Transcription- With Aaron Steffes in conversation- Madison, WI, 6/17
Steffes: Do you make art in a competitive way? Are you thinking of other artists while you’re working?
Malner: Do you feel it in the paintings?
S: I don’t know. I do. I wonder if you’re doing it.
M: If I really like something I won’t forget it. Also when l see a work that’s not so good set in a great context that can get me going, since its treated with such respect. I think I better get down on one knee. I’d like to get down on one knee in front of one of my paintings good or bad even in a not so good context. That would that be a nice way of flipping the bird back.
S: Do you ever see something that’s lousy and then you get angry and go make art?
M: If lousy is celebrated yeah maybe. A good context or home for a painting is rare. Once I made a suitcase size wall with a handle hole in the top and strapped a painting to it so the painting will always have a wall. I put a hanging bracket on the back so the whole thing could hang on a standard wall. A painting on a wall on a wall…
S: I saw a show at the Green Gallery in Milwaukee a few years ago. A guy was showing expressionist paintings of a naked man with a pizza. He’s famous, I can’t remember his name. They were kind of awesome. It made me irate for like a year. Laughs~ When I look at your paintings, with the new work too, I feel something more hopeful and uplifting, yet there’s some of them have that same edge and seem to taunt the viewer. Are those in the moment emotions that happen to you while you’re painting or do you have it all ready to go before you go?
M: Its pretty standard painters talk- but when you’re in its throes, painting is a dialogue in your head. In my case the conversation is pretty rough with an insistent, delusional voice, saying he’s no fool. I can’t not hear him. But there’s that too much repeated Guston quote… everybody gets out of the studio and finally even yourself, and then the painting makes itself.
S: Has that happened to you?
M: I think it can happen…
S: If that’s your answer then you feel calm at that point? You’re not having that battle that internal dialogue geared up? Is it meditative?
M: Drawing could be a meditation. I don’t draw with much of a conscious mind anymore. With painting there’s too much at stake. It’s vast tradition and mythology push it immediately into cliche. If the painting can get free of this meddling it won’t last very long because there’s all kinds of recalibrations going on. I want a painting to be finished, but how would I know? Like other painters, I have some tricks but the process continues. It’s a wishful sincerity accompanied with dread and pretending all together.
S: So they’re riding that line.
M: I like a painting like that. If it feels finished, not finished, loose, tight, smart, dumb, captivating, disinterested all at the same time I’m in it. I almost care that it puts viewers in a rough spot. Seriously, how are they supposed to react?
S: Yeah. That’s why your work is difficult in that way. You feel that torment…. in a good way. I feel effects of dialogue, a back and forth. A lot of painting today is one idea and its just there. Some I can look at for two seconds and know I can like it not like it then I can look away. It’s like the idea is more important than the painting but with your paintings the painting itself carries within it a dialogue. They demand time and I can feel that push pull.
M: Do they look desperate? Is there desperation?
S: I think that’s in some of them yeah. But I wouldn’t say they’re characterized by that. There’s tons of contradictions in the work. Sometimes they’re huge, heroic but then there’s also self-doubt. There’s art and there’s anti-art. You can tell you’re enjoying formal play with paint, but often you’re not and parts are just left untouched. There are different languages going. A part is rich and painterly and there are other parts flat and haphazard. It’s hard to make sense of it all. This makes it a rewarding viewing experience.
M: I have some painter friends who are good at illustration. They focus. I can’t.
S: Is that because it requires switching to a different language?
M: Whatever the language isn’t illustration just another thing that wants to take over? If art is not illustration then it’s not design either. Art is not function driven like design is. Aesthetics also is a trap. Technique obviously is no end all. Formalism is just design unless it’s pushed out of its comfort zone. Usually when I push it the work gets better, maybe it’s a result of not being able to focus.
S: Your paintings sometimes are tumultuous and dramatic so that word “expressionist” sometimes pops into my brain. That’s a difficult thing to define.
M: What am I expressing ya…
S: What are you expressing? The work is personal and the term “expressionist” is ambiguous so I don’t know how to use it. There are people who are more pure formalists. Their paintings don’t look like your paintings.
M: Couple months ago I had a large painting going that was trying to be friendly and it also felt weak. I liked having it around for some reason but finally gave in and added black sections to make it stronger. It improved some but it still felt fragile. Just then a couple neighbors drove up in a truck to load firewood from a pile outside… I invited them in and among other things asked them if this painting felt weak.
S: What did they say?
M: The youngest one of the two wisely said, “Yeah I get it… how do you know what is strong unless you know what is weak?” As for the stronger work I’m a little embarrassed because they launch so confidently off the picture plane. Should I feel bad about that?
S: No I don’t think they’re smug. I’ve seen a lot of smug paintings.
M: But do they look overly happy with themselves?
S: No. They never look happy with themselves..
M: Laughs~ You still have that portrait painting in your bedroom? How’s that holding?
S: Its now in my kitchen. I love it. It’s a self-portrait right? It’s all over the place.
M: pretty vulnerable.
S: In the some way it is one of your more vulnerable looking ones yeah. But there’s bold choices. Your work in general shows a vulnerability. You talk about it in that way and not that its pure formalism or something… like we were talking now, most painters don’t talk about their art like that necessarily.
M: What if we had to rub shoulders all the time because we were brothers. You, your spouse and kids we’re all on a family outing and one of the questions you would never ask is… How’s it going in the studio? Because I’d say… OK, I think I finished a couple paintings last week. because you would then think.. ugh 2 more paintings that make me feel unsafe.
S: That’s funny. You feel like it’s weird that you make all the paintings? But you’ve done some shows where you have hung some giant paintings. Its funny and unexpected. You don’t see a lot of that in Wisconsin.
M: I guess big can be even more necessary to ignore. If it’s large, the dichotomies are many, and its pushed way out formally, you might have to just walk on by. That big painting was hardly looked at. People are on to better things like walking the length of the painting to discuss with the spouse where they’re going to go next- for a burger or a fish sandwich. Do you think painters make paintings for other painters? Who do you make paintings for? or videos, or drawings…
S: I don’t even know anymore. That’s a great question. Who do you make them for… other painters who are engaged in that world?
M: I make em for the land shark that’s insatiable about painting… whether it exists or not…
S: Making art in Wisconsin feels weirder here than it does in most places. You’re almost automatically an outsider artist even if you’re not.
M: What kind of art does the farmer or the farmer’s daughter make? She’s lovely, miserable, buried in chores and crafts, and waiting for a traveling salesman to show up and take her out of there. The farmer of course will kill him before that happens. She doesn’t care. She’ll carry on with the busy work while waiting for the next one… Work like that goes over well here.
S: Wow. I think sometimes maybe I should just do that? Maybe I’d sell something. I never actually know.
M: I saw you’re making really good portrait drawings. Sell those? Are they composites? imaginary?
S: Mostly I make them up.
M: If the motivation for painting is not for décor, if it’s not about selling or professionalism, what’s left? If craft can’t serve as primary motivation and aesthetics cant either what have you got? What are aesthetics for? What’s identity, politics, or personal agenda for? They’re all weak as primary motivations but certainly can be strong component parts. Art motivation comes from somewhere beyond these component elements no matter how many of them are involved in the work. We are all contingent, limited, yet we always reach out for more. Look at the ongoing advancements in science for example. What are the attributes or virtues one would hope to see in an artwork? Most would say beauty, others would say truth, a few would say justice and so on. Can any of these virtues or others ultimately be achieved? No. A more real and truthful expression is necessary and ultimately inevitable. If the nearness to and remoteness from virtue or virtues is manifested together authentically in an artwork it is only then serving its primary purpose. I don’t know if that’s happening in my work but it is however a kind of map or a crystallization I can hold onto because clearly the creative process deals in deep mystery. It feeds on both logic and contradiction.
S: Are you describing an art of pure perfect integrity? Who can harness all of those things without weighting any of them too strong?
M: Well no artist would be able to balance them intentionally. To have that intention and then expect to do it would be mere contrivance, inauthentic, the height of arrogance.
S: I like this description, that art that has aspirations to an ideal but its not getting there and all that being present in the art. It’s a good way to think about it. That’s in a lot of my favorite work I guess. There’s also this aspect of accepting a certain kind of failure when aspiring to something grand and ideal. That failure part is built in there. That’s hard to do. I’ve made calculations in some of my work and it’s funny how any time I try, like if I said I’m going to try to make some drawings that are tighter or I’m going to go through a more palatable phase in my art … it never works out. Its never palatable. Laughs~ I never get there. I don’t know what it is that holds me back from actually making…
M: Laughs~ Art is maybe the only place where you can mess around without wrecking stuff. Some scientists must do this. You do something stupid and it somehow it ends up smart. Where did the intelligence come from? You’re psychotic, probably incarcerated, if you adopt that method in your day to day. We’re all conflicted as human beings, its normal, but a furniture maker must make a chair that won’t land you on the floor. A car manufacturer likewise can’t compete making a car whose wheels come off at any moment, but an artist can! Art utilizes contradictions and you can compound them.
S: I have parts to myself that are dysfunctional. They make it tough.
M: If you mean artistic disfunction, yeah you couldn’t teach your classes like that, or in your daily life it would be crazy to push the kids down the sidewalk in a stroller with fire crackers in the back, but you can carry that much dichotomy in an artwork under your arm and its not going to hurt anybody.
S: It also has to do with it’s uselessness. It’s removal from utility or any utilitarian purpose or any kind of function right?
M: Good point. Most art that people look at works mainly on the levels of design or function. A curator explaining is the kiss of death. Put an authentic creative artwork in any orthodox framework and everybody is stabbing it trying to bleed the non-function out of it. Maybe it urges dismantling and explanation just because it seems so nebulous or useless in the moment. Great work is forever seeping out yet at the same time impermeable and no one really knows what influence it provides.
S: It does irritate me when art becomes too much about solving problems. Not always. It’s fine, but why care about art at that point?
M: Because it has function? If so we have confused art with design. Laughs.. it’s dangerous to talk about but we’ll survive.