certain color is intuitive and personal. There is no particular sequence of events or hierarchy of position that determines how and where a color comes from or how I might choose to use it. You might call it the “glue” of the process. But to answer your question of what I’m looking for, I would say it is not so much what I am looking for, but rather what I am listening to and what is looking at me.

MD: I find it compelling how you rely on your intuition, or maybe better stated, a kind of accumulated wisdom when making your work. In fact, I’ve seen it first-hand many times where you pre-order materials for a major installation at a venue that may or may not have visited previously. Or watching you move raw materials or finished works around a space when mounting a show. What are some of the factors you’re weighing here? Is it a kind of balance? Or discord?

RM: I believe it’s both. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes it’s the balance of the “discordial”. I don’t really think that's a word, but it works for me, which is at the crux of the question. A view or point of view or a sense of conveyance plays a large role, but only to the ends of framing various points of view. For me, these actions of movement and placement, lifting and dropping are performative and in the moment, even more so when I have collaborators.

You may recall when we were in Oaxaca, Mexico together, there were these small pick-up trucks loaded up with bundles of PVC pipes being delivered to the courtyard at the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños. The men unloaded these pipes and carried them by hand from the street right to the location and just dropped them. Bundle after bundle, piling them up, bundle on top of bundle, until there was a huge mound or mass of materials right there in front of me. It was truly incredible and so what to do now? No, but what it could be now? 

So I walked. I walked upstairs on the upper veranda looking down at the site and then around the parameter of the courtyard. I walked through each doorway as I would enter the courtyard and look over my shoulder to have a quick glance. Then there is the air. What does it smell like? How hot or cool is it? And of course there is the light. So what can it be? Reminds me a bit of this quote from John Cage: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.” 

MD: Yes, I’ve always loved that statement by Cage. It touches on so many things, including past and current influences, being totally present in the studio, and allowing yourself the opportunity to step outside of yourself from time to time. Speaking of leaving, I know you’ve exhibited your work both in the United States and also in Europe for decades. Does the context or understanding of your work, even the specific materials you source for it, change when you crisscross the Atlantic? Your methodology probably remains intact, but I imagine the perception of it likely changes.

RM: The wonderful thing about making work in Europe for me is that I am truly outside the studio. This brings an ever-invigorating challenge to the situation. I have found that if I stay out of my own way and truly follow my value for being present, the work follows. Another aspect that has been very interesting is the way my work is interpreted via the history of Constructivism and Concrete Art. It took some time for people there to appreciate the affinities and also experience my projects. 

MD: And finally, of course, the occasion for our conversation today is your upcoming survey exhibitions taking place later this year. What are your plans for each of the exhibitions and how do they dovetail together in your mind? And how does it feel for you to be able to see so much of your creative output on view at the same time?

RM: Yes, so first let me say that it is quite an honor to have been invited to show a survey of my projects and work. The first exhibition will be hosted by the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken in Saarbrücken, Germany and will open on May 19, 2017. The works will be on view through the summer and will range from the early-1980s to the present. Dr. Andrea Jahn, the director of the Stadtgalerie first invited me to create a new outdoor project in their courtyard space, and after some planning and further conversation, felt it appropriate to open up some of the other interior galleries where we could present a survey. Dr. Jahn and I have worked together in the past and she thought this would be an opportunity to expand the scope of the exhibition to include paper works, stacked works, suspended works, as well as works from my most recent “Needle Series”. The preparation for a project like this is a new and exciting experience because it gives me a chance to review and take stock of what I’ve been doing for the past 35 years now. The other exhibition, which will be hosted by Michael Sturm at his gallery, Galerie Michael Sturm in Stuttgart, Germany, will be a survey of my work that dates from 1976 through the early 1980s. This will include works from the POOL project and earlier painted works, documentary photographs and works on paper. The exhibition will open on May 25, 2017 and also run through the summer of 2017. So that would make it about 40 years now – and that feels good.



© Matthew Deleget & Russell Maltz, 2017