Working with materials on site.

Installation view of Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site, 2022. MINUS SPACE. Courtesy of MINUS SPACE.

Before my unceasing infatuation with the gallery MINUS SPACE and before I invited the collective Critical Practices Inc. (CPI) to participate in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, I was drawn to the conceptual and situational lines of thought that grounded Russell Maltz’s sculptures, drawings, and installations. As with most circumstances in the art world, patience and like-mindedness will find you in the conversations that are essential to your values and curiosities. So through MINUS SPACE and Russell’s longtime work with CPI, I have become one of his greatest champions. Although our material vocabularies manifest from different vernacular sources, we share a powerful interest in abstracting the ordinary and the overlooked. A rigorous assessment of form is at the core of Russell’s work where his deployment of construction materials speaks to the aesthetic and social economies of built space while at the same time articulating the rhythm of material movement on a jobsite or within the global supply chain. On the occasion of Russell’s five contemporaneous exhibitions, three of which ran consecutively at MINUS SPACE this year, we discuss the nature and shape of the survey exhibition, artistic freedom, and the many conceptual and material aspects of Russell’s work, including a grad school project in an abandoned in-ground pool that is a prescient lesson in ambitious experimentation.

Michelle Grabner We should probably start with an overview of your three exhibitions at MINUS SPACE. What was surprising was that the work doesn’t double down on its materiality. What it does speak to are the multiple visual languages of ordering you put forward, and in this sense it’s quite bountiful in how you think not only about the specificity of place or materials but also complex abstract relationships.

Russell Maltz During the COVID pandemic, Matthew Deleget of MINUS SPACE told me that he’d like to try to expand the timeframe of my show so that there would be an opportunity to present my work in a way that’s in keeping with the intent of what I’m doing. I took this as an opportunity to explore the thread that runs through my work from piece to piece, thought to thought, and place to place. The result is an exhibition in three parts.

The first part is a documentary, informational show that allows the viewer to see where and how my work began with the Pool Project when I was a grad student. From there, I went to what grew out of those early ideas, specifically the stacked and suspended works. For the third phase, I decided to show works from the Needles series, which I started in 2013. In addition to these, I wanted to do an installation work outside the gallery that related to my “street works.” For years, I’ve been taking photographs of things out in the world such as a pile of bricks, a bundle of lumber—things that reminded me about the status of my work.

Russell Maltz, POOL Wall Installation, 1977, three black-and-white photographs, 11.5 × 14.5 inches each, 11.5 × 45.5 inches overall framed. Courtesy of MINUS SPACE.

MG The Pool Project speaks to something I feel is missing right now which is the responsiveness you had to the potentiality of that site, even if it was out of practicality. You were able to identify that space and immediately engage it in multiple ways by bringing other people into the process, such as working with Ted Stamm on how it could be extended. What was shaping your thinking then, because I don’t see that type of thinking in the art world today? We’re still relatively conventional in terms of what we think about, what form it takes, where it goes, and how it’s distributed.

RM I totally agree with you about the present state of what’s being shown and how it’s being shown. The system we’ve been dealt and its expectations fall short of what artists do. As to my thinking, when I started I was painting like everybody else. One day I saw a piece of Land art; then I found out about Robert Smithson; then I found out about Arte Provera and Conceptual art along with performance work and Allan Kaprow’s happenings. As a young artist, these things were essential. I realized that what I wanted to do was immerse myself in a process of discovery and to have others discover those possibilities as close as they could to the way I did given that they hadn’t made it. Over the years, I’ve tried to stay as true as I could to my process and expand that into, I guess, a lifestyle.

MG There seems to be a kind of agency and freedom that you are insisting upon within the framework of having multiple choices presented to the viewer by showing not just the things you make but how you think when you work. This includes the relationship with people that you’re collaborating with, such as the folks dropping off concrete blocks on the street for you. So the work is not just a social practice; it’s not just making sculpture, even if those things are absolutely there and profound; but it is all the spaces in-between. Is Smithson and the anti-monumental part of your thinking now?

RM Not actually. My work is about questioning the aesthetic experience. I feel that I had to approach things with a different mindset. While part of my aesthetic goes back to the Earth art aesthetic, for me it doesn’t necessarily mean I have to dig a hole in the ground. What it means is focusing on the time it takes to see a piece and experience it. For me the work has its own sense of time and place which is integral to both the process of making and the process of experiencing.

MG Let’s talk about that. So, making work on site is a practice that suggests a high degree of risk in the unknowingness of what materials will be available, the particulars of the location, etc.

RM I wouldn’t call it risk; I would call it pleasure—a very high level of pleasure and excitement in knowing that I don’t know what I’m going to use. I have a little bit of an idea where I’m going when I’m working on site, yet I don’t know what’s available. I don’t even know if there’s someone to help me with the language or maybe even to move stuff. It’s exciting. It’s all part of the electricity of making the work in that sort of environment.

Russell Maltz, ACCU-FLO Bundled #1, 2022, Day-Glo enamel on plywood with metal banding, 28 × 106 × 5 inches. Courtesy of MINUS SPACE.

MG Let’s talk a little bit about how you use the materials, such as concrete blocks, in the stacked work. They are the basic building materials mostly of contemporary architecture. What I have been thinking a lot about with your work is the relationship between capitalism and inventories. An inventory is something that companies don’t like to have; it’s a loss, right? This in turn connects to supply-chain issues. I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts about that?

RM The most important thing in connection with these ideas is that I don’t have to possess the materials myself to be able to make those works. It’s only about the fact that the work is floating in the world. It’s in a lumberyard. It has a trajectory of usage that’s going to go through a series of stages. And somewhere along the line, I’m going to grab a bunch of it; I’m going to stage it; I’m going to transform it; and then I’m going to let it go on its way. That’s my aesthetic ecology.

MG I absolutely agree. I think it’s fantastic that we’re having this conversation because my guess is we would really love to be talking about form and the power of form. We can certainly do that, but you’re interested in this other kind of politics of how materials move in the world. I thought it would be more about arrangements, about the layering of glass, about how things are organized, when they seem to be pulling apart versus when they’re coming together. So let’s talk about form.

RM Form happens to be very serendipitous. Stuff lays around; things get cut up, arranged; some things hang around for years before they find a purpose. It so happens that I was cutting some plywood one day, not for anything to do with one of my works; I think I was building a shelf or something. After I’d finished, I saw these long slices of plywood on the floor that were eight-feet long, one-inch wide, kind of tapered, because I was cutting an angle. Ordinarily, I would have just broken them up and thrown them away. But it was the right moment because I was looking for another approach to explore what I’m doing. So, I said, “Oh, okay. Why don’t I drill some holes in these and just hang them up?” So I did. Then I looked at it and looked at it, and I said, “There’s something here.” Over the years I started to develop it. It became vital to work in a way where it became another facet of my process.

Installation view of Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site, 2022. MINUS SPACE. Courtesy of MINUS SPACE.

MG What do you think about when you’re creating arrangements in terms of the space between things or when something touches?

RM It’s a situational response—this is very important in the work. It’s one of the major aspects of why I do it because it’s situational and present. That’s the only way I can move it.

MG What about your articulation of color? I know the color is found, right? Is it about function or about abstracting?

RM Color does not have one function but has many functions; color can present itself on so many levels. As with so much of the work, nothing’s singular.

Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site is on view at MINUS SPACE in New York City until July 30.

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in Wisconsin. She is the inaugural Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. Grabner has curated many significant survey exhibitions over the past decade, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer) and the FRONT International triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2018. She is the cofounder of The Suburban in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and The Poor Farm, a nonprofit project space in Little Wolf, Wisconsin. Her work is included in public and private collections internationally.

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BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City artists and writers—decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward.

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